Aclu

News flash for Robert Ehrlich: The undeserved pot shot at the ACLU in your recent op-ed speculating on life if Mitt Romney had won the presidency is, indeed, based on fantasy and delusion ("What might have been: Life under President Romney" Jan. 27). As a Ravens fan, I must set the record straight. Far from wishing to keep Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis from invoking God during post-game interviews, the ACLU would defend his right to pray any time during the game he wants. The First Amendment protects his right to pray.

Eleven people and the state ACLU sued Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold on Wednesday, contending that the county illegally compiled files about citizens on Leopold's alleged "enemies list," then refused to release the information collected. The civil complaint alleges that Leopold, his office and the county Police Department broke two provisions of Maryland's public records laws, first by creating the files and then by not turning them over to people who suspected they were targets.

Baltimore Police want to know whether a man suing police for deleting images from his camera at the 2010 Preakness has a drug history, and have reached out to his ex-wife and former employers, an effort his attorneys say amounts to harassment and intimidation. In recent filings in U.S. District Court, police said "whether or not the plaintiff is a drug addict is absolutely material to his competency as a witness. " They have sought phone records, employment records, spoken to his ex-wife's mother and boyfriend, and want the result of a hair follicle test from 2007 divorce proceedings.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland said Monday that it wants to know what police are doing with information collected by automated scanners that routinely read the license plates of drivers throughout the state. Since at least 2005, "automatic license plate readers" have been recording license plates in Maryland from alongside roads and highways and from inside police patrol cars. For the past six to eight months, data from hundreds of those readers has been fed into a central repository.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland says it is contacting law enforcement agencies across Maryland and urging them to establish clear policies on the public's right to record police officers. The announcement came as the group continues to battle the Baltimore Police Department in court over a 2010 incident in which a Howard County man says his cell-phone camera images were deleted after he filmed officers “roughing up” a female friend at the Preakness Stakes. The Department of Justice has already asked a federal judge to side with the plaintiffs, saying police department policies were insufficient.

Anne Arundel County police released hundreds of documents this week regarding media inquiries on topics as broad as gang investigations, cold cases and school shootings, but none of those are any use to the group looking into allegations against County Executive John R. Leopold, ACLU officials said. In response to a public information request made by the American Civil Liberties Union and area newspapers, police provided reams of documents detailing how the police department interacts with the media - but little information about Leopold and an "enemies" list the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland alleges he kept.

It is well documented that African-American and Hispanic men are arrested, convicted and jailed at far higher rates than whites, and that once they enter the prison system they usually serve longer terms as well. That's why the NAACP and the Maryland ACLU among others were right to ask the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last week to take another look at the systematic racial disparities in the state's criminal justice system. According to the Maryland Division of Corrections, 72 percent of the inmates in Maryland prisons are black, even though blacks make up only 29.4 percent of the population.

Public records show that employees of Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold improperly accessed databases to gather information on at least three people on an "enemies" list, the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland said Tuesday. One of the so-called enemies was Lewis Bracy, a recently retired National Security Agency police officer and community activist who has not previously been associated with Leopold's alleged dossiers, according to the ACLU, which obtained the records through a public information request to the state.

Nearly 20 percent of arrests made by Baltimore police for low-level, "quality-of-life" crimes haven't been properly documented, according to a new audit that a civil liberties group says understates the agency's shortcomings in meeting terms of a legal settlement. Independent auditor Charles Wellford, a University of Maryland criminologist, sampled about 1,100 arrests from April to December 2011 and found that 17 percent of reports written by officers did not support a finding of probable cause.

Late on a Friday afternoon, Anne Arundel County announced that it had conducted an “exhaustive search,” and found nothing to indicate that County Executive John R. Leopold had a political “enemies list”. The response to a Maryland Public Information Act request didn't do much to quiet the criticism that has followed Leopold's March indictment on misconduct charges. He's accused of having county officers collect information about his foes, as well as directing them to drive him to sexual encounters with a county employee.