A new chart outlines several of the proposed changes to the USA Patriot Act set to be renewed by the end of 2009.

Confused by all the proposed changes to the Patriot Act ricocheting through the Capitol? The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) has put together a handy chart comparing the current law with the various amendments in the House and Senate.

The chart compares proposed amendments (.pdf) to National Security Letters (NSLs) and the so-called “lone wolf” provisions of the Patriot Act. The proposals have only been passed by the judiciary committees, and face further amendments before they hit the full House and Senate for votes.

According to Gregory Nojeim, CDT’s director of project on freedom, security and technology, although neither of the current proposals goes far enough in fixing all of the problems that civil libertarians find in the Patriot Act, they do show improvements.

A report on what some Ohio schools are doing to ensure their holiday programs do not unfairly endorse one religion over others.

As superintendent of the Jefferson Local School District in Madison County, William Mullett doesn’t worry too much about being politically correct at Christmastime.

The district has allowed Christmas trees as school decorations and Christmas carols at holiday concerts.

Teachers don’t push Christianity or partake in religious observances in the classroom, but secular celebrations of the season don’t raise an eyebrow.

That’s probably because the district is homogenous and almost exclusively Christian, Mullett acknowledged.

“It’s really never been a big issue here,” he said.

That’s in contrast to his seven years in the Sylvania City Schools, near Toledo. The district had a large Jewish population, and the rules on winter holidays were precise. For example, Christmas trees were OK on a staff member’s desk but not in a hallway or on a classroom floor.

Unfortunately, officials at Stow-Munroe Falls High School have refused to back down on their censorship of the student paper.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio said lawyers for the Stow-Munroe Falls High School refuse to back down on their right to control the newspaper, which has not been published since September in protest by students.

The ACLU sent a letter threatening to sue the district if officials continue to demand pre-publication review of the newspaper, The Stohion.

The ACLU contends that officials violated the First Amendment rights of staffers at The Stohion by spiking a memorial article and photo about a classmate who committed suicide, and by demanding full editorial control over future editions.

The law firm of Ulmer and Berne sent a letter to the ACLU stating that the school has the right to censor the newspaper.

“We disagree, of course,” said ACLU staff counsel Carrie Davis. “We will now consider our next move and whether that will be court action.”

More information about the ACLU’s recent stand to support a high school student who refused to take part in the Pledge of Allegiance and was punished by school officials.

Hubbard High School senior Roxanne Westover said although she was afraid school officials might expel her for refusing to recite the the Pledge of Allegiance, she never considered going back on her decision to remain seated.

Westover, 17, was reprimanded by the school for refusing to stand each morning during the reciting of the pledge. She said at least five times over a two-week period in late October and early November she was written up and and sent to the principal’s office because she refused to stand and say the pledge during the daily recitation.

An atheist, Westover said she chose not to stand during the pledge because it goes against her beliefs. She said she takes issue with the phrases “under God” because of her beliefs and with “for liberty and justice for all” because she believes there are many Americans who don’t have the same rights as others.

Now the American Civil Liberties Union has taken up her cause. Earlier this week the The ACLU sent a letter requesting the school to stop requiring students to say the pledge.

Carrie Davis, an attorney with the ACLU said Westover had contacted the organization and said she had been refusing to say the pledge with her class. Davis said she was informed this had happened several times, and the teacher would write the student up and send her to the principal’s office, where she was lectured by an assistant principal.

The Dispatch discusses why it’s important the 9/11 detainees are being tried in a criminal court in New York.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that five Guantanamo Bay detainees who are charged with plotting the 9/11 terrorism attacks will have their day in court in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan, blocks from where 2,751 people perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Critics, from everyday people to Republican lawmakers, have come up with all sorts of reasons not to allow this civilian trial to be conducted in New York City: It will pose too much of a safety risk, both for the site and for the judge and jurors. It will give terrorist boss Khalid Sheik Mohammed a platform to spew his anti-American rhetoric. The trial will turn into an indictment of the Bush administration and its terror-fighting tactics.

And the worst claim of all: There’s no way that these men will get a fair trial in New York. One group says they’re sure to be convicted, no matter how poor the case against them, while another group claims Mohammed and his cohorts are certain to go free on some legal technicality.

Have Americans really become so craven after 9/11? Has their distrust in the legal system become insurmountable?

The Ohio House passed an elections reform package that could make several improvements to the state’s election system. The bill still needs approval from the Senate and signed by the Governor.

The Ohio House passed a bill today over Republican objections to make sweeping changes to how elections are run in Ohio, including expanding the number of sites a county can offer for early-absentee voting.

House Bill 260 passed the Democrat-controlled House 53-45 and now moves to the GOP-led Senate, where its future is uncertain. The Senate has been considering its own elections bill, Senate Bill 8.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat who supports the House bill and convened two summits to consider changes after the 2008 election, observed the vote personally in the House gallery.

The ACLU recently stepped forward to help a young woman who was punished by her school for refusing to take part in the Pledge of Allegiance.

The American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio sent Hubbard school officials a letter Tuesday requiring the district to cease punishing students who refuse to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

A female student at Hubbard High School was reprimanded for her refusal to recite or stand during the pledge.

Some students nationwide are refusing to recite the pledge because of personal beliefs.

ACLU of Ohio Executive Director weighs in on the recent murders in Cleveland and how Community Problem Oriented Policing may have helped stop the murders faster.

In the aftermath of the Imperial Avenue murders, a full investigation into the events and response from law enforcement is necessary. However, these gruesome events are not an isolated incident and may be indicative of other problems.

The overwhelming theme emerging from much of the news coverage is that there was a staggering breakdown in communication — whether that was between the community and police, different law enforcement agencies, or amongst neighbors. A substantial part of this collapse may have been ushered in by recent cutbacks in community policing practices that seek to create partnerships between law enforcement and neighborhoods.

Community policing focuses on how police and residents can partner to prevent crime in their neighborhoods by working together. In this particular case, if there was a police officer in the neighborhood meeting with residents on a regular basis, there may have been a more coordinated response to reports of odd smells, women spotted at the Anthony Sowell residence and other irregularities.

As news reports continue to surface telling of people who tried to sound the alarm but were either not heard, had no one to follow up on their concerns, or did not know where to report their fears, we can see the value of community policing principles. We must prioritize initiatives that strengthen police-community relationships in order to prevent tragedies like this from ever occurring again.

Christine Link, Cleveland

Link is executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

The ABJ once again gets it right in its assessment of the state of Ohio’s death penalty system.

After the failed execution of Romell Broom in September, state officials launched a review of the way Ohio conducts the lethal injection of those prisoners sentenced to death. On Friday, they unveiled the results: The state will divert from the practice of other states, choosing now to inject a single drug rather than a three-drug combination.

That combination included a drug to paralyze the inmate’s muscles and another to stop the heart. The trouble in the Broom case involved the failure to find an accessible vein for the IV line. The new method doesn’t remove the need to use a vein. It does limit the practice to one attempt, a massive amount of an anesthetic. If problems surface, the execution team could deploy a backup procedure, injecting a fatal dose of two chemicals into the inmate’s muscles.

A single injection is the preferred approach in animal euthanasia, and many experts have argued persuasively that it serves as a more humane way to conduct executions. Thus, the change represents a step forward for Ohio. The invitation now is there for other states to follow, even though the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the three-drug procedure.

Judge James Burge and ACLU Cooperating Attorney Jeff Gamso react to Ohio’s announcement that they will alter the state’s execution procedures. Burge previously ruled that Ohio’s procedures violated state law.

Death row inmates will have no legal grounds to argue about Ohio’s new lethal injection procedure, said the judge who ruled the state’s three-drug cocktail was unconstitutional.

Yesterday, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections Director Terry Collins said the state will stop using a three-drug cocktail to execute the state’s worst offenders. Instead, a single intravenous drug will be used to execute inmates, or a two-drug injection into the muscle if workers cannot maintain an IV in the prisoner.

The new state execution protocol is “exactly what I had thought wouldbe constitutional,” Lorain County Common Pleas Court Judge James M. Burge said.

“I suppose that’s some affirmation,” he said yesterday.

The state announcement came as a surprise, Burge said.

“I am surprised because the resistance to my suggestion was so strong,” Burge said.

The ACLU steps in to defend the rights of student journalists at Stow-Munroe Falls High School, near Akron.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio is threatening legal action if Stow-Munroe Falls High School officials don’t stop what it calls censorship of the student newspaper.

The ACLU contends that officials violated the First Amendment rights of staffers at The Stohion by spiking a memorial article about a classmate who committed suicide and by demanding full editorial control over future editions.

A letter from the ACLU gives the district until Tuesday to respond.

Repeated calls to the district superintendent were not returned. The principal of the high school declined to comment.

Lyndsey Sager, editor-in-chief of the newspaper, said last week that school officials were particularly concerned that running a photo of the student could result in other suicides.

“We’d run pictures and stories of suicide victims before,” said Lyndsey, a 17-year-old senior from Munroe Falls. “We wanted to do it out of respect.”

The editor said the staff chose not to publish the September edition, the first of the school year, and have not published since.

Troubling reports of Columbus police officers randomly searching public buses raise questions over whether individuals are are to decline a search and how the police choose who is searched.

The Central Ohio Transit Authority is now using police dogs to increase security, 10TV’s Angela An reported Wednesday.

While assaults against passengers and drivers are down compared to last year, police made 35 percent more arrests this year on buses and bus stops. There have been 158 arrests to date in 2009, An reported.

“The reason we started with bomb dogs is to make sure people aren’t bringing suspicious packages on the buses and leaving them behind,” said COTA’s security director Stan Alverson.

The dogs are joining undercover officers in searching for anything illegal, from explosives to drugs.

More information about the illegal University of Akron DNA collection policy from the Buchtelite, the University’s student newspaper.

A new policy at the Universiy of Akron has spurred controversy around the nation and has some questioning its legality.

[…]

Michael Brickner, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that he feels the policy is blatantly illegal and violates federal laws, such as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and the Americans with Disability Act.

GINA, which prohibits employers from collecting genetic information from employees and making employment decisions based on it, was signed into law May 21, 2008.

“We want to come out and just say, ‘this is illegal,’” he said.

Brickner explained that even though the university has not done any DNA testing, leaving the policy on the books is an open window for other universities to use the same policy.

“Bad ideas travel quickly,” he said.

Brickner said that ACLU is focusing on convincing the university to get rid of the policy immediately.

The ABJ rightfully points out the many flaws in the University of Akron’s new policy that unlawfully requires job applicants to turn over DNA for a criminal background check.

A new policy on DNA testing as part of employment background checks was quietly adopted in August by the board of trustees at the University of Akron. Good thing greater attention arrived soon enough. The resignation of faculty member Matt Williams in protest and pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union have triggered a much wider discussion of the deeply flawed policy.

No other employer in the country requires new hires to submit to a DNA test, according to the ACLU. That’s for good reason. While criminal background checks are fairly standard in higher education, the swab-for-a-job plan at UA represents a unique and unwarranted intrusion into personal privacy and raises potent discrimination issues.

Lawyers for the ACLU say acting on such a requirement would immediately trigger legal challenges based on anti-discrimination provisions in the Americans with Disabilities Act and on privacy rules in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Later this month, a new federal law specifically barring employers from requiring DNA samples will go into effect.

The ACLU of Ohio and several other advocates appeared before the Ohio Supreme Court to challenge the Adam Walsh Act, which retroactively reclassified many low level offenders. The ACLU argued this violates due process and also diverts needed resources away from targetting sex offenders who are more likely to reoffend.

Thousands of registered sex offenders would be subject to less-stringent reporting requirements if defense lawyers succeed in challenging parts of a 2007 state law intended to crack down on sexual criminals.

The attorneys told the Ohio Supreme Court yesterday that the get-tough law was applied illegally to more than 26,000 sex offenders who were sentenced before it took effect.

In addition, the lawyers said, the measure penalizes people who commit sex offenses before they turn 18 by requiring them to continue to register as sex offenders well into adulthood.

The state’s highest court heard four cases yesterday challenging Senate Bill 10, which created a new system for classifying sex offenders based more on the severity of the crime than the likelihood of committing future offenses.

More than half of the offenders were placed in the most-serious category — sexual predators — who are required to register every 90 days for life.

Jeffrey M. Gamso, a Toledo lawyer who argued one of the cases, said the law had more to do with securing federal funding under the Adam Walsh Act than protecting Ohioans.

“Is the sheriff really keeping tabs on all those people?” Gamso asked in an interview. “We know that some people will re-offend, and we want to be able to target those people.

“You want to find the needle in the haystack, and what this does is build a bigger haystack.”