News & Commentary

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 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 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 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

 

U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren granted the ACLU’s motion to send back to state court our challenge to the creation of a two-tiered voter registration system in Kansas.On November 21, 2013 we filed a lawsuit  in Shawnee County District Court charging that by creating a two-tiered voter registration system Kansas was dividing eligible voters into separate and unequal classes, in violation of the Kansas Constitution. When Secretary of State Kris Kobach responded by removing our suit to federal court, we in turn filed a motion to send the case back to state court.  Now that Judge Melgren has agreed with our motion we will file additional papers in Shawnee County District Court in the next few weeks."ACLU lawsuit against Kobach returned to Kansas court", Topeka Capitol-Journal, 04/08/2014

 

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear two cases on city ordinances that sought to require proof of citizenship when trying to rent housing. These ordinances would levy fines against landlords who rent to undocumented immigrants seeking housing.“Today, the ordinances’ supporters failed in their final, last ditch attempt to resurrect these laws, which have been blocked for years without ever going into effect,” said a statement by Omar Jadwat, supervising attorney of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “Now that these appeals are over, we look forward to Farmers Branch and Hazleton joining cities across the nation that are looking at ways to make their cities welcoming places for immigrants, rather writing hostility and discrimination into municipal law.”Read more here: "Kobach’s drive against illegal immigration set back as U.S. Supreme Court declines cases", Kansas City Star, 03/03/2014