Home » About » Newsletters » November 1997
The Truth about the ACLU of Florida's Clients
By Andrew Kayton, Legal Director
November 1997
Nothing provokes ACLU critics and even some of our members more than the stereotypical notions of who our clients are: the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke and NeoNazis; sex offenders, child pornographers and other perverts; terrorists; "Abortionists" and antiabortion zealots; religious fanatics and atheists, and, still, communists. Go ahead and add your least favorite group to the list.
But read on because I want to tell you about some of the real people who are being helped by the work of ACLU cooperating attorneys. In truth, the usual clich‚s about our clients are hardly the standard fare at the ACLU of Florida. We have a proud tradition of representing people who otherwise would likely go unrepresented, and of carrying the torch for very courageous citizens who stand up to government callousness or wrongdoing. And, while our real client is the Bill of Rights, we have affected the lives of thousands of Floridians by our defense of the great principles of that historic document.
We represent about 6000 homeless people in Miami. The ACLU brought a class action suit because police there engaged in sweeps, making arrests for activities such as sleeping or eating on public property. Personal property, including clothing, Bibles and other books, medicine and shelter, was destroyed, sometimes with use of frontend loaders and dump trucks, sometimes simply burned. The city's outrageous acts against the homeless were met and remedied by the ACLU. The ACLU's lawyers were appointed as counsel for all homeless persons in Miami "who have been arrested, harassed, or otherwise interfered with ... for engaging in the ordinary and essential life activities of daily living"; and two historic "safe zones" were created for homeless people living in Miami.
The case has served as a catalyst for policy changes that provide homeless persons with food, shelter and freedom, rather than arrest, handcuffs and a jail cell. It is, quite simply, the most successful litigation ever in the United States on behalf of homeless persons.
The ACLU is also part of a legal team that represents mental patients at G. Pierce Wood Memorial Hospital in Arcadia. These individuals received unspeakably barbaric care: elderly patients were tied to chairs or left in urinesoaked beds throughout the day; female patients were sexually assaulted without investigation or treatment; nonviolent patients were illegally administered disabling narcotics by unlicensed hospital aides. In the summer of 1994, four patients at the state hospital died two from choking, one from poisoning and one from hanging. A fifth patient severed his hands on an electric table saw. The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice has moved to intervene in the case, asserting that patients at the hospital are at "serious risk of harm, including death." The Justice Department joins an extraordinary group of lawyers, including Steve Hanlon and Nina Zollo at Holland & Knight and James K. Green, who have sustained this difficult litigation since 1987 without much attention by the press or the public. We should be proud of the ACLU's association with this effort.
In another class action, we represent all women in Florida who are eligible for Medicaid and who, in consultation with their physicians, have decided to have legal abortions for which the State of Florida refuses to provide Medicaid coverage. The State of Florida provides all necessary prenatal and postdelivery care for indigent women except for abortion services. The ACLU has challenged the State's ban on abortion coverage for lowincome women.
The case involves far more than dry legalities. Many of the women we represent in this case are from poor rural areas or are homeless. One of our clients became pregnant when she was raped. (So much for her needed "medical care" from the state.) The State's ban on Medicaid funding for these and other indigent women who have unwanted pregnancies requires them to find alternate funding, often with substantial delay that creates medical risk; to resort to unsafe, illegal or selfinduced abortions; or to be forced to carry the pregnancy to term. The health and mortality risks for women increase exponentially in all of these circumstances.
Florida unwisely has sacrificed health care to the antiabortion lobby. Without support from the ACLU and our cocounsel, poor women in Florida would likely have no voice in a courtroom defending their medical needs from the ideologically driven politics of the state legislature.
One of our class members in this case is a teenager named Kawana Ashley. On public assistance and unable to pay for an abortion, she put a pillow to her abdomen and a handgun to the pillow. The premature fetus was struck on the wrist by a bullet, delivered by emergency Cesarean section and then died.
One might hope that Kawana was given the counseling and assistance she so obviously needed. Instead the State Attorney's Office for the Sixth Judicial Circuit, in Clearwater, arrested the teenager, charging her with murder and manslaughter. The supposed basis for the murder charge: the government claimed Kawana had performed an illegal abortion.
The ACLU filed amicus briefs seeking dismissal of criminal charges against Kawana Ashley. After more than three years of court battles, the Florida Supreme Court dismissed those charges in a unanimous decision on October 30. The outcome was not a foregone conclusion: two lower courts had upheld charges against Kawana. Had she lost, such a prosecution would have been unprecedented. And the specter of a Florida "pregnancy police force", arresting pregnant women who engage in behavior that threatens the health of a developing fetus, let alone who shot themselves, would not have been unthinkable.
Most of our cases do not represent broad classes of people, but rather individual citizens who undertake an astounding form of public service by becoming ACLU plaintiffs. No case demonstrates that more poignantly than our assisted suicide case, McIver v. Krischer, which was decided adversely by the Florida Supreme Court this last summer. Three plaintiffs in that case, Charles Hall, Chuck Castonguay and Robert Cron, were terminally ill patients. Castonguay and Cron died before the case could be tried.
Wracked by cancer, Castonguay died in May 1996 after a week of dehydration and a morphine coma. The assisted suicide he sought, but could not have legally, would simply have saved him from his last week of agony. Cron, dying of mesothelioma, was allergic to morphine. In lieu of the lethal dose of drugs that he sought through our case, he was given morphine anyway. Before he died in October 1996, his family had to persevere while his body thrashed for three days and he lost twenty pounds in that short period. Hall, as you may know from the press coverage of our case, is dying of AIDS, and is the lone individual patient who enabled the case to go forward through a historic victory in the trial court.
Each of these three individuals, despite their own devastating illnesses, fought for the special dignity of all Floridians,. They represent the most unique type of courage we find in ACLU clients.
I also want to pay tribute to some of our student plaintiffs who, during this last year, stood up when school officials acted as misguided autocrats.
Rebecca Antolak sued when the Dillard High School principal banned a large male nude sculpture she had created from a school sponsored art exhibit. Remarkably, this occurred at a magnet school for the arts in Broward County, and Rebecca had created the work as part of her Advanced Placement curriculum. Rebecca's courage was rewarded: she received a $25,000 settlement from the Broward County School Board, and a summer scholarship from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Peter Riera, of Boca Raton, was barred from his high school campus this last year because administrators objected to a necklace he wore to school. It simply displayed a Cuban flag. The necklace had been bought by Peter's father, a refugee from Cuba, and his mother, a refugee from the Soviet Union. School officials claimed its colored beads (red, white and blue!) constituted "gang paraphernalia". After a settlement was reached in his ACLU lawsuit, Peter was able to return to school, necklace displayed and intact. I am sure his parents, political refugees who became American citizens, are exceptionally proud of him.
John Henson, a student at Zephyr Hills High School, contacted the ACLU last month when administrators threatened him with disciplinary action if he and some other students carried out plans to refrain from the pledge of allegiance at school. John had planned a "sitdown" as his way of participating in a nationally organized event expressing concerns about acts of police brutality in the United States. The principal had even read a morning announcement to students over the inschool television network stating that remaining seated and refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance constitutes a violation of Florida law and would result in inschool suspension. The matter, happily, was resolved with a phone call and letter from the ACLU to the school district. But John's determination to press forward with his constitutional rights (even apparently without the availability of a course on the Bill of Rights at his high school) reflects the best tradition of American political virtues.
These clients provide a stark contrast to the pejoratives about who the ACLU represents. These cases are also an important reminder of the human impact of our work, and why each of us is a member of this organization.
