News & Commentary

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin Wednesday struck down a law that barred transgender people from receiving medical care while they are incarcerated. The American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal challenged the law in January 2006 on behalf of transgender prisoners, some of whom had been receiving hormones in Wisconsin prisons for years prior to the passage of the law. The lawsuit charged that it is a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection as well as the guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment to bar transgender inmates from access to individualized medical care. The legal groups based their challenge on federal case law that establishes that health care providers must determine proper treatment for all prison inmates.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin Wednesday struck down a law that barred transgender people from receiving medical care while they are incarcerated. The American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal challenged the law in January 2006 on behalf of transgender prisoners, some of whom had been receiving hormones in Wisconsin prisons for years prior to the passage of the law. The lawsuit charged that it is a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection as well as the guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment to bar transgender inmates from access to individualized medical care. The legal groups based their challenge on federal case law that establishes that health care providers must determine proper treatment for all prison inmates. 

Today, Christopher Ahmuty, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin issued the following statement regarding an incident at a student protest at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (UWM).

The district attorney in Juneau County has made an ill-advised attack on Wisconsin’s newly passed comprehensive sexuality education law. The Healthy Youth Act raises the state standards for human growth and development curricula. But the letter from District Attorney Southworth erroneously compares teaching the facts about reproduction and contraception to the sexual assault of children. “The district attorney in Juneau County has taken it upon himself to threaten possible prosecution of public school teachers in the county, if they follow a new state law that requires medically accurate and age appropriate sex education. He says that accurate information encourages teens to have sex, but the new law actually requires teachers to inform their students that sex with a minor is illegal.”

Today the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin asked Wisconsin State Senate majority leader, Russell Decker (D-Schofield), to schedule a vote on legislation to address discriminatory race-based school team nicknames, logos and mascots. Last Thursday, the Wisconsin Assembly passed an amended version of such legislation with bipartisan support.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Wisconsin and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday urging the justices to find that, when the police place a global positioning system tracking device on a car to obtain information on its location and movements without a valid warrant, they violate the Wisconsin constitution.

The proposal to give MPS governance to the mayor is a scheme that won’t remedy Wisconsin’s failure to provide an adequate education to far too many of Milwaukee’s children. Rather than spending time and effort to push through a controversial takeover program, the Governor, Mayor and state legislators need to comply with the state Constitutional obligation to ensure that all Milwaukee children have equal opportunity in education.

The ACLU works to ensure that the U.S. government complies with universal human rights principles in addition to the U.S. Constitution. Global human rights protection strategies are used to complement existing ACLU advocacy on national security, racial justice and the rights of immigrants, children and women targeted by discrimination.

In the United States, no other criminal justice policies show more racially disparate impacts than that of drug law enforcement. Since the “war on drugs” began, efforts to end punitive drug policies that cause the widespread violation of constitutional and human rights has been needed to address the root cause of unprecedented levels of incarceration. Nationally, the ACLU works on marijuana law reform, the disparate impact of crack versus cocaine sentencing disparities, drug testing laws, and search and seizure policies.