Thinking Freely

The fight for voting rights remains as critical as ever, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. We talked to leading voting rights experts in Maryland: Joanne Antoine, Executive Director of Common Cause, Reverend Kobi Little, President of the Baltimore Branch of the NAACP, and Dana Vickers Shelley, Executive Director of the ACLU of Maryland. We talked about our voting rights, the challenges of voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what you need to know to exercise your vote by Tuesday, November 3.

With police spy planes, everywhere Baltimore goes, the government will always know. Spy planes carry sophisticated cameras developed for the military, mounted on airplanes, that can see the entire city, and that track the movement of every person or vehicle moving outside. Baltimore has a terrible history of racial bias and a lack of accountability for abuses by police. It should be the last place to use a program of mass surveillance. In this episode, we talk with Dayvon Love, the Public Policy Director for Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a grassroots think tank that advances the public policy interests of Black people in Baltimore, and David Rocah, Senior Staff Attorney for the ACLU of Maryland, to talk about the spy planes program, the legal case, our privacy rights, government surveillance, and the impact the spy planes are having on residents of Baltimore, especially Black residents. Let’s stop the Baltimore Police spy plane program.

Too many people have lost their lives at the hands of police. But perhaps the saddest thing is that many of these deaths were unnecessary and could have been avoided. Today, we will be joined by Tracy Shand, sister to Leonard Shand, and Shamāiah Manriquez, sister to Emanuel Oates, to share their experiences about how the killing of their brothers by police could have been and should have been, prevented. We will also talk to Jay Jimenez, our Legal Program Associate, about some of the trends we are seeing in police killing and important recommendations for the police that would reduce these tragic deaths.

Knowing your rights is vital. Especially during police interactions. You cannot assume that officers will behave in a way that protects your safety or that they will respect your rights even after you assert them. That’s why the ACLU of Maryland developed our free Know Your Rights program so that you can know how to exercise your rights and what to do when your rights are violated. This month, we talked to two experienced Know Your Rights Trainers, Kimi Washington and Gus Griffin, along with Amy Cruice the Director of ACLU of Maryland’s Know Your Rights Program, about why knowing your rights is so important and how you can request a KYR training.

During these difficult times, the ACLU of Maryland is here to defend and protect our civil rights and civil liberties. We are providing guidance to our elected officials, so they can craft a COVID-19 response that is compassionate and protects the populations most vulnerable to harm, including immigrants and those caught in the legal justice system – as well as all Maryland voters. As always, we will provide people with action items you can do to support this vital work.

For Women’s History Month, we are highlighting the issues facing women exiting the criminal legal system and why we need a dedicated pre-release facility for women.

The number of women and girls in the criminal legal system has grown substantially over the past several decades. The over-incarceration of women devastates families, because 75% of women who are incarcerated are the primary or sole caretakers of children. Currently, the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services operates nine dedicated lower-security facilities for men who are preparing to return to their communities from prison. But there are none for women. The re-entry services available to women are inadequate as they are, but the situation is even more egregious in light of the services available to men. We were joined by Qiana Johnson, the Executive Director of Life After Release, to discuss why women need a dedicated pre-release facility in Maryland and how to support incarcerated women.

We want officers to speak up against racist police practices and sexual harassment to help change the culture of policing. But when officers of color speak up against these unconstitutional practices they often experience discrimination and retaliation. For this Black History Month, we sat down with an African American officer, Lieutenant Sonya Zollicoffer, second vice president of the United Black Police Officers Association and with a Latino officer Retired Captain Joe Perez, president of the Hispanic National Law Enforcement Association. We talk about why they and over 10 other officers of color, decided to file a lawsuit against Prince George’s County Police Department challenging the department’s pattern and practice of unconstitutional conduct. And we ask them about their message to other Black and brown officers and women officers fighting against discrimination in their police departments.

Another Maryland Legislative session is upon us, with the General Assembly set to start on January 8, 2020. This session, the ACLU of Maryland will be working on six priority areas: 1) Race and wealth equity for Maryland’s school children, 2) the Trust Act to defend the rights of immigrants in our communities, 3) equality in support services for women exiting the criminal legal system, 4) transparency in policing, 5) the right to vote for Marylanders behind bars, and 6) due process for children entangled in the criminal so-called “justice” system. Toni Holness, our public policy Director, Joe Spielberger, our Public Policy Council, and Justin Nalley, our Education Policy Analyst join Thinking Freely this month to talk about our work and how you can get involved.

Maryland students have a right to a high-quality public education guaranteed by the state constitution. But for far too many students, that right is undermined by generations of underfunding. This has most deeply impacted students from families with low income and Black and Brown children. Janna Parker, a former educator and a public education advocate, and Kimberly Humphrey, Esq., Legislative Counsel for the ACLU of Maryland, talk about how you can help to address racial and wealth inequities in the Kirwan Commission, the group developing Maryland’s new statewide education funding formula.

This podcast was recorded on Piscataway land.

For years, people sentenced as children to life in prison with the possibility of parole, and their families, have tried to get Maryland to live up to the promise of second chances that a parole-eligible sentence is intended to provide. However, many barriers exist that stop this from happening. Many criminal justice stakeholders have turned to technology to help make parole decisions through “risk assessment tools.” Also labeled artificial intelligence, these tools have been touted as carrying with them the potential to save a broken system. However, these tools may exacerbate the same problems they are supposed to help solve. They rely on flawed criminal justice data that is not controlled for the institutional vestiges of slavery, de jure and de facto segregation, racial discrimination, and biased policing. In this episode we talk to Earl Young, who was sentenced to life as a young man; James Foulds, Assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems at UMBC; and Sonia Kumar, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Maryland. What are the barriers to people getting a real opportunity to earn a second chance? What can you do to support meaningful reforms to parole systems, like the deeply flawed system in Maryland?