Top Stories From the ACLU of Southern California

Immigrant Detainees with Mental Disabilities Released

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Five days after a team of civil rights lawyers filed lawsuits on behalf of two immigrants with mental disabilities who were locked up for years after being judged mentally incompetent to understand the proceedings against them, federal officials announced the two men would be released from custody.

Jose Antonio Franco and Guillermo Gomez Sanchez are being released to their families today from immigration facilities in Santa Ana and San Bernardino. Both men will be placed on electronic monitoring and will be provided with treatment in community health centers.

Apr 1, 2010 |  permalink

"Killer Counties": LA, OC, Riverside

As the United States moves away from death sentences to permanent imprisonment, California—particularly Los Angeles County—lags behind, according to a new report on the death penalty by the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC). In 2009, the number of new death sentences nationwide reached the lowest level since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The Golden State, however, sent more people to death row last year than in the seven preceding years. At the close of 2009, California’s death row was the largest and most costly in the United States.

The increase in death sentences in California last year was caused by the high number of new death sentences in just three counties, according to the report. The majority of counties in California, like the rest of the nation, have effectively replaced the death penalty with permanent imprisonment. Prosecutorial practices in just three “killer counties”— Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside – accounted for 83% of death sentences in 2009, while those counties represented only 41% of the state’s population.

Read more, view a county-by-county interactive map, or nuestra versión en español (pdf).

Mar 30, 2010 |  permalink

Immigrants with Mental Disabilities Lost in Detention

For five years, two men with mental disabilities have languished in immigration detention, effectively lost in a system that has no established procedures to determine whether they should be released or whether their cases should be resolved in another way.

On March 26, 2010, two affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Counsel in Los Angeles and the Casa Cornelia Law Center in San Diego filed petitions in U.S. Federal District Courts in Southern California charging that the government has deprived the two men of their constitutional right to due process, and violated both the immigration statute under which they were detained and federal discrimination laws designed to protect people with disabilities.

Mar 26, 2010 |  permalink

Fighting For Army Veteran's Free Speech Rights

On March 16, 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California sued the Veterans Administration for denying a 67-year-old Army veteran his free-speech right to protest the agency’s failure to use part of its property in west Los Angeles for the benefit and care of veterans, particularly those who are homeless.

This is the second time we've had to step up on behalf of his Free Speech rights. Read more.

View photos of a typical protest action Rosebrock has organized outside of the VA for over a year.

Pictured: Robert Rosebrock, center, with Peter Eliasberg, ACLU/SC Manheim Family Attorney for First Amendment Rights.

Mar 16, 2010 |  permalink

Costa Mesa Backs Off

Within days of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, MALDEF and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, on March 2, 2010 the City of Costa Mesa halted enforcement of its anti-solicitation ordinance. The suit was brought on behalf of day laborers represented by the Asociacion de Jornaleros de Costa Mesa and the Colectivo Tonantzin.

Read more.

Mar 2, 2010 |  permalink

State/LAUSD "Decimating" Teaching Staffs of 3 Schools

Massive teacher layoffs at three Los Angeles Unified School District middle schools have deprived thousands of students at Gompers, Liechty, and Markham middle schools of their legal right to an education consistent with prevailing statewide standards, a team of civil rights attorneys said in a class-action lawsuit filed Feb. 24, 2010.

Read more.

Pictured: Concepciona Manuel-Flores, 7th grader, Markham middle school.

Feb 24, 2010 |  permalink

Ramona Ripston Announces Retirement

ACLU/SC Executive Director Ramona Ripston, for decades one of the region’s most respected and outspoken voices on civil rights and civil liberties issues ranging from education and police reform to privacy, freedom of speech, and the rights of immigrants and homeless people, announced today that she will step down from the post she has held for 38 years.

Read more.

Feb 23, 2010 |  permalink

ACLU/SC Expands Death Penalty Opposition

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has hired the first Southern California-based professional organizer in at least a decade to be devoted solely to death penalty issues in California.

“This move comes as the ACLU/SC and its partner ACLU affiliates in Northern California and San Diego ratchet up their longtime campaign to end the death penalty,” said Ramona Ripston, ACLU/SC executive director. “The evidence is accumulating that the system of state-sanctioned killing is expensive, biased and error prone.”

James Clark, a former coordinator of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, will undertake a major organizing effort aimed at raising awareness among the public and legislators that the death penalty is costly, unjust, ineffective as a crime deterrent and inhumane.

Read more.

Feb 11, 2010 |  permalink

Hector Villagra Appointed ACLU/SC Legal Director

This Feb. 9, 2010 statement is from Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California:

It gives me great pleasure and pride to announce that Hector Villagra has been appointed as the new legal director of the ACLU of Southern California. Hector truly embodies what the ACLU/SC is all about: he combines agile and incisive legal thinking with deep compassion, tenaciousness and an unswerving dedication to the causes of civil liberties and civil rights.

Read more.

Feb 9, 2010 |  permalink

Suit Challenges Costa Mesa Ordinance

MALDEF, the ACLU of Southern California and the National Day Laborer’s Organizing Network (NDLON) have filed a lawsuit challenging the City of Costa Mesa’s anti-solicitation ordinance as unconstitutional. The civil rights groups say ordinance violates day laborers’ First Amendment rights.

The Feb. 2, 2010 lawsuit was filed against the City of Costa Mesa on behalf of the Asociacion de Jornaleros de Costa Mesa and the Colectivo Tonantzin, whose members have been restricted from peaceably expressing their need and availability for employment in the city’s public areas due to the ordinance.

Read more.

Feb 2, 2010 |  permalink