Statement of ACLU of Colorado Deputy Director Stephen Meswarb on Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey’s decision to seek the death penalty in the Fero’s bar case

“The ACLU of Colorado is disappointed by Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey’s decision to pursue the death penalty in this case. The death penalty is immoral, unjust, and expensive, and every execution and death warrant perpetuates an arbitrary system that can and does make irreversible mistakes.
“When prosecutors choose to pursue death, as Morrissey did today, they validate a deeply flawed system and disregard the substantive costs, both in terms of morality and actual taxpayer dollars, that accompany their decision.”

July 23, 2013
New ACLU report examines legal, moral, and fiscal implications of housing mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement, urges CDOC chief Rick Raemisch to end the practice

DENVER – The Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) continues to rely on long-term solitary confinement to manage mentally ill prisoners, often for months or even years, according to a new report released today by the ACLU of Colorado.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Colorado’s continued warehousing of mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement, draws on 18 months of research, including interviews with prisoners, analysis of CDOC data, site visits, and review of prisoner health files and finds that, while the overall number of prisoners held in solitary confinement has decreased in recent years, the proportion of those prisoners who suffer from mental illnesses has increased.
According to the report, more than half of the prisoners currently housed in long-term solitary confinement in Colorado have significant mental health needs.
“Warehousing mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement is not only costly, cruel and unlawful, it puts the public at serious risk,” says ACLU staff attorney Rebecca Wallace, who drafted the report. “When mental illness goes untreated, or is made worse by solitary confinement, it can lead to criminal or antisocial actions once a prisoner is released, leaving the public to suffer the consequences.”
On any given day in 2012, between 537 and 686 mentally ill prisoners were held in solitary confinement in Colorado prisons. The average length of stay for mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement was 16 months.
Courts and psychiatrists agree that prolonged isolation poses a substantial risk of causing or exacerbating mental illness. The ACLU report chronicles instances of solitary confinement driving untreated mentally ill prisoners to a psychotic state, leading them to attempt suicide, attack others, eat their feces, or “bang their heads against the wall in an effort to drown out the voices in their heads.”
Under former Director Tom Clements, CDOC initiated the Residential Treatment Program (RTP) in early 2013 as a means of providing intensive mental health care to prisoners with the most significant mental health needs, but the ACLU found that seriously mentally ill prisoners are still being disproportionately housed in solitary confinement. As of last March, CDOC housed at least 87 “seriously mentally ill” prisoners in solitary confinement, the majority of whom had been living in isolation for more than a year.
“Courts are unanimous in their view that prolonged solitary confinement of seriously mentally ill prisoners is cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Constitution,” says Wallace.
In 2001, a federal court ordered the Wisconsin DOC to remove all prisoners with serious mental illness from the Supermax Correctional Institution. Incoming CDOC Director Rick Raemish led the Wisconsin DOC after the lawsuit settled while following a policy against confining seriously mentally ill prisoners in the supermax facility.
“Given Mr. Raemish’s successes during his tenure at the Wisconsin DOC, we are hopeful that he will bring to CDOC a true understanding that a state prison system can be managed safely and effectively without warehousing seriously mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement,” says Wallace.
The report includes the following recommendations for CDOC and its incoming director:
(1) CDOC should bar seriously mentally ill prisoners from placement is prolonged solitary confinement.
(2) CDOC should adopt policies requiring mental health involvement in disciplinary and criminal charging decisions related to seriously mentally ill prisoners.
(3) All seriously mentally ill prisoners, including those at the lowest levels of the Residential Treatment Program (RTP), should be provided a minimum of 20 hours of out-of-cell time per week, including 10 hours of dedicated therapeutic time.
(4) The Residential Treatment Program should be fully staffed to provide out-of-cell therapeutic and non-therapeutic time. To accomplish this goal, CDOC must have the funding and the will to fill all mental health staff positions, particularly those of psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses.

Click here to read the report.


Click for a fact sheet on the mentally ill in solitary confinement in Colorado.

July 17, 2013

Documents obtained from Colorado police departments show tracking data is kept for years, even indefinitely

Denver – Police departments in Colorado and all around the country are rapidly expanding their use of automatic license plate readers to track the location of drivers, but few have meaningful rules in place to protect privacy rights, according to documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union. As a result, the new documents reveal, many departments are keeping innocent people’s location information stored for years or even indefinitely, regardless of whether there is any suspicion of a crime.

“License plate scanners can be a legitimate tool for law enforcement when their use is narrowly tailored and focused on an ongoing criminal investigation,” said ACLU of Colorado Public Policy Director Denise Maes, “but these documents show that police departments around the state are using license plate scanners to conduct broad, invasive surveillance of all citizens in case they might someday commit a crime.”

In Colorado, grants from the Colorado Auto Theft Prevention Authority (CAPTA) directly or indirectly funded the purchase of automated license readers in Boulder, Longmont, Lafayette, Erie, Louisville, Commerce City, and Thornton. The Adams County Sheriff’s Office also received funding from CAPTA for automated license plate reader equipment.

The systems use cameras mounted on patrol cars or on objects like road signs and bridges, and the documents show that their deployment is increasing rapidly. They photograph every license plate they encounter, use software to read the number and add a time and location stamp, then record the information in a database. Police are alerted when numbers match lists containing license numbers of interest, such as stolen cars.

View an interactive slideshow on automated license plate readers

Last summer, the ACLU of Colorado joined affiliates in 37 states to file nearly 600 freedom of information requests asking federal, state, and local agencies how they use the readers. The 26,000 pages of documents produced by the agencies that responded – about half – include training materials, internal memos, and policy statements. The results and analysis are detailed in an ACLU report released today called “You Are Being Tracked,” which includes charts and policy recommendations.

The study found that not only are license plate scanners widely deployed, but few police departments place any substantial restrictions on how they can be used. A tiny fraction of the license plate scans are flagged as “hits.” For example, in Maryland, for every million plates read, only 47 (0.005 percent) were potentially associated with a stolen car or a person wanted for a serious crime. Yet, the documents show that many police departments are storing – for long periods of time – huge numbers of records on scanned plates that do not return hits.

In Colorado, for example, Commerce City and Aurora keep all driver location data from automated license readers for two years. In Aurora, some scans are then transferred to a database for indefinite retention.

The City of Longmont maintains all automated license reader data for a minimum of one year and a maximum of two. Longmont license plate readers do not distinguish between Colorado and out-of-state plates, occasionally resulting in false hits for innocent drivers.

“Without sufficient privacy protections, we could quickly reach a point where these devices are in operation on every block, monitoring like a GPS tracker every movement we make, including what friends, doctors, protests, political events, or churches we visit,” added Maes.

The ACLU report contains over a dozen specific recommendations for government use of license plate scanner systems, including: police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime has occurred before examining the data; unless there are legitimate reasons to retain records, they should be deleted within days or weeks at most; and, people should be able to find out if their cars’ location history is in a law enforcement database.

The report, an interactive map with links to the documents, and an interactive slide show are available at: www.aclu.org/alpr.