News & Commentary

ACLU of Florida's Field Coordinator Nikki Fisher is attending the 50th Anniversary March on Washington. She will be blogging her experiences for ACLUFL.org

The original March on Washington took place over two decades before I was born. When I was a kid in school first hearing about it, it seemed as far away from me as did stories about the Civil War or the founding fathers or anything else I read about in a history books. But as I grew older and learned more about the march, more about what the people involved were fighting for, and more about the world, it became less of a mythic part of some distant history and more relevant to me.

Note: This blog post originally appeared on the National ACLU Blog of Rights. That post can be found here.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project

(Update: John Ferguson was executed at 6:17 PM E.T. on Monday, August 5th)

Unless the United States Supreme Court intervenes in the next few days, Florida will execute John Ferguson on August 5, despite a well-documented history of his psychosis spanning over 40 years.

“I

Note: This blog post originally appeared on the National ACLU Blog of Rights. That post can be found here.

By Rebecca McCray, ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project

Last week down in Florida, 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian was playing in the water with a friend at the beach when a Miami-Dade police officer approached him to ask what he was doing, misinterpreting their play for a fight. Tremaine walked away from the officers, carrying his new puppy in his arms. After observing his allegedly "dehumanizing stares" and clenched fists, the officer used his ATV to chase Tremaine down and throw him to the ground in a chokehold so intense that the teenager wet himself during the incident. It was his mother who caught part of the incident on camera.

By Kiera Wilmot

After model student Kiera Wilmot (pictured, left, with her twin sister Kayla) was arrested and removed from her high school for doing a science experiment on school property, hundreds of thousands of people across the country signed petitions asking for charges to be dropped and for her to be reinstated in school. Kiera's school's zero-tolerance approach, like so many schools across the country requires severe discipline and does not improve student behavior or improve our schools. It just pushes kids out of school, harming their futures and perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline. Below, Kiera blogs for ACLU.org about how she and her family have been affected by the school-to-prison pipeline.

"The

By Tanya Greene, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU

Note: This post originally appeared on the National ACLU Blog of Rights. The original blog post can be found here.

Florida will start this long, hot summer with a bang. The state has announced that in the coming months it intends to strap three separate men down, open their veins, paralyze them, and force deadly chemicals into their hearts until they die.

by J

I met Mary Graham last Saturday at a meeting of Mothers Standing in the Gap, a group of women in Jacksonville who come together to support one another through their sons’ incarceration. Like mothers everywhere, they do everything they can for their sons, with little concern for themselves.