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In addition to Mike German, policy counsel for the National ACLU, we have the distinct honor of hosting two legislators for the panel portion of the event. Delegate John Doyle (D-Jefferson) and Senator Clark Barnes (R-Randolph) will join Mr. German for a panel discussing civil liberties issues and the implications federal policies have at the state level.
For those who aren't aware, Senator Barnes and Delegate Doyle are both the chief sponsors of the REAL I.D. opt out legislation in their respective chambers at the legislature. Both are thoughtful public servants who have a sincere interest in their duties as public officials. This should be an excellent event.
Next Thursday, we have the distinguished privlege of hosting Mike German, Policy Counsel for the National ACLU. Mike will present at the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at 730 pm on Thursday, January 22nd.
I have personally seen Mike present before. I guarantee you won't be dissapointed.
Just so everyone has the opportunity to see, here is a link to today's Gazette article citing the opinion rendered last month regarding Kanawha County's drug testing case. There is a link to the opinion at the top of the article. Enjoy.
(Good news... as predicted at this blog, by the author of this diary, no less! - promoted by Clem Guttata)
In Today's Gazette, it is reported that U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin has put a temporary stop to random and suspicionless drug testing of Kanawha County school employees.
He said that "suspicionless, random drug testing in this case violates the Fourth Amendment" of the U.S. Constitution, which protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Employees who are randomly subjected to urine tests face "invasive, degrading, humiliating" searches that should only be required if there is a compelling reason, Goodwin said.
The temporary injunction blocks the program from taking effect on Thursday, but the case will continue in federal court. Jim Withrow, general counsel for the school board, expects Goodwin to schedule hearings in the near future.
Suffice to say, this is a pretty big deal. I like the fact that the judge called out the Kanawha County Board of Education for their complete lack of any evidence citing an actual problem. "Where's the Beef?"
Today saw a major development in the debate over what to do about West Virginia's prison overcrowding problem. The Gazette's Phil Kabler reports:
With overcrowding in state prisons and regional jails reaching critical levels, the West Virginia Supreme Court has appointed a seven-member panel to come up with ways to alleviate the problem, the court's administrative director said Wednesday.
"Our hope is to work with the Legislature and the executive branch to do the best we can to resolve a growing problem," Steve Canterbury said of the Sams v. Kirby Compliance Commission.
The Sams v. Kirby case involved a state inmate whom the court ruled was being denied access to Division of Corrections training and rehabilitation programs while being housed in a regional jail because of overcrowding in state prisons. The court told state officials to come up with a solution.
We have been following the chatter in the statewide MSM that insinuates building a new prison is the only thing that can be done to remedy our very serious prison overcrowding issue.
To be sure, if the state only built a new prison, it wouldn't do anything at all to remedy the problem. What WV needs is a comprehensive approach. We need to demand answers to some very serious questions.
First and foremost, why does a state with zero population growth have such an exploding prison population?
Today's Daily Mail is reporting that the West Virginia State Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case determining whether or not a Fayette County judge overstepped his bounds when he ordered the removal of a child the couple had been foster parenting for some time.
Kathyrn Kutil and Cheryl Hess argue that Fayette Circuit Judge Paul Blake exceeded his authority and violated their constitutional rights by ordering that the 11-month-old be immediately transitioned into a "traditional" home. They say the judge has effectively excluded them as potential adoptive parents of the child simply because of their sexual orientation. The couple also contend that the state Department of Health and Human Resources - while initially supporting their adoption of the infant - changed course in a later hearing and advocated that the child be removed because there was one too many children already living in the couple's Oak Hill home.
The girl was born Dec. 8, 2007 in Charleston to a drug abusing mother, according to court records. The baby had cocaine, opiates and benzodiazepines in her system and underwent withdrawals from the drugs after birth. The father of the girl was unknown and DHHR could not find any blood relatives to take her in, so the agency placed the girl with Kutil and Hess on Christmas Eve, the day she was released from the hospital. The couple is approved by the DHHR as foster and adoptive parents, the petition says. Kutil recently adopted a 12-year-old girl whom she'd been fostering for over two years.
Fair warning: This is not the first time I will be talking about this. I hope it leads to a broader conversation here and across the state as to where we need to be putting our resources and where we should not.
The wrangling has begun as to which programs and initiatives will be getting the hatchet under what looks to be tightening budgets all across the state. Officials from the Municipal and County levels have both sent up trial balloons as to what they feel would not be the best investment of taxpayer dollars.
And the losers are....? Public libraries, field trips for public school students, and water projects are amongst the initiatives looking to go the way of the dodo if Kanawha County leaders go unchallenged.
If the government wants to talk about money, then the overwhelming cost of the surveillance state (coupled with the fact that none of those unconstitutional policies even work) should be a major part of the conversation.
Today, the editorial staff of the Charleston Daily Mail posed some very pertinent questions for the four members of Kanawha County's Board of Ed. who voted to pursue an expensive and unconstitutional drug testing policy of virtually all public school employees.
In doing so, the conservative voice of center-right Kanawha County cast a shadow of doubt over whether or not this policy has the support some maintain it does.
For reasons the board has not really detailed for the public, four of the five board members recently agreed to random drug testing of teachers beginning Jan. 1.
The American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia has indicated it will seek an injunction to stop the program before it begins.
That should give board members pause. They are undertaking an expensive program that carries with it the likelihood of expensive litigation.
Is this really necessary?
No doubt board members do get calls from concerned parents about drug use in schools. But how bad is the problem?
How many times last year did the school system discipline students for drug use? How many times did the school system act against teachers because of substance abuse?
Given that the Daily Mail is the conservative side of the Charleston Newspaper duo, this editorial offers an interesting bit of political speculation.
Despite their parting shot at teachers in the last few sentences, the editorial board of the the Daily Mail hits legitmate points regarding the tremendous cost associated with random and suspicionless drug testing. Additionally, the piece takes issue with the supposed need by pointing out there is no empirical evidence of mass drug related staff firings.
One is left with the impression that Kanawha County conservatives do not believe this is a battle worth fighting, or, at the very minimum, the way to improve the overall drug problem in Kanawha County.
Despite the absolute assurance of a lawsuit where experts including West Virginia's very own Bob Bastress have assured they will lose, the Kanawha County Board of Education will move forward with an unconstitutional policy of random and suspicionless drug testing of all teachers, principals, coaches, and other officials.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Kanawha County school board members will proceed with a plan to randomly drug test teachers and other school employees starting Jan. 1, despite attorneys' warnings that the policy is unconstitutional and would be struck down in court. The American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia immediately announced it will file a lawsuit in Kanawha Circuit Court in an effort to block the policy's implementation. "If you do go forward with this program, there will be a lawsuit and you'll lose," said Bob Bastress, a West Virginia University law professor and former candidate for the state Supreme Court. Bastress specializes in constitutional law and was involved in Twigg v. Hercules Corp., a nearly two decades-old state Supreme Court case that tackled random drug testing in the private sector.
Adam Wolf, an attorney with the National Legal Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it's understood that nuclear power and chemical plant workers are clearly safety-sensitive, a label given to those employees who U.S. courts have found can be randomly drug tested.
There is no gray area with teachers, Wolf said.
"It's flatly unconstitutional, at least from a federal level," he said.
The article points out some telling things. Mainly, the fact that only one of the Board members would even bother to shake hands with Wolf and Bastress tells me that the Board members who voted for this are not interested in good policy as much as headlines.
Well, if it is headlines they want, then headlines they will get. For the record, there were several parties that tried very hard to get the Board to be reasonable. Representatives from labor as well as our own legal director and others with expertise in this particular type of law met privately in an effort to get the Board to see that what they are doing is flatly against the law. Unfortunately, our efforts at professionalism were met with disdain.
From yesterday's Charleston Gazette, a random audit of the West Virginia State Police has found some very troubling problems. First and foremost, a 'sloppiness' in record keeping and evidence preservation has been cited.
The audit found widespread and frequent inadequacies in documenting and safeguarding evidence, including:
Time lags as long as 200 days or more from the time evidence was seized to the time it was logged and stored in the detachment's evidence room.
Failure to secure cash and jewelry in the detachment's safe-deposit box.
Numerous problems with failure to adequately document evidence, including failing to document when evidence was destroyed or released to its owner.
Considering the lawful handling of evidence is crucial to one's Fifth Amendment right to due process, the report brings up some very serious problems.
The extraordinary powers of customs and border agents to invade the privacy of individuals at the U.S. border are spreading inland and creating what amounts to a “Constitution-free Zone” that covers fully two-thirds of the American population, including about 13% of West Virginians living in the state’s Eastern Panhandle and Potomac Highlands regions. At the border, law enforcement agencies such as Customs and Border Patrol have always had more power to invade your privacy and your right to due process. However, what the government has done here is extend those extraordinary powers 100 miles inland from our borders, thus setting the stage for denying Constitutional rights up to two-thirds of Americans, many living right here in West Virginia.
To put this into perspective, imagine driving to the grocery store, being pulled over and told to “show your papers.” Then, upon informing the law enforcement officer making the demand that in America we don’t have to do that sort of thing, you were told that the part of America you are currently in doesn’t really qualify for those unalienable rights. It is currently under the designation “Constitution Free!”
“In the United States, citizens are not supposed to need an internal passport,” said Barry Steinhardt Director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project. “This is our country and we are free to go where we please, without being stopped and interrogated by the authorities, as long as we are not behaving illegally or in a way that is clearly suspicious.”
Clearly this is an issue to take very seriously. Much in the same way this administration redefined the word ‘torture’ to systematically meet their diabolical ends, so have they redefined the word ‘border’ to include all physical territory 100 miles inland. If it seems like this ludicrous policy is an end run around 4th and 5th Amendment protections—well, that’s because it is.
This year, the state is expected to spend nearly $156 million to house, feed and provide health care to about 6,000 inmates in work release centers, regional jails and correctional centers across the state. The system is already over capacity as about 1,000 additional state inmates are being housed in one of 10 regional jails.
However, amongst the conversation, West Virginians need to talk about more than just building new prisons. We need to start having an honest conversation about how much money we are spending locking up non-violent drug offenders in this state. I am willing to bet that if West Virginia had a more sensible approach to dealing with non-violent drug offenders, then we probably wouldn't have near the issues with overcrowding and cost that we have now.
There is an article in this morning's Charleston
Gazette about the West Virginia Southern Baptists calling for a ban on gay marriage.
One again, in this land of liberty, I find myself wondering how one group feels it has the authority to dictate its own version of morality to the rest of us.
Terry Harper is Executive Director of this bunch. Here is his email address if you'd like to tell him what you think!
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