News & Commentary

A proposal by members of the Saline County Board to post a plaque with the Ten Commandments on the property of the County Courthouse recently drew a sharp objection from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. Recently, the Saline County Board discussed the proposal including the idea having a public referendum to assess support for the display. Perhaps most surprising, a member of the Board publicly suggested that it was time for the Board to "take a stand and defy the courts."

This week, Illinois changed the course of history.

Gay

I came down to Springfield this morning with ACLU of Illinois Executive Director Colleen Connell and Board President Jill Metz to join the rest of the ACLU team as we fight for two of our major legislative objectives during this fall veto session: passing SB 1716 Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act and SB 3529 which would end the death penalty.

Executive Director Colleen Connell appeared on WTTW's Chicago Tonight to discuss the new TSA backscatter body scanners and "enhanced" pat-downs:

In August 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois filed a lawsuit arguing that civilians have a right protected by the First Amendment to make audio recordings of on-duty police officers. The plaintiff in the lawsuit is the ACLU of Illinois as an organization, because we want to audio record police as part of our on-going police monitoring and advocacy. Specifically, the ACLU of Illinois challenged the use of Illinois Eavesdropping Act to prosecute individuals who record police conversations with civilians that take place in public, while police are performing their duties, and when those conversations are audible to the human ear. The ACLU contends that such prosecutions unlawfully preclude individuals - and organizations such as the ACLU of Illinois - from being able to record police interactions on public streets and thoroughfares and disseminate that information to policy makers in order to address specific policy concerns.

Coll

On Wednesday, November 10th, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois will be inducted at the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame's 20th annual ceremony in recognition of "decades of support for the civil liberties of the LGBT community and persons living with HIV as well as advocacy of nondiscrimination laws covering sexual orientation, gender identity and HIV status."

Illinois death penalty system is broken beyond repair. Two years after the moratorium was issued in 2000, the Ryan Commission issued 85 recommendations to improve our death penalty system. Eight years later, there are still gaping issues that make fixing the broken system impossible - less than half of the recommendations have been implemented; there is not enough money to implement recommendations; and numerous local and national organizations, including the Chicago Council of Lawyers and 4000 judges, lawyers and law professors of the American Law Institute (ALI), believe that the system is irrevocably broken. That the ALI walked away from any further efforts to reform the death penalty because of the belief that the system is irretrievably broken and all reform efforts are futile is noteworthy since they drafted the Model Penal Code on capital punishment and assisted states that reinstated the death penalty after 1976.