There will be a court hearing tomorrow, Thursday, August 1st, at 11am in U.S. District Court in Providence in an important immigrants’ rights case in which the federal government is claiming that a person who will likely be tortured if he is extradited back to his home country cannot rely on that fact to prevent his return to that country. The case will be heard at 11am before U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell, Jr.  U.S. District Court is located at 1 Exchange Terrace, Providence, RI 02903.

The case arises in the context of a habeas corpus petition filed by the Federal Public Defender on behalf of Cristian Aguasvivas, who is from the Dominican Republic. That country is seeking to extradite him for allegedly shooting to death a drug police officer. Aguasvivas claims he is innocent and the victim of rampant police corruption in that country that includes kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings. An immigration appeals board agreed, but the federal government is nonetheless still seeking to extradite him back there.
ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project attorney Cody Wofsy will be arguing the case with the Federal Defender in support of Aguasvivas’s petition.

The ACLU’s brief and other information about the case can be found here:
http://www.riaclu.org/news/post/aclu-files-court-brief-opposing-extradition-of-man-likely-to-be-tortured-if

​ACLU MOUNTS TWO-PRONGED ATTACK TO MAKE RECORDS OF POLICE MISCONDUCT PUBLIC

Dimitri Lyssikatos Live! On The Coalition April 2019
 
Calling it “one of the most damaging decisions affecting the public’s right to know that has been issued, and a significant obstacle to holding police departments accountable,” the ACLU of Rhode Island has launched a two-pronged attack on a 2017 Attorney General ruling that allows police to keep secret some of its reports of police misconduct. In simultaneous appeals to the Rhode Island Supreme Court and the Attorney General, ACLU of RI cooperating attorney James Cullen is asking for a reversal of that ruling.
 
In two major Access to Public Records Act (APRA) lawsuits filed in past years by the ACLU, the R.I. Supreme Court has ruled that the public is entitled to obtain final reports of investigations of police misconduct. Although both cases involved requests for reports involving citizen-generated complaints of misconduct, the court rulings did not propound any distinction between investigations prompted by civilians and those initiated by a police department itself. However, a 2017 APRA advisory opinion by the Attorney General’s office, Piskunov v. Town of Narragansett, approved such a distinction and held in that case that the Narragansett Police Department could withhold their final reports of misconduct investigations if they were initiated internally. Until that ruling, police departments had routinely provided those reports. That quickly changed.
 
Later that year, the ACLU filed an APRA lawsuit against the Pawtucket Police Department on behalf of Dimitri Lyssikatos, who was stymied from obtaining those internally-generated police misconduct final reports. Lyssikatos is a member of the Rhode Island Accountability Project, a non-partisan organization which promotes governmental accountability and maintains a publicly available database of police misconduct reports. However, Pawtucket police, relying on the Piskunov opinion, refused to turn over 57 separate internal investigatory findings, prompting the ACLU to sue. In March, however, RI Superior Court Judge Melissa Long sided with the police and held that additional hearings were necessary to determine whether those records had to be released under APRA.
 
In a court brief filed today, the ACLU has asked the R.I. Supreme Court to review and overturn that decision, stating that Long’s ruling “invites public bodies to use unnecessary procedural hurdles to block APRA requests [and]  imposes significant transaction costs that most applicants for the release of records cannot afford.”
 
Separately, Lyssikatos was denied access to similar records in April by the Woonsocket Police Department, which also relied on Piskunov in rejecting his request for misconduct reports. In response, ACLU attorney Cullen has filed with the Attorney General a formal appeal of that denial, asking that his office overturn its 2017 opinion. Calling the Woonsocket Police Department’s denial “a flagrant breach of Rhode Island’s Access to Public Records Act,” the appeal to the AG argues that it “highlights the faulty and problematic nature” of the 2017 opinion “which has become an increasingly-used tool by police departments to shield themselves from public accountability.”  The formal appeal to the Attorney General concludes:
 
“The Piskunov opinion has cast a pall over police department accountability and transparency and is being used to hinder the public’s right to know in significant ways. We request that your office take this opportunity to reconsider and reverse that pronouncement, and conclude that the text and intent of the APRA . . . compel the conclusion that internally-generated reports regarding alleged police misconduct, no less than citizen-generated reports, are public records.”
 
In seeking the records from both Pawtucket and Woonsocket, Lyssikatos agreed, to no avail, to allow personally-identifiable information from the reports to be redacted.
 
ACLU cooperating attorney Cullen said today: “There is no meaningful distinction between internal affairs reports generated as a result of citizen complaints and internal affairs reports generated without an underlying citizen complaint.  However initiated, these reports of investigations conducted by the internal affairs department shed light on one of the core functions of government – policing.”
 
Lyssikatos added: “The idea that internally generated investigations demand greater privacy than those initiated by the public only serves to foster the disconnect between the public and law enforcement. The Rhode Island Accountability Project was, and in some cases still is, receiving internally generated reports and feels strongly that their release is essential in maintaining a single standard of investigative integrity. As it stands now, all a law enforcement agency would have to do to withhold an investigation is beat the public to the initiation of the complaint.”

ACLU of RI executive director Steven Brown stated: “The 2017 Attorney General opinion is one of the most damaging decisions affecting the public’s right to know that has been issued, and a significant obstacle to holding police departments accountable. We are hopeful that the new Attorney General’s promise of greater transparency will lead to a reversal of that unfortunate opinion.”
 
Earlier this year, Judge Long upheld thousands of questionable redactions made by the previous Attorney General in releasing records regarding the AG’s expenditure of “Google settlement” funds. Those redactions included the complete blacking out of a two-page memo describing the Attorney General’s purchase of ceremonial lapel pins for the office. After the ACLU appealed that ruling, Attorney General Neronha reexamined the records and released almost all of them in unredacted form.
 
More information on the cases mentioned above including copies of the filings, can be found here.

ACLU CHALLENGES CENTURY-OLD LAW DECLARING INMATES SERVING LIFE SENTENCES “CIVILLY DEAD”
 
Attorney Sonja Deyoe Joined The Coalition Talk Radio!

The ACLU of Rhode Island today filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of a 110-year-old statute that declares inmates serving life sentences at the ACI to be “dead in all respects” with respect to “all civil rights.” The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court by ACLU cooperating attorneys Sonja Deyoe and Lynette Labinger, is on behalf of two ACI inmates who are barred from pursuing legal actions against the Department of Corrections in court because of the “civil death” law. According to the lawsuit, Rhode Island may be the only state in the country still enforcing a law like this, whose origins date back to ancient English common law.
 
As far back as 1976, a court struck down Missouri’s civil death statute, noting that “the concept of civil death has been condemned by virtually every court and commentator to study it over the last thirty years.” The court observed that such laws had been characterized even before then as “archaic,” “outmoded,” “an outdated and inscrutable common law precept,” and “a medieval fiction in a modern world.” In 1937, when 18 states still had civil death laws, a law review article called the concept “outworn.”
 
The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring the civil death law unconstitutional on a number of grounds, including as a violation of inmates’ First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
 
One of the plaintiffs, James Lombardi, is barred by the statute from suing the DOC after he cut himself in his cell on a footlocker that he claims the Department knew was hazardous. The other plaintiff, Joshua Davis, claims that a DOC nurse recklessly exposed him to blood-borne pathogens by administering insulin from a contaminated vial of medication, but the civil death statute bars him from bringing claims alleging medical negligence or other violations of his rights.
 
In 2015, the ACLU challenged the statute as it applied to bar inmates serving life sentences from marrying, but the court in that case said that a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court summary affirmance, without a written opinion, of a federal court decision upholding a New York statute that barred inmates sentenced to life imprisonment from marrying applied.
 
The key portion of the state law being challenged reads: “Every person imprisoned in the adult correctional institutions for life shall, with respect to all rights of property, to the bond of matrimony and to all civil rights and relations of any nature whatsoever, be deemed to be dead in all respects, as if his or her natural death had taken place at the time of conviction.”
 
ACLU attorney Deyoe said today: “Most of the individuals affected by this act receive life sentences with the possibility of parole and will subsequently be released back into society.  This law is a remnant of a byzantine era and works directly against any type of rehabilitation these offenders could receive which would better equip them when they eventually reenter society.  It removes from them all of their civil rights and constitutes a punishment in some respects far greater than is fathomable in an orderly society such as ours.  Under the Civil Death Act, those affected cannot file suit in state court for even the most grievous of crimes that are committed against them while in prison.  This would include crimes such as torture, rape, criminal neglect and denial of the most basic things such as food and water.”
 
ACLU of Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown added: “Interpreted literally, the statute would allow prison officials to waterboard an inmate serving a life sentence, and leave the inmate with no legal recourse. The irony of the statute is that a person who is sentenced to life imprisonment – and thus legally dead – may be eligible for parole after 20 or 25 years, while a person who is instead sentenced to confinement for 99 years, and not eligible for parole for a longer period of time, retains their civil rights under the law. The statute is archaic, irrational and unjustifable.”
 
More information on the lawsuit, Lombardi and Davis v. Raimondo, can be found here:
http://www.riaclu.org/court-cases/case-details/lombardi-and-davis-v.-raimondo
 
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Sonja Deyoe: (401) 864-5877
Steven Brown: (401) 831-7171