Stories from the ACLU of Washington

By the time they’re 23 years old, between 30 and 41 percent of Americans have been arrested, according to a study recently released by the journal Pediatrics.  This number has sharply increased in recent decades; in the mid-1960s, only 22 percent of Americans reported having been arrested by the time they turned 23.

Teen marijuana usage rates have risen slightly in recent years, while tobacco and alcohol usage rates have declined. Alarmingly, 12th-graders across the nation and in Washington state are now more likely to have used marijuana in the past 30 days than to have smoked a cigarette.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and a group of farm-group representatives recently made headlines when they returned from Washington D.C., where they had sought to persuade Congress to oppose a bill requiring employers to use a system called E-Verify.  In stern words, Gov. Gregoire criticized the measure and its likely detrimental effect on our state’s agriculture industry. 

On May 10, 1970, a Washington state college student joined a chorus of anti-war voices by waving his version of the American flag. It featured a peace symbol – and it got him arrested under Washington’s flag-desecration statute. The student was convicted. The Washington Supreme Court did not grant his appeal. But in a landmark case (Spence v. Washington) won by Seattle attorney Peter Greenfield, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision as a violation of the First Amendment.

One disturbing consequence of the Patriot Act, which just marked its ten-year anniversary, is how it has been used for law enforcement actions not related to combating terrorism -- the rationale for the Act's passage. A glaring example can be seen in the use of "sneak and peak” searches for drug crimes.