News & Commentary

Today was our first student conference of the year – and it was our largest ever! With 242 students attending from 13 different schools, it was a packed house of eager youngsters ready to listen, discuss and debate on the great constitutional issues of their day.

Each Friday, we’ll bring you updates on the latest civil liberties news from Maine and the nation.

Respected Federal Appeals Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit recently admitted what the ACLU and voting rights advocates have been saying for a long time:  Voter identification laws are a means to impede access to the polls and not to prevent fraud.  Judge Posner wrote the majority opinion in a landmark case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, affirming voter ID requirements in 2007.

As corrections budgets soar both nationally and at the state level, lawmakers and bureaucrats are looking for ways to cut costs - and unfortunately, privatization of our prisons, jails and corrections services are a tempting solution. There is a fundamental tension between the stated goals of our prisons and jails and the priorities of for-profit companies. While our prisons and jails should be focused on rehabilitation and supporting successful re-entry back into our communities, for-profit industries have one responsibility: to cut costs and increase revenue. This has created a perverse set of incentives, whereby companies' profits are implicitly tied to increasing demand for prisons and jails - and actively lobbying to ensure they remain full. Mass incarceration has deprived a record number of Americans of their liberty, has disproportionately impacted minorities and people of color and has come at a huge cost to individuals, families and our communities. No one should be profiting from locking people up. In order to address over-incarceration, it is important that we tell our lawmakers that profiteering off the warehousing of our citizens is unacceptable. To read more about the ACLU’s work on private prisons click here.

Each Friday, we’ll bring you updates on the latest civil liberties news from Maine and the nation.

This just in from the rage-inducing stories department: a judge in Nebraska is forcing a 16-year-old girl to give birth against her will.

Yesterday, Maine's new cell phone privacy laws went into effect. Under the new law, if the government wants to get the location information generated by your cell phone, they must first go before a judge and give a good reason. This is an importand update to our cell phone privacy laws - which were written in 1986!

On October 9 LD 1062 – An Act To Add Conditions That Qualify For Medical Marijuana Use will go into effect. Once enacted, this law will allow medical marijuana to be prescribed for those currently suffering from PTSD, dyskenetic and spastic movement disorders, and irritable bowl syndrome.

In just two weeks we’ll host our first Bill of Rights Student Conference of the 2013-14 school year. We’ve got more than a dozen schools coming to our conference in Portland, and nearly a dozen more for the Farmington and Belfast conferences in the subsequent weeks. We’ll be covering lots of different topics at our conferences – from free speech to equal protection to police stops – but perhaps the freshest topic of them all will be bullying.