In the spring of 2005, undercover officers from the Flint Area Narcotics Group raided a dance club called the Club What’s Next and rounded up 117 young men and women under the pretense that they were “frequenting a drug house.” Although the majority of college-aged patrons at the dance club had done nothing illegal, some undercover cops had purchased drugs from a few individuals, casting the light of suspicion on everyone. Jennifer Thompson was one of the many patrons who were handcuffed, strip searched, cavity searched and falsely arrested. Women were taken into a restroom and told to remove their blouses and bras within sight of male officers. One male officer commented on the size of a young woman’s breasts, asking if they were real. The winter issue of the ACLU Rights Review newspaper goes on in this vein: “Most of the men were taken into a men’s bathroom and told to raise their shirts, drop their pants and underwear, and to bend over and cough. Some were told to put a finger into their anus. Those who were still handcuffed had their pants and underwear pulled down to around their knees by police officers. One man was stripped on the side of the road after he had left the club.” The upshot of this unconstitutional strip- and body cavity search was a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU settled the case in December, forcing the police department to institute new policies and training to prevent unlawful searches to ever occur again. Flint and Genesee County must also pay victims of the incident a total of $900,000. But suppose it was you? Just minding your own business, wrapping up the night at a dance club in Petoskey or TC? Who would you call? It’s popular in America to heap scorn on the ACLU and its “card-carrying members.” The stereotype of the American Civil Liberties Union is that it’s made up of liberal crackpot lawyers who spend much of their time driving around looking for Nativity scenes to shut down at Christmas. But those who’ve been victims of the powers-that-be know that those stereotypes are wrong. “Though the ACLU has always been viewed as powerful, few people know that just a handful of brave and outspoken activists around the state of Michigan are responsible for the organization...” notes the Rights Review. Here are some of the cases that Michigan’s ACLU has been involved in recently:
• Ending naked detention in the Saginaw County Jail. Shades of Abu Ghraib: from 1999 to 2005 the jail had a policy of stripping inmates naked and forcing them to remain in a cell called “the hole,” where they could be viewed by jail personnel and inmates of the opposite sex. “If the prisoner declined to strip, guards forcibly removed the clothing, often by spraying chemicals in their faces, forcing them on the ground and cutting off their clothing.” Multiple lawsuits resulted in an end to this practice, along with Saginaw County paying $1.5 million for “Callously disregarding the basic human dignity of individuals awaiting trial.”
• No crime being homeless: In Ann Arbor, a number of homeless people live on public land near a highway. Caleb Poirier is one of them -- he was arrested and charged with trespassing. The ACLU filed a brief, “arguing that it is unconstitutional to arrest a person for sleeping on public land when there is no place else for him to sleep.” The prosecutor dropped the charges.
• Illegal home entries in Leelanau County: Last October, the local ACLU demanded that police officers put an end to the practice of “entering homes without warrants and forcing college-age students to submit to breathalyzer tests.” In one incident, police entered a Leelanau County home illegally, walked into a woman’s bedroom at 3:30 a.m., woke her up, and forced her to take a breathalyzer test.
• A terrorist? Daniel Allen of Macomb County bit a neighbor during a fight and wound up being charged as a terrorist because he’s HIV-positive. The ACLU is preparing a brief, arguing that this is not how Michigan’s statute on terrorism is intended to be used.
• Unjustly labelled a sex offender: In a case also reported by Northern Express, a young man had sex with his girlfriend (now his wife) when he was 18. A teacher reported the relationship to police, and although criminal charges were dismissed, he was required to register for life as a sex offender. In November, an appeals court agreed with the ACLU that this constituted cruel and unusual punishment, and took him off the list.
These are among the many other News of the Weird-style incidents that the ACLU is involved with in Michigan. Who knows? Perhaps someday they’ll even throw you a line when no one else will help or listen. Check them out at www.aclumich.org. Like me, you may even decide to become a “card-carrying member.”
A Threat to Your Right to Know
Currently, six bills are being considered in the State House of Representatives which would allow Michigan communities to post legal notices on websites, rather than in local newspapers. The bills would allow legal notices to be listed on one of the following: • the municipality’s website. • the website of the local newspaper. • on the local public TV channel. This issue has got the Michigan Press Association and its member newspapers in an uproar over the public’s “right to know” (not to mention lost revenues from legal notices). We receive few, if any, legal notices at Northern Express and have no vested interest in this matter, but one could argue that the Internet is too diffuse a medium to trust with legal notices. By its nature, the Internet encourages people to flit from site-to-site on a moment’s notice, seldom spending much time in any one “place.” And it’s also crowded out there, with millions of websites competing for your attention. Thus, it would be all too easy for the general public to miss legal notices -- even those inveterate city government watchers who are inclined to search out such things. Better to keep them in the local “newspaper of record,” where they are sure to be seen by someone, if only your pet parakeet...
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