News & Commentary

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Four times as many prospective Kansas voters have their registrations on hold for failing to meet a proof-of-citizenship requirement than for all other reasons combined, state statistics show.Kansans with registrations on hold can't legally cast ballots. A law that took effect in January requires new Kansas voters to produce a birth certificate, passport or other papers documenting their U.S. citizenship, but election officials also put registrations on hold for other reasons, such as when people fill out registration forms improperly or register before turning 18.Kansas had about 21,300 voter registrations on hold this week, and more than 17,100 — 80 percent of the total — were for people who hadn't met the proof-of-citizenship requirement. The secretary of state's office provided the figures to The Associated Press.Most voters whose registrations are on hold filled out their forms at a driver's license office, the secretary of state's office says. Kansas requires anyone obtaining a new license to document that they're living in the U.S. legally, but the Department of Revenue, which oversees licensing, has backed away from requiring anyone renewing a license to do the same.The department's shift and the number of registrations on hold led a key backer of the proof-of-citizenship law, Kansas House Elections Committee Chairman Scott Schwab, to promise to review its administration after the Legislature reconvenes next year."Something's got to change," Schwab, an Olathe Republican, said Wednesday.Kansas has about 1.7 million registered voters. But the number of people with registrations on hold over the proof-of-citizenship rule surpasses the ballots typically cast in a state House race and could swing a tight statewide election.Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican, championed the proof-of-citizenship law as a way to prevent noncitizens, particularly those in the U.S. illegally, from voting. He said at least 15 noncitizens were registered to vote at the end of 2012, and Sedgwick County officials recently reported a case of someone on the "suspense" list acknowledging being a noncitizen — and thus, unable to comply with the proof-of-citizenship law."A percentage of those 17,000 who haven't proven their citizenship can't and shouldn't be allowed to register," Kobach said. "The system is working."Federal election laws mandate that states allow people to register to vote at driver's license offices. In Kansas, such registrations account for more than 80 percent of those on hold over the proof-of-citizenship rule."These are mostly casual registrants, many of whom do not intend to vote," Kobach said.Holly Weatherford, program director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and Western Missouri, called the number "shocking." The ACLU strongly opposed the law's enactment and has threatened to file a federal lawsuit."We have sort of created a problem where a problem didn't exist," she said.Weatherford and other critics of the law contend it suppresses voter turnout, an argument Kobach called "idiotic." He likened the proof-of-citizenship requirement to the state law requiring voter registration and said his office had expected that registrations on hold "would be in the thousands."But Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew, a Democrat, said county election officials hadn't anticipated the Department of Revenue's policy shift on driver's licenses. Revenue Secretary Nick Jordan said this week that the department was responding to concerns about inconveniencing drivers and to cues from federal officials that less would be required of states under a 2005 anti-terrorism law designed to make driver's licenses secure."None of us truly believed it was going to be a seamless, no-harm implementation, but none of us thought there would be this many (registrations on hold) at this point," Shew said.Link to article

 

A city ordinance downgrading first-time marijuana possession to a municipal offense, to be met with a ticket rather than handcuffs, was seen by both supporters and detractors as a softer approach to drug crime when it was enacted in 2005.Eight years later, the result has been, by some measures, quite the opposite.The number of people arrested or cited in Lawrence for marijuana possession, on a first or subsequent offense, has increased nearly six-fold over the past ten years, according to a study of federal data released this summer by theAmerican Civil Liberties Union. The study also pointed to racial disparities in enforcement, with black residents four times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though the two groups use the drug at about the same rates.That the marijuana ordinance did not turn out to be the pro-pot law that some had feared, or hoped for, might not come as much of a surprise to some.The idea was to move the first-offense possession prosecution from district court, which triggered a federal law that could affect student loan eligibility, to city court, where the process was much like getting a ticket. The flip side of that is that writing a ticket is relatively easy and quick, making the decision to cite someone for possession easier for a busy law enforcement officer.And although proposed by a group seeking fewer penalties for marijuana offenders, the ordinance actually ended up increasing fines after it was reworked by the city commission and passed in March 2005.More enforcement, stricter penaltiesInstead of the typical $25 or $100 fines levied in Douglas County District Court at the time, the new ordinance required a minimum $200 fine. That, in turn, was later increased to $300 to make it equal to the fine for a minor possessing alcohol, said Elizabeth Hafoka, a Lawrence city prosecutor. Defendants also pay court costs and, if they are convicted, pay for drug evaluations.More people have been cited or arrested each year, and Douglas County ranked number five in the nation for the largest increase in marijuana enforcement over 10 years, according to the ACLU. Using arrest data the FBI gathers from local law enforcement here and around the country, the ACLU study showed a 580 percent increase in Douglas County’s arrest rate: about 170 per 100,000 residents in 2010, up from 25 per 100,000 in 2001. Generally, a citation is counted as an arrest, even if the person is not actually handcuffed.Law enforcement officials in Douglas County don’t keep statistics on marijuana possession arrests specifically, but data from the city and district courts show that the number of cases rose dramatically after the 2005 ordinance took effect.A review of district court records showed about 60 simple misdemeanor marijuana cases, as distinct from those combined with more serious offenses or felony drug crimes, in 2004. In 2006, after the ordinance was in effect, 134 such cases went to city court. Six years later, city prosecutors saw more than 200, apart from other cases that went to the district court because they involved juveniles or occurred outside the city.The increase locally comes at a time when drug possession arrests are decreasing at the national level.There hasn’t been a push to make more arrests specifically for marijuana possession in Lawrence, said Sgt. Trent McKinley, a Lawrence Police Department spokesman. If more of those cases are being made in recent years McKinley said, the 2005 ordinance is likely the reason.“It is faster to write a ticket than to arrest somebody,” McKinley said. While a ticket can be completed in minutes, an arrest means an officer must write a three-page offense report, take evidence, write an affidavit for the court, and possibly transport the person to jail. It could take hours, especially if the case goes to trial.The possibility of steady yearly increases in citations wasn’t something the city commission discussed when considering the ordinance, said Mike Amyx, vice mayor of Lawrence and a member of the commission in 2005. For him, the key point in the ordinance was to allow first-time offenders to avoid going to district court and triggering federal rules that block those convicted of drug crimes from receiving student loans. “The fine was an issue,” Amyx said. “Our concern at the time was, ‘It’s a first offense, and what’s the penalty going to be?’”The city’s marijuana ordinance allows only first-time marijuana possession offenses to be heard in city court, and any future offenses go to the district court as felony cases.Claims of racial bias, locally and nationallyIn Douglas County, the federal data on marijuana possession arrests mirrored a troubling national trend that is found in nearly every community, according to the ACLU."We have serious concerns about racial disparities in how police enforce laws designed to prevent the use of marijuana," said Gary Brunk, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri, who was not involved in the study but works on such issues locally.In Douglas County, the arrest rate for black residents, adjusted per capita, for marijuana possession was almost four times higher than the rate for white residents. Almost the exact same disparity was found across the state and the U.S., even though surveys by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration show white and black people use the drug at about the same rate. Some jurisdictions in Kansas show even greater disparities, such as Saline County, where the per capita arrest rate for black people is six times higher than it is for whites. Some, such as Leavenworth County, show a lower, two-fold disparity.McKinley, of the Lawrence Police Department, declined to speak to the study's conclusions until he could examine it further, he said.Those racial disparities come from selective policing, which, along with the high cost of enforcement and unclear benefits, pointed to a failure of efforts to enforce drug laws, according to the study author, Ezekiel Edwards, director of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. “The war on marijuana has largely been a war on people of color,” he wrote.Meanwhile, marijuana use in Lawrence appears to continue unabated, despite increased enforcement of low-level possession offenses, and bigger cases such as the indictment of a multimillion-dollar marijuana smuggling conspiracy here last year. In a survey of Lawrence high school students conducted last year by Draw the Line Lawrence, a local group against drug and alcohol abuse, more than a quarter of high school seniors in Lawrence reported using marijuana at least once in the previous month. Lawrence Journal World Article

This summer, the ACLU Foundation of Kansas & Western Missouri (the ACLU) has been collecting and reviewing the inmate mail policies in place in Kansas’ jails.

On September 5, 2013, the ACLU Foundation of Kansas & Western Missouri (the ACLU)  received a complaint from Lisa Elasser, whose cousin, Matthew Tracy was in the Caldwell County, Missouri, jail and was receiving no care for his serious medical problems.

For decades the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas, maintained an art exhibition space in which the Medical Center displayed the works of local artists on a rotating basis.  This summer, the exhibition on display was entitled "Tom Gregg: Unsold - Grenades, Cute Animals and Bad Apples."  The works contained an anti-gun violence message that, based on the circumstantial evidence, seems not to have set well with the powers that be in Kansas. In mid-July, the Vice Chancellor responsible for the art space ordered the curator of the exhibition space to take Tom Gregg’s work down immediately, several weeks before the next exhibit was scheduled to go up.  In addition, the Vice Chancellor cancelled the Medical Center’s contract with the curator and thus erased the Medical Center’s long history of supporting local artists. Because the circumstantial evidence clearly points to a censorious motive in this case, the ACLU of Kansas & Western Missouri along with the National Coalition Against Censorship and many local artists and free speech advocates sent the Kansas Board of Regents a letter of concern on August 14, 2013.  In a letter dated August 16, the Board of Regents disavowed any responsibility for the Medical Center’s actions.  We look forward to a response from responsible officials at the Medical Center or the University.Press Release, August 14, 2013 

Opinion Piece by Executive Director, Gary Brunk -- Lawrence Journal World, August 7, 2013 All Americans should be able to vote — the most basic right in our democracy — without having to jump through a bureaucratic maze. Yet Secretary of State Kris Kobach persists in his ongoing effort to make voting more difficult by suggesting a “fix” to a law he authored that requires voters to document citizenship.Kobach proposes to create a two-tiered voting system, where some voters would be eligible to vote in federal elections but not in state and local elections (“Kobach considering plan that could produce two kinds of voters,” Journal-World, July 31).His plan violates the intent of the National Voter Registration Act, would be burdensome to implement and costly to taxpayers, and harkens back to a regrettable history of voter suppression in the United States.The very purpose of the National Voter Registration Act is to make registering to vote easy and convenient. Kobach’s proposal does the exact opposite by introducing more complexity into an already confusing voting system. Mistakes are bound to happen. You don’t have to look any farther than the 12,000-plus Kansans whose registrations are in suspense to know that there are going to be some who do everything right but still end up disfranchised because of an unnecessarily complicated system.Furthermore, implementing Kobach’s proposal would be unnecessarily burdensome to local election administrators and would add to the cost of keeping, maintaining, and verifying voter registration lists throughout the state. It would also require printing two separate ballots, further increasing costs.Dual registration systems have a long and sad history in the U.S. The last state to maintain one was Mississippi. It adopted its dual registration system and poll taxes in the 1890 Mississippi Constitution as a way to make registration more complicated, with the express purpose of keeping as many African-Americans and poor people from registering to vote as possible. By the 1980s, the dual registration system was still in effect and still had its original intended purpose of disproportionately disfranchising Black voters, leading a federal court to declare that the system violated the Voting Rights Act.In advancing his latest proposal Mr. Kobach wants to climb out of a box of his own making: an unduly complicated voting system largely of his design that discourages participation in our electoral process.We should instead strengthen our democracy by making the voting system more transparent and simple.— Gary Brunk is a Lawrence resident and executive director of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri. 

In a recent opinion piece, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach defended his track record as a national proponent of anti-immigrant laws. He asserted that the anti-immigrant laws he’s authored and espoused across the country have done “remarkably well” in court. A review of these cases shows otherwise. Indeed, just last week, his record suffered a serious blow when the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and a unanimous three-judge panel of the Third Circuit struck down anti-immigrant ordinances he authored in Farmer’s Branch, Texas and Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Although a divided Eighth Circuit panel recently upheld another of these ordinances in Fremont, Neb., the clear trend is away from his anti-immigrant approach.In his opinion piece, he claimed a “score” of “2 wins — 0 losses — 2 draws,” appearing essentially undefeated. Even apart from the Farmers Branch and Hazleton decisions, the anti-immigrant policies he promotes have been litigated many times, far more than the four court cases he discusses. For example, he conveniently excludes several failed lawsuits he brought challenging laws that promote immigrant integration, such as Kansas’ law allowing in-state college tuition for all Kansas high school graduates. After a federal appeals court dismissed his lawsuit here, he filed a similar one against California’s in-state tuition law, which the California Supreme Court rejected unanimously. He raises the issue year after year in the Legislature and every time, he scores a loss. This, in the Republican controlled Legislature in his home state.For the cases he doesn’t ignore, he obscures the results. For example, he calls the Supreme Court decision overturning provisions of SB 1070, Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant law — the hallmark of his career — a “draw” even though the Court struck down three of the four sections of the law that it reviewed.Mr. Kobach would have us believe that the single provision the court allowed was the only one that mattered. In the SB 1070 case, the Supreme Court struck down warrantless arrests of undocumented individuals, the criminalization under state law of work by the undocumented and criminal punishments for immigrants who fail to carry immigration papers at all times. And, the court limited the scope of the one provision it permitted, known as “show me your papers,” making it clear that the police cannot detain individuals just to inquire about immigration status. In other words, much of the anti-immigrant law that put Arizona in the national spotlight has now been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.Similarly, Mr. Kobach categorized the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision on Alabama’s HB 56 as a “draw” even though it too rebuked his fundamental approach. The court said, “We are convinced that Alabama has crafted a calculated policy of expulsion, seeking to make the lives of unlawfully present aliens so difficult as to force them to retreat from the state.” This is Mr. Kobach’s underlying theory of driving the undocumented to “self-deport,” which the court determined is an unconstitutional, “thinly veiled attempt to regulate immigration”— a power held solely by the federal government.Mr. Kobach’s faulty legal reasoning has brought only harm to communities that have relied on it. Yet he repeatedly asks Kansans to trust his expert legal opinion on controversial matters, whether it’s defending the voter identification law he authored, or advocating for more restrictive laws against immigrants. Kansans deserve better. We should trust our own instincts instead, supporting common sense immigration reform and integrating immigrants through sound policy.

The ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri is proud to launch the 4th Edition of the Kansas/Missouri LGBT Rights Handbook. The primary purpose of the handbook is simply to provide information.  Through the process of writing and updating it, we realize that, while progress is being made a great deal of work lies ahead.  The ACLU will continue participating in this crucial struggle to secure the civil rights and civil liberties of the LGBT community.4th Edition LGBT Handbook