Civil Liberties in 2007

2007 was the year of the Taser, as police departments and private security agencies began to use the stun gun on a more regular--sometimes excessive--basis. When a persistent University of Florida student named Andrew Meyer was videotaped from several different angles being Tasered by campus police, it called attention (we hope) to the more widespread problem of excessive Taser use. His plea to officers--"Don't tase me, bro!"--was later rated the most memorable quote of 2007 by the Yale Book of Quotations. Read more...

The virulently misogynistic, antisemitic, and homophobic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would never be given a podium at Columbia University if he were not president of a major foreign power--but he is, so he was. The content of his speech was predictable; he pretended there were no journalists on Iran's death row, pretended that he was not a Holocaust denier, and pretended that everyone in Iran was heterosexual.

But the most remarkable thing about Ahmadinejad's speech was that it happened at all. Iran is unquestionably an enemy of the United States--and yet its president was still given a podium in the heart of New York City. In a year full of bad news, Ahmadinejad's speech demonstrated the enduring strength of the First Amendment. Read more...

When Democrats took power in November 2006's congressional election, there was reason to believe that U.S. civil liberties policy might change. But Congress is too closely divided, President Bush too stubborn, and Democratic leaders too politically-focused for much good to come of 2007--and the 2008 legislative agenda doesn't look all that exciting, either. Read more...

When Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) announced that he was running for president, most observers wrote the former 1988 Libertarian presidential nominee off as a novelty candidate. After all, how could anyone who advocates for an isolationist foreign policy win over the neoconservative post-9/11 world of Republican politics? And how could a Goldwater-style social libertarian succeed Reagan as a Republican presidential nominee?

But he showed us, building a coalition of Goldwater libertarians and antiwar conservatives into a bona fide movement. While he stands no serious chance of winning the nomination, he has done something that is almost equally important: He has reminded Republican leaders that the libertarian right is still alive. Read more...

Members of the LAPD beat Rodney King on camera, botched the O.J. Simpson investigation by letting an epithet-spouting evidence-planter have unrestricted access to the crime scene, and still kill young men of color under suspicious circumstances every year. New leadership has improved the LAPD, and it is not fair to judge all 10,000 officers of the LAPD by the behavior of its worst members, but every now and then a few officers contribute to the LAPD's depressing public image.

That happened on May 1st, when a group of LAPD officers attacked immigrants' rights protesters--and then attacked journalists covering the event, even destroying television cameras (presumably so that video of the attacks would not exist). Read more...

The facts speak for themselves.

On December 1st, 2006, a black teenager named Robert Bailey Jr. attempted to attend a white party at the Fair Barn in Jena, Louisiana. He was beaten by a group of white men, one of whom was armed with a broken beer bottle. The district attorney charged one attacker with misdemeanor battery, which carried no jail time, but did not pursue any charges against the other assailants.

Three days later, a white student at Jena High School allegedly taunted Bailey about the beating. Bailey and five other unarmed black students knocked the white student down and gave him a swollen eye. They were all charged as adults with attempted murder, and the district attorney pursued six 100-year sentences. Read more...

Alberto Gonzales' use of the Department of Justice to pursue political enemies of the president was reminiscent of the Nixon administration's enemies list. So it made perfect sense that he would resign in disgrace--depriving us of the attorney general who had spearheaded the Bush administration's controversial surveillance, torture, and secret detention programs for nearly three years. It isn't really fair to blame him for all of this--his biggest fault was, in all likelihood, excessive loyalty to the president--but his resignation gives the Department of Justice the opportunity to clean up its act in preparation for the next administration. Read more...

The botched December 2006 execution of Angel Nieves Diaz was followed by lethal injection moratoriums in California, Florida, Maryland, and, soon, the country as a whole. In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in Baze v. Rees on the constitutionality of execution by lethal injection. Until that happens, the death penalty is effectively suspended in the United States--for the first time in more than thirty years. Read more...

One of the biggest Senate debates of the year centered on the question of whether waterboarding, a form of water torture, fits the U.S. criminal definition of torture. Michael Mukasey, the new nominee for U.S. attorney general, said he wasn't sure--and was promptly confirmed anyway. But Mukasey isn't the only one to blame; Congress, which certainly has the power to revise torture statutes to specifically include waterboarding, has not done so.

The debate is not a hypothetical one. In December 2007, a retired CIA officer admitted to using waterboarding against two detainees. Video of the detainees' interrogation, illegally hidden from the 9/11 Commission, had already been destroyed by CIA staff in violation of a court order. Read more...

When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the landmark 6-3 ruling striking down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), few would have considered him the leader of a conservative coalition. Along with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, he made up the court's centrist bloc; in most closely-divided rulings, their votes were determinative.

But now, four years later, Justice O'Connor has retired and Justice Kennedy is a one-man centrist bloc. Justice Kennedy charts his own via media between the strict constructionists and the modernists, and this has given him unprecedented power over the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Although he is not technically chief justice, Justice Kennedy has become the most powerful judge in the country. Read more...