News & Commentary

Under Senate Bill 34, Secretary of State Kris Kobach would make violation of advance voting statutes or attempting to vote when not qualified a felony rather than a misdemeanor. It would be a higher-grade felony to vote when not qualified, engage in election tampering or falsely impersonate a voter. The bill will also give prosecutorial power to Kobach.Micah Kubic, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said the proposal could penalize individuals who unintentionally failed to follow the correct process in voting. He said there was potential that nursing home residents with aging minds could get hauled before the court for mistakenly breaking a voting law.“Voting-related crimes are exceedingly, exceptionally rare, and even then are most often the result of mistakes like voting in one’s old precinct after having moved to a nearby neighborhood, rather than a willful attempt to subvert an election, but if they occur, should be taken seriously," Kubic said.Read the entire article on the Topeka Capital-Journal from January 30th, 2015.

The mentoring program in question is the LEAP Ambassador Program at Free State High School. The program pairs 15 boys with various members of the community, including school administrators (including Doll), financial industry professionals and even former Kansas University basketball player Wayne Simien."It's outrageous, frankly," Bonney said in an interview. "One of the problems with the glass ceiling is that women do not have these social connections with business people, educators."Read the entire article on The Lawrence Journal-World from January 29, 2015.ACLU letter to Superintendent Doll from January 29, 2015.

The posting of nude photographs online of an ex-spouse or significant other without consent has become more prevalent in our communities and Kansas is trying to ban this practice.Executice Director Micah Kubic was recently interviewed on this topic and  said criminal law “is probably too blunt of an instrument to use on these types of issues.”His organization is sympathetic to the privacy concerns, he said. But he added that lawmakers should tread carefully to ensure they don’t end up restricting free speech.“In general we would be concerned, yes, about criminalizing forms of expression of any kind whether those are images or language. And I think there’s no question that there’s expression that is taking place in these incidents,” Kubic said.Read the entire article on the Wichita Eagle from January 20, 2015.

The ACLU of Kansas promises to push forward on Kansas marriage lawsuit after the U.S. Supreme Court takes cases.Doug Bonney, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas, said nothing would likely change while the nation’s highest court considers several marriage-related cases. The U.S. Supreme Court announced Friday it had decided to take cases related to state same-sex marriage bans. The court will likely issue a ruling this spring.“We are certainly going to continue to press forward to try to get final judgments in our case,” Bonney said.Read the entire article on the Topeka Capital-Journal from January 16, 2015.

Doug Bonney, Legal Director of the ACLU of Kansas recently gave a speech at the Take Back Kansas convention held in Wichita, KS. Doug's speech highlights why the defense of the right to vote matters today, especially in the state of Kansas.

In August 2012, lawyers for the ACLU Foundation of Kansas (then the ACLU of Kansas & Western Missouri) and the ACLU of Missouri filed a class action lawsuit (Lane v. Lombardi ) on behalf of Caged Potential and a class of publishers and distributors.  The lawsuit asserted that the Missouri Department of Corrections (DOC) had violated the due process rights of publishers and distributors by failing to give them notice and an opportunity to be heard when the DOC censors books and other publications mailed to inmates. On November 15, 2012, the Judge Laughrey of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Missouri granted Caged Potential’s motion for a preliminary injunction, finding that the Due Process Clause obligates the DOC to give notice and an opportunity to be heard when it intercepts and refuses to deliver books and other materials that publishers and distributors mail to prisoners.  The Court further ordered the DOC to provide such notice and an opportunity to be heard.Since then our Legal Director, Doug Bonney, and lawyers with the ACLU of Missouri have worked with the DOC’s lawyers to draft notice and appeal procedures that comply with the Due Process Clause’s requirements.  Those policies were put in place on a trial basis last summer and have been in effect permanently since early in 2014.Under those policies, publishers and distributors are now getting notice when the DOC censors a publication and refuses to provide it to the inmate who ordered it.  This month the DOC refused to give an inmate an edition of St. Louis Magazine merely because it contained an article on the death penalty.  St. Louis Magazine received notice of the censorship and appealed that decision to the DOC’s administrators, who reversed the censorship decision and allowed the inmate to have the article on the death penalty.This shows that the Lane case has advanced the First Amendment rights of inmates and outside publishers to communicate about important issues of public debate without unnecessary censorship by public officials.For more information, see the links below:http://www.stlmag.com/Blogs/SLM-Daily/May-2014/Missouri-Prisons-Overturn-Ban-of-St-Louis-Magazines-May-Issue/http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2014/05/missouri_prisons_ban_st_louis.php 

In July 2013, the Barton County Jail in Great Bend, Kansas, incarcerated an inmate who has a diagnosis of post-polio syndrome, one of the symptoms of which is increased muscular weakness.  In order to stand and walk without falling, the inmate must wear a leg brace, but one of the leg braces the inmate brought with her to the jail tore in the fall of 2013.Although a hospital nurse tried to fix the tear with duct tape, the brace no longer provided the inmate with adequate support and stability after it tore.  In fact, from October 2013 through mid-April 2014, the inmate fell several times in the jail, often in the shower, and at least three of those falls were so severe that the jail transported the inmate to the emergency room where X-rays and CT scans were obtained.  Although the inmate had made numerous requests for reasonable accommodations including a new brace, a wheelchair, a shower chair, and a non-slip shower mat, the jail simply ignored the inmate’s requests.

In mid-March, the ACLU Foundation of Kansas learned that Phillips County in northwestern Kansas has not reapportioned its county commission districts since 1965.  Because Phillipsburg has grown markedly over the last fifty years in comparison to the rural areas of the County, the county commission districts are now malapportioned so that residents of Phillipburg are grossly underrepresented while voters in the rural areas of the County are overrepresented.

In mid-March 2014, the ACLU’s Legal Department received reports that the traffic courtroom at the Sedgwick County Courthouse in Wichita, Kansas, was closed to the public.   Legal Director Doug Bonney investigated these reports and found the following:A sign posted on the door of the traffic courtroom on