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Still, the growing use of the devices by police raises questions about citizens’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, said Lauren Bonds, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.

"When the bigger cities start taking this on and indicating that a larger percentage of the population should be protected from discriminaton, that's an indication to the other cities, to the rest of Kansas, that this is something that's a priority for every single municipality," Harmon said.

“There’s no way any attorney who passed their professional responsibility exam,” ACLU of Kansas Legal Director Lauren Bonds said, “would think that what Cindy and Scott were doing constituted the unauthorized practice of law.”

“There was no legitimate basis for believing Hoedel or Yeargain were engaged in the unauthorized practice of law,” said Lauren Bonds, legal director for ACLU of Kansas. “As an attorney, he really should’ve known that Cindy and Scott’s activism didn’t constitute a law practice.”

Following a wave of feedback to an original draft that raised censorship concerns, the Shawnee Mission Board of Education on Monday advanced updated policy language on student publications that integrated input received from students and patrons.

The organization filed a motion last week denouncing the “bizarre and illegal sentence” and calling for a state court judge to correct it.

A group of student journalists packed the front rows of the Shawnee Mission Board of Education meeting Monday as editors of student newspapers in the district expressed their concerns with draft policy language on student press rights that got a first reading last month.

The ACLU of Kansas announced this week that it had named Nadine Farid Johnson, who spent six years as a diplomat in the U.S. Department of State before moving to a role with Google in Los Angeles, as its new executive director.

“This is a fairly clear Eighth Amendment violation,” said Lauren Bonds, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas, which brought the Medicaid lawsuit. “Delayed treatment is unconstitutional.”