Lucas County Board of Elections discarded 921 absentee ballots because voters failed to fold the ballots inside an envelope too small for the ballot.

These voters were needlessly disenfranchised because they sealed the ballots and privacy envelopes separately inside a larger prepaid, preaddressed mailing envelope and sent the whole package back to the elections board.

Adding to the confusion, large, block-letter instructions on the outside of the mailing envelope said: “ABSENTEE VOTER BALLOTS PLEASE DO NOT BEND,” leading voters to the entirely reasonable conclusion that they were not supposed to fold the ballots to fit into the privacy envelope.

[…]

What makes the error particularly frustrating is that it did not need to happen. Republican activist Jon Stainbrook warned then-Elections Director Jill Kelly about the problem but, inexplicably, no action was taken.

[…]

Simply put, discarding the 921 votes appears to have been unnecessary. In Wood County, in instances such as this, an elections official calls voters to verify that they intended to put the ballot in the privacy envelope. No harm, no foul. Their votes are counted.

Officials in Lucas County did turn to Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner for a ruling. Unfortunately, Ms. Brunner showed less concern for discarded votes than she has for creating a voting paper trail. She decided - too narrowly, we believe - that their votes could not be counted. However, circumstances listed in state law that can disqualify a ballot do not include failure to seal the ballot in the privacy envelope.

[…]

Apologies have been offered and fixes are in the works. But fixes won’t turn back the clock to count those 921 ballots, some of which could have had an impact in close primary races.

University of Toledo human resource administrator fired for voicing unpopular opinions in a pubic forum.

Crystal Dixon’s column appeared April 18 on the Toledo Free Press’ online edition. It was written in opposition to a column written by Editor-in-Chief Michael Miller that said Ohio lags in gay rights.

She was placed on paid administrative leave the same day.

[…]

Ms. Dixon cited her 25-year career in human resources in which she has hired and recommended the hiring of both homosexual and heterosexual people based on their qualifications.

[…]

Chris Link, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, said the focus should be on Ms. Dixon’s job performance, and not what she said with her First Amendment right to speech.

“It would seem perfectly fair and logical for the university to say if this is what you believe, we have to look at your job performance,” she said, later adding, “look at their actions, not their words. People should be punished for their actions.”

Ms. Dixon’s attorney Tom Sobecki, who is working with the Thomas Moore Law Center in Ann Arbor on her case, said they are investigating legal action, including the violation of her First Amendment right as well as religious and racial discrimination. Nothing was filed as of yesterday.

Silver Lake and Bath Township should dump First Amendment violating ordinances regarding political signs.

In this intensely political year, two suburban communities are under fire from the American Civil Liberties Union over longstanding regulations of political displays. Silver Lake and Bath Township both require $5 deposits for each yard sign, refundable after Election Day. The ACLU has put them on notice that they are violating the First Amendment.

Neither community has a legal leg to stand on, and should move quickly to dump rules on political expression, ending the likelihood of needless and potentially expensive litigation.

[…]

Many other communities have similar regulations. Court cases at the state and federal levels have made it clear that fees and restrictions on the size, number and times when political signs may be erected run afoul of free speech rights. Even in Silver Lake, when it comes to the Constitution, the overriding value is protecting political expression.

ACLU, EFF and a librarian thwarted the FBI’s demand for private user information, opposing indiscriminate use of national security letters served upon a libraries.

Between 2003 and 2006, the FBI reportedly issued nearly 200,000 national security letters ostensibly as urgent investigative tools to fight terrorism.

[…]

Founder Brewster Kahle, whose nonprofit digital library works in collaboration with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, argued that the government’s request not only was overly broad, but that it also violated free speech rights by prohibiting recipients from talking about it to anyone.

Mr. Kahle, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the national security letter program and the FBI subsequently withdrew the objectionable letter on April 22.

[…]

ACLU lawyer Melissa Goodman, it’s curious that in each of the three court challenges to the national security letter program, the FBI has withdrawn its demands for records. “I think that calls into question how much the FBI needed the information in the first place,” she said.

Or whether the FBI really needs this kind of sweeping and unchecked surveillance power at all.

Judge proclaims that military commissions at Guantanamo run improperly.

Col. Morris Davis once served as the chief prosecutor for the military tribunals established at Guantanamo Bay. Now he is a sharp critic of the system for putting on trial detainees in the war against terrorism, and on Friday, a military judge essentially agreed with his assessment. The judge disqualified a leading Pentagon official from any further role in one of the cases.

[…]

In other words, the judge concluded that Hartmann wanted cases to move forward based on something other than the legal merits.

[…]

The judge sided with Davis in another important way, … Davis has accused Hartmann of favoring the use of evidence obtained through torture. The law creating the tribunals bars such evidence, though it allows evidence derived through coercion. The judge reminded that prosecutors should make such choices - not Pentagon officials overseeing the tribunals.

U.S. House of Representatives is talking about using a national database, that would deny U.S. citizens and immigrants jobs based on erroneous data.

The SAVE Act would dramatically expand the government’s flawed “E-Verify” program — ensuring that millions of Americans will be denied the ability to work. If passed, every employer in the United States will be required to verify the eligibility to work of every current and prospective employee, including U.S. citizens. In order to do this, the SAVE Act would create a massive government database containing extraordinary amounts of personal information, with no privacy protections, about every person in the U.S.

E-Verify is currently used by less than one percent of the nation’s employers. Despite the small number of participating employers, the E-Verify program has been besieged with ongoing technological snafus, database errors and bureaucratic bungling, causing numerous delays and financial losses for both employers and employees. Expanding it nationwide will only multiply and exacerbate these problems, setting up a monstrous system that will put millions of Americans out of jobs. At a time of growing economic uncertainty, the last thing we need is for Congress to pass legislation making it even more difficult for Americans to work.

Invariably, DHS will confuse the files of people with similar names or use outdated or erroneous information, creating a “No Work List” similar to the government’s “No Fly List.” The lessons of the No Fly List have taught us that it is virtually impossible to remove yourself from this kind of list.

The ACLU is requesting a township and village in Summit County change ordinances that makes residents pay a fee to display political signs.

Silver Lake and Bath Township require $5 deposit fees for each sign residents want to display.

”It’s a violation of the First Amendment,” said attorney Jeff Gamso, legal director of the ACLU of Ohio, which is based in Cleveland. ”You can’t charge people to put up a sign in their own yard for the right to speak on their own property.”

[…]

Gamso said in 2000 the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that time limits can’t be put on political signs. ”The law is clear,” he said.

[…]

According to the ACLU, federal and state courts have routinely held that municipalities may not impose a fee for displaying political signs and may not restrict the size, number and time frame when signs are erected.

[…]

In Barberton, for example, there is a $25 bond requirement. Building Commissioner Jim Bauschlinger said this money is refunded when requested and the signs are removed.

[…]

In Fairlawn, there is a $25 refundable permit fee that also doesn’t limit the number of signs. There is a time
limit: The signs can go up 65 days prior to an election and must be removed three days after the election.

[…]

Bath Township and Silver Lake officials have a couple of weeks to respond to the ACLU complaint.

”Not everything leads to litigation,” Gamso said. ”Some communities re-examine the issues we point out and make changes.”

Secretary of State Brunner second-guessing voting machine testing systems.

Based on concerns expressed by Gov. Ted Strickland and others, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is re-examining a proposal to enable Ohio to test and approve new voting systems that have not been federally certified.

[…]

The state Board of Voting Machine Examiners voted 2-1 last week to pursue a plan to change an Ohio rule requiring that any voting device approved for use in the state also must have federal certification.

[…]

[Brunner’s] plan would require an executive order from Strickland to change the rule and waive the need for federal certification. The governor said yesterday that although Brunner has assured him that any state standards and testing would exceed the federal ones, he’s worried about public perception.

“I think if I were to take an action that may imply that we were in some way weakening the certification requirements, that that could be problematic,”Strickland said.

Critics of the plan also doubt the state’s ability to develop adequate standards for accuracy and security so quickly, and say it would be risky to rush new equipment into use, especially in Ohio in a presidential election year.

ACLU scholarship winner at Shaw High School looking for social change.

Jonathan Lykes is a poet, activist, caregiver, scholar, singer and self-described “shifter and changer of things.”

What’s next? The lean, 17-year-old Shaw High School student quietly stares into the possible future for a moment, then grins and says, “I’d like to make a difference.”

He says it might be as an attorney. Jonathan recently learned he’s getting a full ride — including a $5,000 American Civil Liberties Union Student Youth Activist Award scholarship — when he starts at the University of Chicago in the fall to study history and political science.

[…]

He traded the Atlanta suburbs for an urban environment of violence and drugs. “I don’t fear it,” he says, then adds, smiling, “I’ve gotten a lot of good poems out of it.”

His easygoing nature is balanced by the dedication of a youth who shuns smoking, drinking and even dating — at least until college — in pursuit of a goal.

The price is pressure. “You can’t do anything wrong because you’re Jonathan Lykes,” he says. “Sometimes you just want to be a teen,” says the young man who addressed state legislators last year regarding African-American males and graduation rates.

In a prominent Ohio death penalty case, when assistant county prosecutor asked to defend statements, he tries to accuse judge of foul play.

“The court is now making arguments for the plaintiff and that is not the court’s role,” said assistant county prosecutor Tony Cillo, complaining that he could not prepare for arguments that the ACLU had not raised.

“You’re supposed to know all of [the arguments],” Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge said.

[…]

Burge raised the issue of whether the words “quickly and painlessly cause death” in the statue should be applied not only to the dosage of the lethal injection drugs, but to how they are administered.

[…]

“Things can go wrong, and when things go wrong there is at least the possibility that lethal injection will not be free of extraordinary pain,”Gamso said.

[…]

Burge’s decision could determine the fate of the state’s process for executing condemned inmates, although his ruling will likely be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

On April 17, nine Bucyrus Middle School students were strip-searched illegally.

“What they did was dead wrong and in violation of Ohio law,” said Chris Link, Executive Director of the ACLU of Ohio.

The ACLU sent a letter to Bucyrus City Schools Superintendent Dr. Todd Nichols late on Monday evening.

[…]

“According to reports from the media and others, the students were detained and subjected to body searches after some of the students were seen smoking on or near school grounds. Rather than lesser search techniques, such as sniffing the students’ breath, having them turn out their pockets or patting them down, the school personnel reportedly ordered the students to life their shirts and pull their pants down revealing their underwear, at which point the school personnel ran their fingers inside the waistband of the students’ underwear,” reads part of the letter written by ACLU Legal Director Jeffrey M. Gamso.

[…]

“That portion of the Revised Code goes on to prohibit strip searches except in the narrowest of circumstances. It further says that performing an unauthorized strip search is a first-degree misdemeanor and the person illegally searched may sue for damages,” Gamso says in the letter.

The searches were conducted on the students by Bucyrus Middle School Principal Todd Roll and Assistant Principal Mark Burke.

The ACLU does not think the searches were reasonable in proportion to the circumstances.

“Smoking cigarettes may be prohibited by school policy, but it does not justify the most extreme search-stripping a child-that should never be used except for perhaps, life-threatening emergencies,” Gamso writes in his letter.

[…]

“There was a similar situation in southern Ohio where students were strip searched. The Ohio Department of Education launched their own investigation, which they may do in this case,” Link said.

In that case, the ACLU represented the parents of the students who were stripped and the lawsuit was settled out of court.

“In this case, we will proceed based on what the families involved want to do,” Link said.

Link and her staff requests that parents of the children involved in the search contact them at 216-472-2200.

Ohio should wait for voting system to be certified by federal standards.

Ohio counties would be ill-advised to buy new voting equipment before it’s federally certified. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the first Democrat in that office in 16 years, wants a change in law to allow purchasing equipment not yet certified by federal officials. Gov. Ted Strickland and the General Assembly should resist that.

Brunner says the newest and best types of precinct-based optical scanners have yet to be federally certified.

[…]

A problem for optical-scan systems in three counties doesn’t justify a rush to abandon federal certification of election machines.

[…]

Even if switching the entire state to optical-scan voting were a good idea, rushing to do so would not be wise.

If Brunner were to be successful in pushing this latest proposal through, and if the new machines failed to work as advertised in the November election, she would rue the day she abandoned federal certification.

The ACLU of Ohio, Latino Affairs Commission, and SEIU challenge the English-only public meetings and official records, proposed in Ohio HB 477. (link requires login)

Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and the state’s Latino Affairs Commission urged lawmakers to quash legislation that would require public agencies to conduct business and keep records in English. The bill, they said, is unnecessary, threatens civil and human rights of non-English-speaking citizens and would deter residents from learning other languages.

“The denial of services to American citizens with limited English proficiency is already happening,” said Ezra C. Escudero, director of the Ohio Latino Affairs Commission, which advises the governor and lawmakers on issues facing Hispanic residents.

[…]

“The threat of costly litigation, denial of rights and services and the threat of limiting economic opportunities for our state are all quantifiable,” Escudero said. “The benefit of HB 477 is not quantifiable because it simply does not exist.”

[…]

Carrie Davis, staff attorney for the ACLU of Ohio, said the legislation was “ill-conceived, will lead to costly litigation and will hurt Ohio’s ability to attract innovative companies and good jobs … English is not under attack.”

Voter ID requirements permitted by a majority vote of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In doing so, the majority gives little weight to the actual evidence

[…]

The far better policy course would be to err on the side of keeping elections as open and accessible as possible. That would reverse the burden of proof, placing the onus on those who favor voter ID to first produce evidence of systematic fraud. What’s been uncovered so far in investigations is voter confusion. An analysis conducted by the New York Times found that an aggressive five-year effort by the U.S. Department of Justice to root out voter fraud produced just five convictions.

[…]

The more legitimate fear is that the poor, elderly and disabled will be intimidated by voter identification requirements, even those that don’t require a government-issued photo ID. Anything that creates an additional obstacle before voting should be undertaken - if convincing evidence shows current protections aren’t working. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court failed to apply such a standard. It opted unwisely for narrowing, if slightly, the door to vote.

Voting by mail makes fraud more likely, but some election officials would rather have it this way.

Trumbull County officials, therefore, should immediately reject Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s notion that counties should have the option of conducting elections solely through mail-in ballots. She wants state legislators to consider action that would allow counties to seek voter approval of such a mechanism. Under the plan, if a county’s voters approve, ballots would be submitted only by mail - there would be no polling places open on election day.

[…]

Elections officials admit there is an increased chance of fraud when ballots are simply filled out, then dropped in the mail. But they say that no system of voting is entirely secure against fraud.

[…]

Making it easier for voters to participate in the election process is not a good idea if it also makes it easier for dishonest politicians to commit vote fraud. And Trumbull has certainly seen its share of dishonest politicians and political fraud. Legislators should be extremely wary of Brunner’s proposal. First and foremost, elections in Ohio need to be fair and honest.

House bill to ban spanking in Ohio schools.

With so many effective disciplinary methods at the disposal of educators, there is simply no compelling reason to continue to use corporal punishment. Luckily, there is House Bill 406, a bipartisan bill pending in the Ohio General Assembly, that would prohibit spanking in schools.

Students should feel safe and protected at school, but there is very little reason for them to feel so. Inmates in prison cannot receive corporal punishment, and yet children in schools may. Children are protected from severe corporal punishment from their parents, yet they are not afforded the same rights in schools.

Ohio House passes a bill that would allow judges to help curb drug abuse and effected non-violent crime, from the bench rather than being forced to hand out prison sentences to non-violent offenders.

Locking up all drug users and throwing away the keys eventually was going to cost more than Ohioans would be willing to pay. That day has come for most in the Ohio House of Representatives. The Ohio Senate and Gov. Ted Strickland should follow the responsible lead of the House.

By an 89-6 vote - with four of this region’s six representatives in the majority - the House on April 15 voted to give judges greater flexibility in sentencing nonviolent, low-level criminals. Judges already have that ability with nonviolent drug offenders, The Columbus Dispatch reported, but House Bill 130 would allow them to also send to treatment rather than prison people who committed low-level, nonviolent crimes if their actions were influenced by drugs or alcohol. Judges still would retain the ability to impose prison sentences.

[…]

This bill should become law. Credit Reps. Matt Huffman, Tony Core, Cliff Hite and Jim Zehringer for helping the House pass it.

Ohio’s Public Defender’s Office states 27 people are running out of legal options to prevent their executions because of the U.S. Supreme Court dismissal of a lethal-injection case.

For the first time since Ohio resumed executions in 1999, a woman is among 27 Death Row inmates whose legal options are closing.

[…]

She could become the first woman executed since Betty Butler from Hamilton County on June 11, 1954.

[…]

Public Defender Tim Young said August is the earliest he envisions another execution. The last person executed in the state was Christopher J. Newton on May 24, 2007.

Young said the cases being reviewed are at various stages of the lengthy appeals process. Some are nearing the end of several rounds of legal challenges, while others are not nearly as close.

The public defender estimated that about 17 cases are in the first tier, meaning their appeal process is limited, but not yet over.

The Ohio Attorney General’s office is trying to force enforcement of a law that creates unclear restrictions on birth control.

The law was supposed to take effect in 2004, but it has been tied up in federal court for four years and has never been enforced.

Lawyers for Attorney General Marc Dann asked the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday to overturn a lower court order that found the law was vague and, therefore, unconstitutional.

Planned Parenthood, which sued to block enforcement of the law, contends the law is so confusing and unclear that doctors could face criminal charges for acts they did not know were illegal.

Conservative judges of the U.S. Supreme Court misinterpret law to the disadvantage of discrimination victims.

Lilly Ledbetter worked from 1979 until 1998 at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in Gadsden, Ala., and was paid less than male workers. After finally finding out about it, she sued as a victim of gender discrimination and justice seemed to be done.

[…]

Justice was undone when the company appealed and a federal appeals court overturned the award and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. Ms. Ledbetter, deserving and sympathetic plaintiff, found out why she could not prevail:
She did not have extra-sensory perception, she could not read minds, and she did not have the x-ray vision necessary to pierce closed doors and see that her male colleagues were being paid more than she was.

That’s what it amounts to anyway. The coldly legalistic reason was that the law said she had to file a claim within 180 days of an act of discrimination, which in her case had started many years before with cumulative effect.

[…]

Last July, the House of Representatives passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, HR 2831, which would correct the alleged defect in the law the justices identified. This week, it is likely to be considered by the Senate.

Justice John Paul Stevens makes some sense about the use of Kentucky’s lethal injection procedure, despite generally perplexing SCOTUS decision.

What was - and wasn’t - at stake is best illustrated by an opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens. He said that he has concluded that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional. But he said that if the death penalty is acceptable, then the Kentucky system is acceptable.

He didn’t take the case as a vote on the death penalty itself. That was a good decision. The merits of the death penalty should be addressed through direct questions about its constitutionality, morality and usefulness, not through the back door.

Some people think a back-door effort - challenging each mode of execution, one by one - is respectable because it reveals a central truth: killing somebody forcibly is an ugly process, inevitably. There’s no good way.

[…]

There have, of course, been botched executions in Ohio and elsewhere.

[…]

The case for the death penalty itself is undermined by a lot of factors, some being fairly new: the realization, via DNA technology, that some death row inmates are innocent; the growing use of no-parole sentences, thus somewhat assuaging the public’s concern about killers being let back out on the streets; the growing understanding that most other democracies are functioning without the death penalty and without seeing their crime rates soar; and the fact that the death penalty is being applied inconsistently.

The number of DNA samplings going into a national database is growing quickly. It includes the data of many who are never convicted of a crime.

The federal government has announced that it will expand its current practice of collecting DNA samples from people convicted of federal crimes and begin collecting them from all people arrested in connection with a federal crime along with many immigrants detained by federal authorities.

This practice is expected to add genetic identifiers from about 1 million people a year to the rapidly growing federal law enforcement DNA database, which now has about 5.9 million people in it.

Thirteen states - Ohio is not among them - already collect or are planning to collect DNA samples from everybody arrested, including people never prosecuted, for whom charges are later dropped, and those acquitted. These states routinely forward the data to the national database.

[…]

The preliminary federal rules call for eliminating people never convicted, but only if they petition for expungement. It would be better if expungement were automatic.

[…]

In addition, DNA has information about genetic characteristics, susceptibility to disease and the like. Current FBI rules preclude using samples to study genetic traits, but those rules could be changed or broken. It might be wise to retain only those alleles necessary for identification and destroy the rest, along with the actual sample.

Ohio Supreme Court states that indictments must be worded correctly or else they are ‘defective’

A defective indictment means the defendant has not actually been charged.

[…]

Without an element of the crime, the indictment actually failed to charge a crime at all, the decision said.

The decision further said the judge in the case failed to speak about the mental state of the defendant at the time of the offense while giving instruction to the jury.

Both omissions meant that Colon did not receive a constitutional indictment or a constitutional trial, the opinion said.

[…]

“It’s a terrific decision,” said Jeffrey Gamso, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. “It’s an all-too-rare recognition that Ohio’s requirement of a grand jury indictment is a real and serious issue.”

Mr. Gamso applauded the decision and said he believed it should be retroactive to all defendants currently or previously incarcerated on robbery charges under a defective indictment. He added that what is likely to happen is that the Supreme Court will clarify its decision further.

“I think the right thing to do is that if you were convicted under a defective indictment, then you shouldn’t be convicted at all,” he said. “I don’t think that’s how it will be applied in the long run. Although that’s how it should be, I don’t think it will.”

Mr. Gamso listed the State vs. Foster case as an example of the Supreme Court modifying its decision so that only those cases still active were included.

When considering immigration issues,  misinformation can damage legal immigrants and a community as a whole.

We are a nation of immigrants, a fact too often ignored in the modern debate over undocumented workers and what impact they do, or do not, have on the fabric of our communities.

[…]

When prominent public officials repeatedly show up in the media warning about people coming across the border illegally there is a tendency for the under informed or outright bigoted to assume that every Hispanic in town is probably here illegally. Eduardo Guerrero, who runs a barbershop with a mostly Hispanic clientele in Hamilton, says in the story that many of customers who gather in his shop express fear of being rounded up as suspects every time they venture outside of their homes. He’s not talking about a criminal underground. He’s referring to Hamilton’s Fourth Ward, a working-class Hispanic neighborhood for the past 30 years. Guerrero immigrated legally to the United States from the Dominican Republic years ago. He’s raised his four children in the United States, including one now serving in the Marines. Generating a climate of fear among such citizens is a detriment to the well-being of the entire community.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the execution process in Kentucky shows doubt, as seven different opinions were delivered.

Courts and legislators in Ohio must see that this state [has careful protocols to mitigate excessive pain].

[…]

[Justice John Paul Stevens] agreed that Kentucky’s method of execution passes constitutional muster.

But Stevens also reveals that his opinion of the death penalty has changed. Based on concerns about how the death penalty is applied - as opposed to carried out - Stevens said it’s no longer justifiable. He suggests that capital punishment lives on as a “product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process” by courts or legislators.

A Mount Vernon teacher bid to promote the Bible in his classroom infringes on separation of church and state.

Mount Vernon Middle School science teacher John Freshwater refused to move his Bible from his classroom desk after school officials requested that he do so. At a rally on Public Square on Wednesday, he defended his right to display his personal Bible as a constitutional right. If he’s looking for the American Civil Liberties Union to defend him, he could be disappointed.

[…]

The American Civil Liberties Union doesn’t agree. As a public school employee, the fundamental rights of freedom of speech and religion don’t necessarily convert inside the classroom. The ACLU of Ohio supports the Mount Vernon Board of Education’s request that Freshwater keep his Bible out of sight when children are in the classroom.

“This really should have an easy resolution,” said Christine Link, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. “The courts have recognized that our teachers have a special position and they can’t use their post to promote [a specific religion].”

Link said that as a citizen, the ACLU would defend a teacher’s right to his or her beliefs outside of the classroom. However, inside the school it becomes a different scenario altogether.

“The relationship [between teacher and student] is special,” Link said. “The teacher is a hyper-authority figure and they can’t promote religious beliefs or even political views.”

As a teacher in a public school system, Link suggests that Freshwater put his Bible away.

“If it’s in a desk, locker or in the teacher’s lounge, it would be fine,” Link said. “It is not permissible [to display his Bible] at work. You have to pay the piper when you are at work and follow the rules of your employer. [As a] public employee, [a teacher] has less rights to proselytize their religion.”

Link went on to repeat a position that has been brought up in many conversations throughout the county in regard to the subject.

“If it is all OK with the Bible, would it be OK if the Quran was on his desk?” she asked.

When asked if the school board should proceed with a deadline for Freshwater to remove his Bible, Link said the ACLU would not get involved, but cautioned that if the situation is not quickly resolved, it could end up being “traumatic and expensive.”

The board’s request to have Freshwater remove his Bible from students’ view was correct, according to Link.

“The school system is doing exactly the right thing,” she said. “It is actually acting in a way that is protecting them from a lawsuit from the ACLU; and if not from us, from some other group. They are acting in a way that is responsible. They are on the right path.”

In a conversation with Board President Ian Watson on Friday, Watson told the News that the board was only asking that Freshwater put his Bible inside his desk when students are in his classroom. Watson said the situation was “not a Bible thing, but an employee thing.”

[…]

She said the school board does not oppose religion, but that it is “protecting the establishment of religion in schools,” as deemed by the U.S. Constitution.

The Cincinnati Enquirer takes another look at the changes to the region due to immigration.

During the University of Cincinnati’s College of Law forum, U.S. Immigration Policy in a Climate of Fear, panelists spoke about the value of immigrants.

On July 13, 2006 Hazelton, Pa. passed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance blaming undocumented immigrants for budget concerns, a rise in demand for health care, failing schools and a rise in crime, according to Vic Walczak, co-lead counsel in Lozano v. Hazleton and legal director of Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union.

[…]

“In a six year period 8,500 crimes were committed in Hazelton, which includes everything from murder to jaywalking; 21 of these crimes were committed by undocumented immigrants,” Walczak said.

[…]

“Of 428 violent crimes, four were committed by undocumented immigrants,” Walczak said.

[…]

The DREAM Act would give the immigrants a conditional green card while they complete a two-year stint in college or with the U.S. military. After the minimum two-year requirement, the conditions may be lifted giving the illegal immigrants a regular green card.

Margaret Stock, a member of the American Immigration Attorney’s Association, argued that with the DREAM Act, national security would go up.

“There is a large pool of able bodies,” Stock said. “Immigrants tend to do better in the military than natural-born Americans; immigrants stay longer and they provide cultural diversity.”

One of the possible locations for absentee voting in Summit County is a car dealership.

Cast your ballot and test-drive a car.

That could be an option for Summit County voters in the November presidential election.

[…]

Board members discussed that and several other possible locations Wednesday as part of an ongoing attempt to address the issue of a deluge of early voters.

A change in state law permits anyone - for any reason - to vote absentee, rather than going to the polls on Election Day.

[…]

About 70,000 [Summit County] residents are expected to vote absentee in the Nov. 4 general election.

[…]

Other large urban counties also had problems in the primary and are wary about how to handle a large turnout this fall. Montgomery, Franklin and Stark counties all are examining options.

[…]

Don Varian, chairman of the Summit County Board of Elections], thinks the challenge of addressing absentee voters is going to get ”worse each year.”

[…]

The state legislature is considering a bill that would permit elections boards to do what Summit is considering. James Hardy, a regional liaison for Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, who is proposing the legislation, advised the board to continue with its plans in anticipation of the legislature acting.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided to uphold Kentucky’s lethal injection process.  This may place several Ohioans on death row closer to execution.

“[The decision] has a huge impact,” Ohio Public Defender Timothy Young told the Dayton Daily News. “The ultimate reality is, the Supreme Court case clears the way for 20 to 22 inmates on Ohio’s death row to have execution dates set.” These are inmates who have exhausted their appeals and, in some cases, have had clemency hearings.

[…]

Ohio inmates could have a better chance with the court, however, because Ohio’s lethal injection system has had specific problems, Young and other attorneys said.

“In Ohio, we have different facts (than in the Kentucky case). We’ve had two botched executions, of Joe Clark and Chris Newton,” said Carrie Davis, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio in Cleveland.

“In Clark’s case, it took an hour and a half and in the middle of it he sat up on the gurney and said, ‘It’s not working.’ With Chris Newton, it took two hours and they had to stop and take a bathroom break in the middle of it.”

Attorneys for the governor’s office, the state attorney general’s office and the state prison system are reviewing the Kentucky decision, said prisons spokeswoman Andrea Carson. There are 184 inmates on Ohio’s death row.

Common Pleas Judge James Burge continues hearings on Ohio’s flawed lethal injection process.

Burge said … he will be looking at not only the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment but also a similar ban in the state constitution and an Ohio law that requires that executions be quick and painless.

[…]

Critics contend the first drug administered to condemned inmates, a sedative, could wear off and leave the prisoner suffering horribly as the second drug paralyzes him and the third drug stops his heart.

[…]

Jeff Gamso, the legal director of Ohio’s American Civil Liberties Union and an attorney for both Rivera and McCloud, said he was disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision.

“It’s a sad day for American decency,” he said.

[…]

Gamso said that while the lethal injection protocols in Ohio and Kentucky are similar, they aren’t exactly the same, and Ohio, which has executed more than 20 prisoners, may be doing it wrong. Kentucky has executed only one prisoner using lethal injection, he said.

[…]

But the Supreme Court decision doesn’t mean that Ohio will resume executions, because a federal judge has effectively placed a moratorium on executions in the state while a federal lawsuit by Ohio death row inmates challenging lethal injection works its way through the legal system, Gamso said.

[…]

Kreig Brusnahan, one of Rivera’s attorneys, said the debate on lethal injection is far from over.

“There’s too much of a risk involved in this particular method of lethal injection to say that it’s not cruel and unusual,” he said.

Corporal punishment in schools crosses a moral line that should be reserved for parents.

Of Ohio school districts, at least 15 continue to paddle students, or at least keep the policy on the books.

[…]

As a state, Ohio doesn’t ban corporal punishment completely from its schools. It should. Instead, it allows the local districts to make the call.

It’s clear some of the state’s districts still don’t get it. It’s not enough to get a parent’s OK or to report the incidents to the state.

[…]

Suspensions, detention and even expulsions certainly are options. But many schools offer peer mediation programs and other means of working through a student’s problems, such as character education programs, student recognition programs and attending school on Saturday.

[…]

The state has given local school districts the option of continuing to spank. We urge the districts to pass. Work with students, parents, teachers and other behavioral experts to set up alternatives. Talk to other school districts that have found alternatives that work. Show students that you care enough about them, and respect them enough, to seek other more effective means of discipline.

The Secretary of State proposes more changes to Ohio’s voting process.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner wants every Ohio county to have the option of asking voters whether they want to conduct elections entirely by mail.

The legislature first would have to give counties the authority to put a vote-by-mail issue on the ballot, and Brunner said she doesn’t expect overwhelming support.

House Speaker Jon Husted said yesterday that although he hasn’t seen the details, he’s concerned about the ramifications of some counties but not others voting by mail.

[…]

The Ohio Association of Election Officials supports handling special elections by mail but has concerns about using mail exclusively for other elections and wants to study the idea, President Shannon Leininger said.

The County Commissioners’ Association of Ohio is discussing the proposal with its members and has yet to take a formal position.

[…]

She also wants to keep county elections officials from taking voting machines home with them on the eve of an election. Some officials do that so they can take them directly to the polls the next morning, but that raises security concerns, she said.

[…]

Husted, R-Kettering, said any changes that Brunner wants would have to be submitted “very, very quickly.”

The Bush Administration continues to endorse torture.

In the wake of the latest reports that important figures within the Bush administration signed off on White House legal counselor John Yoo’s memo advocating the use of torture, the administration has simply shrugged, as if to say, so what?

[…]

These people got away with a crime. However, no punishment can fit the real damage this administration has inflicted to the moral credibility of the United States.

[…]

[According to the Geneva Conventions,] “Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” The Yoo legal memo, essentially, gets around this by saying that enemy combatants are no prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. As are most notions this administration expresses, this is false. Terrorists associated with al-Qaida meet the criteria of being members of an organized resistance group.

The problem with the American torture regime has less to do with the quantity of instances and more to do with legal revisionism. With one memo and with all hands on deck, the Bush administration compromised the international legal framework that took years to build. The fact that torture has done absolutely nothing to make the U.S. any safer demonstrates the administration’s overconfidence in executive power. Overconfidence will be Bush’s legacy. Rather than maintain any shred of faith in our constitutional principles, he has asserted his office’s authority.

Miami University journalism program planted a tree to honor free speech and discussed breaches to freedom of the press.

“The Liberty Tree Initiative: Celebrating the First Amendment,” explored modern media’s challenges through exhibits, speakers and the tree planting.

Miami University’s journalism program launched the national effort to increase support for a free press and shed light on media struggles. Officials anticipate other campuses continuing the effort, planting trees as a symbol of First Amendment freedoms.

Ken Paulson, editor of USA Today, discussed journalists’ struggle to maintain a free press during what he calls “a very ugly time.” Using comic strips, movie clips and a quick wit, he encouraged hundreds of students to realize that the First Amendment is “the heart of the nation.”

“Throughout the years, what’s most astonishing is how incredible those 45 words have been, and boy have we taken them for granted,” Paulson said.

Doctor says Ohio’s lethal injection procedure isn’t even appropriate for dogs or cats.

Dr. Mark Heath’s testimony on behalf of two murder defendants came in a Lorain County hearing on the constitutionality of state’s method for putting prisoners to death.

Heath, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Columbia University, says it’s possible to perform lethal injection of prisoners in a humane manner, but that Ohio’s method falls below the standard for euthanizing household pets.

Ohio requires its executions to be carried out ”in a professional, humane, sensitive and dignified manner.” The two men facing murder charges say the state’s lethal injection procedure doesn’t give the quick and painless deaths required by state law.

[…]

Ohio has executed 26 inmates since it resumed putting prisoners to death in 1999.

Joseph E. Thomas Jr., a suburban Detroit police chief and a consultant hired by the city of Lima to bring community and police into dialogue, shares ideas about what needs to be improved.

Everyone wants to see a return to community-oriented policing. People like knowing their neighborhood officer, but the Lima Police Department dropped the program when federal funding ran out. The city should make sure it finds a way to bring back a version of community-oriented policing. Christine Link, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, pointed out to us in February that, despite the loss of community-oriented policing, the city still has a SWAT team. In other words, the city has money for what officials deem a priority. It might be time to rethink the city’s priorities.

Perhaps not surprising but still disappointing is that Allen County Sheriff Dan Beck has yet to take Thomas up on his invitation to attend one of the roundtable sessions.

[…]

The city relies on an outdated system of testing for hiring, Thomas said.
With so much focus now on the racial makeup of the city’s safety services, the hiring process already is under review. That is a needed development.

Regarding the sharing of information, Thomas said he believes in getting information out to people as early as possible. That doesn’t mean at the conclusion of an investigation and prosecution, but rather at the beginning of the process.

Franklin County’s Board of Elections is trying to resolve disputed votes on optical scan ballots.

The four board members inspected and determined what voters intended to mark on 700 ballots cast in the March 4 primary. The process dragged on more than five hours.

The problem ballots had been set aside and left uncounted because of stray marks, water stains or other problems.

[…]

Among about 325,000 ballots cast in the primary, about 100,000 were paper ballots, so the failure rate was 0.7 percent.

Under the directive of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the four board members must vote on what they discern was the voters’ intent.

[…]

Yesterday’s tedious exercise shows one downside to paper ballots.

Damschroder presented each disputed ballot, told the board the problem and explained the staff’s recommendation. The ballot was passed among the board members — two Republicans and two Democrats — who then voted.

The secretary of state’s office allowed the board to expedite the process by grouping ballots with the same problem. For example, the board voted once on all disputed ballots that appeared to favor John O’Grady over Cindy Lazarus in the Democratic primary for county commissioner.

Ohio’s laws should reflect legal equity for all.

[Lawmakers] blithely ignore the patchwork quilt of statutes in Ohio that outlaw discrimination against a person because of sexual orientation or gender identity.

[…]

[The needed protection against injustice] is what should be considered as lawmakers debate a pair of bills introduced a few weeks ago that would make it illegal to discriminate against a person in employment, housing or public accommodations because he or she is gay or transsexual.

[…]

The days of benign disregard should end.

[…]

We talk about turning Ohio into that progressive, high-tech state we envision as prosperous. Yet we deny an entire class of citizens the right to job security.

Though it may be considered a part of a continuing incremental invasion of privacy, Google’s new “street view” of Cleveland can be considered part of the inevitability of new technologies, and it is not unconstitutional.

Google’s watching The Plain Dealer — and most of the rest of Cleveland. Google Maps, with a new feature that lets you tour much of greater Cleveland without leaving your office chair, might better be described as “ogle” maps.

[…]

[Michael DeAloia, Cleveland’s former “tech czar” and now director of business development for Fit Technologies,] said it’s good news that Cleveland was included so quickly by Google. It is the first Ohio city to be in the database.

[…]

This month, after detailed images of Fort Sam Houston in Texas were posted, Google complied with a request by the Pentagon to remove the images. The government has prohibited any further photographing of military bases because such detail can pose a security threat.

[…]

“It’s quite stunning actually,” said its legal director, Jeff Gamso. “They let you not have to leave home. There is nothing you can see there you can’t see if you get up and get out of your chair and go to the spot and look. If you don’t want somebody looking inside your house, close the curtains.”