By: ACLU of Colorado The Senate Judiciary committee will be hearing testimony on HB14-1061 this afternoon. The bill would force Colorado municipalities to comply with existing Constitutional and Colorado laws requiring courts to determine whether a person is too poor to pay their court fines and fees before throwing them in jail for failing to pay. The bill, sponsored by Thornton Rep. Joe Salazar, is the result of a two-year statewide ACLU investigation into the use of these practices by municipal courts. UPDATE:.... | Read More

By: ACLU of Colorado   The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive   The struggle to find drugs to carry out lethal injection has made headlines all over the country and was recently featured on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. Pharmaceutical companies who make these drugs have started to ban their sale for executions, and states are scrambling to find alternatives, with many dangerous consequences. An Oklahoma execution.... | Read More

By: ACLU Blog of Rights (From the ACLU Blog of Rights) By Steven M. Watt, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Human Rights Program & Allison Frankel, Criminal Law Reform Project, ACLU  Juwan Wickware wasn't the shooter. But he and more than 2,500 others nationwide will enter prison as teenagers, grow into adults, and die – all behind bars. This is not right. The sentence must fit the crime, and we cannot throw away kids' lives. Here's Juwan's story: When he was 16, he and another young kid robbed a pizza deliveryman..... | Read More

By: Rebecca T. Wallace The Denver Post editorial board’s suggestion that Colorado leave the issue of solitary confinement to prison officials is an approach that has been tried for three decades and, until very recently, has failed. Colorado Department of Corrections Director Rick Raemisch has made commendable progress toward reducing the use of prolonged solitary confinement, particularly for prisoners with serious mental illness. But change in DOC leadership at some point in the future is not merely a possibility;.... | Read More

By: Rachel Pryor-Lease When I found out that I was pregnant with twins, I was incredibly excited and also completely terrified. There were so many things to learn, including whether or not I would be able to breastfeed two infants. And then, 9 weeks before their due date, my babies decided that they were ready to make their appearance. They were tiny - both under 4 pounds - and not ready to be out in the big, bad world. Because they were so little and needed help eating, they had to stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care.... | Read More

By: ACLU of Colorado The Senate Judiciary committee will be hearing testimony on SB 064 this afternoon. The bill would put limits on the use of solitary confinement for seriously mentally ill inmates and set rules regarding the discipline of and provision of therapy to such inmates. The bill is sponsored by State Senator Jessie Ulibarri and Representative Joe Salazar. UPDATE: The bill passed out of committee unanimously, 5-0. Read the ACLU of Colorado's report on the overuse of solitary confinement for mentally.... | Read More