News & Commentary

On Monday evening I attended a community dialogue with Portland Police Chief Michael Sauschuck about race, law enforcement and community relations, organized by the NAACP Portland Branch, Green Memorial AME Zion Church and Williams Temple Church of God in Christ. The discussion was a follow-up to a dialogue that took place last month in response to the tragic events that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri.

Today we filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Bar Harbor couple who were arrested for observing and attempting to film an interaction between several police officers and a woman in downtown Portland.

Last week, in the wake of the tragic killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the renewed national debate about racialized policing, the Bangor Daily News editorialized on the discriminatory nature or our criminal justice system.

August 26 is Women's Equality Day, commemorating the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote 94 years ago. Unfortunately, we are still a long way from full equality for every woman. The mainstream conversation about women's rights over the last century has at best left behind, and at worst ignored, intersectional identities (women of color, transgender women, poor women, immigrant women, etc.). For example, we often see the data that women who work full time earn, on average, only 77 cents for every dollar men earned. But the figures are astoundingly worse for women of color. African American women earn only approximately 64 cents and Latinas only 54 cents for each dollar earned by a white male.

In 2012, the Portland Police Department acquired a Lenco BearCat, which is essentially an armored, four-wheeled mini-tank with a turret and spaces to fire guns out the sides. The $270,000 price tag paid for by a federal Port Security Grant.

The tragic killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown has raised many questions for the community of Ferguson, as well as the entire nation. From the ACLU’s perspective there are many civil liberties issues at play, which has prompted an immediate response both from our affiliate in Missouri as well as the entire ACLU nationwide.

This Friday a new youth curfew law, one of the strictest in the nation, will go into effect in Baltimore. It will require unaccompanied children under the age of 14 to be indoors by 9pm and 14, 15 and 16-year-olds to be indoors by 10pm on weekdays and 11 pm on weekends and during the summer. Children found out after the curfew will be picked up by police and brought to one of two curfew centers where the child's parents will then be called. Parents can face anywhere from a $30-$500 fine.

Last week, we got the news of yet another botched execution, this time in the state of Arizona. After being given an experimental combination of lethal drugs from an unknown source, Joseph Woods took nearly two hours to die, snorting and gasping for air 660 times. This comes not long after the botched execution of Oklahoma prisoner Clayton Lockett, who writhed in pain for 45 minutes before dying of a heart attack.

A shocking new study finds that people who have spent time in the juvenile justice system are more likely to die violently than their peers who have not been involved in the system.