News & Commentary

Congress just got yet another reminder that the First Amendment right to political boycotts is alive and well in the United States, and any legislative attempt to infringe on that right puts them squarely against the Constitution.

On the 50th anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday, one of the darkest stains in our nation’s civil rights history, President Obama spoke with hope and confidence about Americans who were “unencumbered by what is, because you're ready to seize what ought to be.” Lenora Lapidus lived her life by this principle.

On Tuesday, April 30, a Minnesota jury convicted police officer Mohamed Noor of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter for shooting and killing Justine Damond, a white Australian woman. Damond had called 9-1-1 to report a possible sexual assault near her apartment and then approached Noor’s squad car when he and his partner responded to the call. Noor killed Damond, and he deserved to be found guilty. His decision to shoot and kill an unarmed person without warning, apparently because her presence next to his squad car surprised him, is indefensible. But if the races of Noor and Damond had been reversed, Noor might well have gotten away with murder.

“Do you want the Boston marathon bomber to vote?” is a provocative question that acts as a smokescreen concealing the real issue — why and when did America decide that people convicted of a crime should not vote?The historical context for this comes from old English common law which justified the concept of “civil death” as punishment for conviction of treason or a felony because a person committing a crime had “corrupt blood,” making the person “dead in the law.” America did not immediately adopt this position because the Constitution was silent on voting rights — it neither granted nor denied anyone the right to vote.

In the wake of the terrible Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, that government shut down access to Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and other social media services. The shutdown garnered praise from some within the United States and other democratic countries, but as tragic as the circumstances may be, Americans must never come to see social media or other Internet shutdowns as anything other than an authoritarian power move and/or a mistake.

The government often relies on private entities to carry out its work. It has them running private prisons, designing location tracking technologies, and developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems that automate government decisions, such as determining our Medicaid benefits, bail, and even which children are purportedly at risk of abuse or neglect. Today the Supreme Court heard a case, FMI v. Argus Media, about whether working with private companies changes the government’s transparency and accountability obligations to the public. As we and several other organizations argued in a friend-of-the-court brief, it should not.

At the founding of our nation, women, African Americans, those who were unable to read or write, poor people, and individuals with felony convictions were excluded from the ballot box. Over the course of our nation’s history, the right to vote has expanded to include African Americans and women. Additionally, poll taxes and literacy tests have been banned. As a result of felony disenfranchisement, six million people are still unable to vote because they are incarcerated, completing probation or parole, or are precluded from voting for having a felony conviction in their past.

For more than a decade, Tarana Burke and survivors across the country have used #MeToo to share their experiences of sexual violence, raise women’s voices, and respond to the needs of survivors. In its current incarnation, #MeToo has sparked an unprecedented examination of sexual harassment, including sexual assault, in our workplaces, and illuminated the multiple manifestations of workplace discrimination.

Every year, millions of people are arrested, required to pay money bail they cannot afford, separated from their families and loved ones, or subjected to long periods of incarceration based on the mere accusation of a crime. This all occurs while people are presumed innocent under the law. Black and brown people, their loved ones, and those without the economic resources to thrive suffer the worst harms.