Jayne Fuentes is one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Benton County of having “modern-day debtors’ prisons.”

After years of drug addiction, Jayne Fuentes feels she’s close to getting her life back on track, as long as she doesn’t get arrested again — but not for using drugs. She fears it will be because she still owes court fines and fees, including hundreds of dollars for her public defender.

Fuentes hopes to change that. She’s one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, charging that Benton County, Wash., where she lives, “operates a modern-day debtors’ prison.”

Fuentes first told her story to NPR in 2014, in our investigation called Guilty and Charged. That series showed how in all 50 states, defendants are now handed a bill for more and more of the costs of their own trials, sentences and supervision when they leave jail. That can be a hardship for many indigent defendants. And, around the country, when they fall behind on payment, they may end up serving jail time.

That was particularly so in Benton County, where last year, an NPR analysis of jail records found that about 1 out of every 4 people in jail for a misdemeanor offense was there because he failed to pay court fines and fees.

The ACLU lawsuit says people in Benton County who are homeless, unemployed or just out of prison get sent to jail when they can’t pay their court fines, which can add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Fuentes says she owes “tens of thousands of dollars” to the county Superior Court, where she faced felony drug charges, and almost $2,000 to the District Court, which handles misdemeanors.

Since leaving prison in 2011, she’s repaired relationships with her family. She has stayed sober, left a treatment house earlier this year and moved into an apartment with a roommate. She also bought an old, used car and, in July, finally found work, a part-time job making sandwiches at a fast-food restaurant. But she lives from one paycheck to the next, and there have been months — especially before she got her job — when she missed or was late on the $65 monthly payment she has to make to the courts.

When that happens, she says she gets a letter stating that the court can issue a warrant for her arrest. She worries about going back to jail.

“I would lose my job, my house, my car, my life and my freedom, for not being able to pay a fine,” Fuentes says.

She says she’s willing to pay what she owes the court, but shouldn’t be penalized for months when she has no income. Her debt grew when she was in prison. Every year, including when she was behind bars, there was a 12 percent annual interest rate added by the state to her debt to Superior Court.

Among her debts, she says, are several hundred dollars to pay for her public defender. The NPR survey found that’s common. In 2014, 43 states allowed indigent defendants to be charged a small fee or even hundreds of dollars for a public defendant.

Benton County, NPR found, collects just a fraction of the fines and fees it’s owed, but it still collected $13 million in 2012. Across the country, municipalities have come under scrutiny for the way they raise revenues through court fines. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report critical of Ferguson, Mo., for arresting people and charging them court fines and fees and then jailing them if they did not pay. There are 90 municipalities in St. Louis County, and some of them were collecting 20 to 60 percent of their municipal budgets in court fines. Since then, state lawmakers have put stricter limits on how much counties can raise, capping the amount at 10 percent as of 2017.

Officials in Benton County did not respond to a request for comment. But in the past, judges have said they give defendants multiple chances to reset the amount they owe, before ordering them to jail.

Vanessa Torres Hernandez, an attorney with the ACLU of Washington, says resetting fines is not enough because a person’s ability to pay can change quickly, if he loses a job or there’s a family emergency.

“There is a growing local and national recognition that debtors-prison systems are unproductive,” says Hernandez, and “as a society we all benefit when we give people who have made mistakes and gone through the criminal justice system real opportunities to pay their debts to society and rebuild their lives.”

By Joseph Shapiro for NPR.org

The American Civil Liberties Union has published a list of answers to frequently asked questions regarding the government’s ability to access your personal medical information.

Recently, some Americans who have visited a hospital, pharmacy, or doctor’s office have received letters informing them that their private health information may be turned over to “authorized federal officials” for the purposes of national security or intelligence activities.

The ACLU’s response takes into account legislation still in effect from the USA Patriot Act, as well as current HIPAA privacy regulations. The ACLU answers questions about whether police can obtain medical information without a warrant (yes), and whether the government (and possibly those acting on its behalf) can access that information under the Patriot Act (yes).

Many Americans feel a growing concern about the potential for government overreach in their ability to access private information about its citizens. The ACLU seems to share in this concern, recommending readers contact Congress to pass legislature that would revise medical privacy laws, in particular requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant first before accessing private medical data.

You can read the full report, complete with legal sources for the ACLU’s findings, on their website.

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Governor Larry Hogan (R-MD) vetoed three bills on Friday that contained major criminal justice reforms, including one which reduced penalties related to cannabis use.

SB 517 contained legislation to reduce marijuana paraphernalia penalties to a civil offense. The governor also vetoed two other bills: SB 528, which would have limited asset forfeiture seized by police, and HB 980, which would have restored the right to vote to felons who have been released from prison.

Hogan explained in a letter to legislators that his decision to veto the bills was based on requests from Maryland police unions, including the Maryland Sheriffs’ Association and the Maryland Chiefs of Police Association. Both organizations have campaigned against legislative reforms to asset forfeiture and cannabis possession penalties.

The actual explanation given by Hogan for his veto of the cannabis reform bill bafflingly referenced heroin addiction as factor in the governor’s reasoning.

“Maryland is currently facing a heroin epidemic. The individuals involved in the manufacture and sale of drugs are profiting from the deaths and ruined lives they are creating. The asset forfeiture law helps to ensure that these criminals do not reap any economic benefits from their crimes.”

— Maryland Governor Larry Hogan

Hogan made no comment about the benefits and funding the state of Maryland receives as a result of drug criminalization.

A study by the ACLU on marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010 concluded that the state of Maryland had one of the highest arrest rates for marijuana possession. Baltimore in particular was found to have an arrest rate of approximately 11.4 arrests per 1,000 people, among the highest in the US.

If it looks like a drone and smells like a drone, it’s a drone. The Illinois State Police was recently granted permission by the Federal Aviation Administration to use drones. But the police department clearly senses the PR nightmare over their use, because it’s trying very hard not to call a drone a drone.

In a statement released to the Sun-Times Media Wire, the police department said that it was intentionally avoiding the word “drone” because “it carries the perception of pre-programmed or automatic flight patterns and random, indiscriminate collection of images and information.”

The Illinois State Police will add “unmanned aircraft” to its list of tools for the next two years.

The state police said they worked with legal professionals and civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to minimize the privacy impact on average citizens. The force maintained that it needed the drones because “the ability to obtain accurate measurements and clear images from aerial photographs will significantly reduce the amount of time highways are closed during the initial investigation of major traffic crashes.”

Two years ago, the Illinois General Assembly passed the “Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act,” which says that the use of drones is prohibited in the state with a number of exceptions. Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told ArsTechnica that back in 2013, the ACLU worked with the state police and other law enforcement agencies to put in place some ground rules before law enforcement agencies actually started incorporating drones into their work.

The ACLU pushed for a structure “that necessitated law enforcement getting a warrant before any kind of general or ongoing surveillance.”

“Law enforcement was willing to do that,” Yohnka said, although the police “wanted some basic carve outs for really exigent circumstances,” like kidnappings and car chases.

As the Freedom from Drone Surveillance Act stands, law enforcement is allowed to use drones if police have a warrant, if they have reasonable suspicion that harm to human life is imminent, or if they are attempting to locate a missing person. Police may also use drones “for crime scene and traffic crash scene photography,” during a disaster or public health emergency, or “to counter a high risk of a terrorist attack.”

This story originally posted on Revolution-News.com

The Delaware Attorney General’s Office has indicted a Dover police office on assault charges after he was caught on camera kicking a suspect in the face.

We should warn you the video might be disturbing to some viewers.

A dash camera from another patrol car captured Officer Thomas Webster approaching Latif Dickerson following a fight back in August of 2013.

After ordering Dickerson to the ground, Webster is seen kicking him once in the head, knocking him out and breaking his jaw.

Webster was originally put on leave pending an investigation and a grand jury convened in 2014 did not indict him. The ACLU subsequently sued Dover police on Dickerson’s behalf.

But the Delaware Attorney General’s office took the case before a second grand jury, which indicted the cop on assault charges.

Delaware NAACP leaders are criticizing the police department’s decision to release the video, saying they wanted time to redirect any tension that would stem from the footage being made public.

The ACLU in California today released a free smart-phone app that allows people to send cellphone videos of police encounters to the ACLU, automatically—and the ACLU will preserve the video footage, even if the cops seize the phone and delete the video or destroy the phone. The app, “Mobile Justice CA,” works for both iPhones and Android users. It’s available at Apple’s App Store and at Google Play.

The app features a large red “Record” button in the middle of the screen. When it’s pressed, the video is recorded on the phone and a duplicate copy is transmitted simultaneously to the ACLU server. When the “stop” button is pressed, a “Report” screen appears, where information about the location of the incident and the people involved can also be transmitted to the ACLU.

The video and the information are treated as a request for legal assistance and reviewed by staff members. No action is taken by the ACLU, however, unless an explicit request is made, and the reports are treated as confidential and privileged legal communications. The videos, however, may be shared by the ACLU with the news media, community organizations or the general public to help call attention to police abuse.

The app is available in English and Spanish. It includes a “Know Your Rights” page.

The value of the Mobile Justice app was dramatized this month in the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate, where a bystander taped cops detaining people in her neighborhood. A second person was recording her, and in that video, a lawman rushes at the first woman, grabs her cell phone, and smashes it on the floor. The second video ended up on YouTube. (South Gate police later said the officer was not a local cop but rather a deputy US marshal.)

Meanwhile in Texas, a proposed law would make it a crime for ordinary people to videotape police actions—on the grounds that it was “interference” with police activity. In California, on the other hand, the state senate this month approved legislation providing clear legal protection to people who videotape police activity without interfering with investigations.

“People who historically have had very little power in the face of law enforcement now have this tool to reclaim their power and dignity,” said Patrisse Cullors, director of the Truth and Reinvestment Campaign at the Ella Baker Center, which is working with the ACLU of California to support the launch of the Mobile Justice CA app. “Our vision is that this app will ultimately help community members connect and organize to respond to incidents of law enforcement violence, and then share their experiences and knowledge with others.”

The Mobile Justice CA app complies with California law. ACLU affiliates in other states have developed other versions for use in those states: residents of New York should use the “Stop and Frisk Watch” app; in New Jersey, it’s the “Police Tape” app; in Oregon and Missouri it’s the “Mobile Justice” app.

These work in different ways: with the New York app, shaking the phone stops the filming; the New Jersey app does not transmit the video automatically—the user must choose to send it to the ACLU-NJ for backup storage. Not all of them are available on all platforms and not all are available in Spanish, as the California app is. However, video submitted from anywhere via the California app will be stored and available to those who submitted it, an ACLU SoCal official said.

“This app will help serve as a check on abuse,” said Hector Villagra, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU SoCal), where the app was developed. It will “allow ordinary citizens to record and document any interaction with law enforcement,” he said, including “police officers, sheriff’s deputies, border patrol, or other officials.”

Originally published at TheNation.com