Civil Rights/Civil Liberties

Massachusetts Should Join Other States in Banning Discrimination Based on Natural Hairstyles

Published on: May 20, 2021 | by Naomi Shatz

This is Part 2 in a series. You can read Part 1 here.

I previously detailed how existing anti-discrimination law is insufficient to protect employees and students who wear their hair in natural or protective styles from discrimination. A national campaign called the CROWN Act, has built an impressive coalition of organizations in support of legislation to remedy this problem. In the last two years, eleven states and a handful of cities and counties have passed this type of legislation. Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley introduced a federal CROWN Act in Congress in December of 2019. CONTINUE READING ›

Recent News Shines Spotlight on the Lack of Legal Protection Against Discrimination Based on Natural Hairstyles

Published on: May 20, 2021 | by Naomi Shatz

This is Part 1 in a series. You can read Part 2 here.

Last week Jon Oliver took a deep dive into Black hair, and the barriers people with natural and protective hairstyles face in the workplace, in schools, and elsewhere. His segment highlighted stories of a woman who was not hired because she wore her hair in locs, twins here in Massachusetts who received detention and were banned from prom because they wore their hair in braids, and an Ivy-league alumnus who sent a vitriolic, racist letter to his college because a football player for the college wore his hair in locs. Over the weekend news broke that a high school softball player in Durham was forced to cut her beads out of her hair in the middle of a game if she wanted to continue playing. While there has been a growing movement in the last two years for states, cities, and towns to pass versions of the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act, thus far Massachusetts has not passed any legislation on this issue. Because our current laws do not adequately protect against such discrimination, a legislative fix is necessary. CONTINUE READING ›

SJC Strikes Down State Anti-Panhandling Law as Unconstitutional

Published on: December 22, 2020 | by Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP

In a landmark decision published last week, Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless v. Fall River, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) struck down G.L.c. 85, § 17A (often referred to as the anti-panhandling law) as an unconstitutional restriction on protected speech. This decision was hailed as a victory by community organizers and people who are houseless, who have long criticized the law for effectively criminalizing houselessness and poverty.

Section 17A imposed criminal penalties for any person who “signals a moving vehicle on any public way or causes the stopping of a vehicle thereon, or accosts any occupant of a vehicle … for the purpose of soliciting any alms, contribution or subscription or of selling any merchandise.” (emphasis added). However, the law permitted the same conduct for other purposes, like selling admissions tickets and newspapers. The law also explicitly exempted from regulation this same conduct when performed on behalf of a non-profit organization with a police permit. The law imposed a $50 fine for violators.

Plaintiffs John Correira and Joseph Treeful are both houseless and members of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, an organization that advocates for housing justice and provides direct services and assistance to people experiencing houselessness. Like many people who are houseless, Mr. Correira and Mr. Treeful sometimes stand on public streets and ask motorists and passersby for donations in order to survive. Between 2018 and 2019, the Fall River Police Department charged the two men with more than forty violations of Section 17A. Both Mr. Correira and Mr. Treeful have previously been incarcerated as a result of these charges.

Supreme Judicial Court Extends Pre-Trial Detention Time Limits Due to COVID-19 Pandemic

Published on: June 24, 2020 | by David Duncan

This week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) issued an opinion in Commonwealth v. Lougee holding that its orders delaying trials due to COVID-19 allow the Commonwealth to hold defendants pre-trial beyond time limits set by statute. The decision applies to pre-trial detainees being held either on grounds of dangerousness under G.L. c. 276, §58A, or after violation of conditions of release under G.L. c. 276, §58B. Both statutes put time limits on how long a defendant can be held in jail without trial: 180 days under section 58A and 120 days under section 58B. The SJC decision addressed three cases: two in which the defendants were found dangerous and held under 58A, and one in which the defendant violated release conditions and was detained under 58B. In all three cases, a trial judge found that because the defendants had been detained for the statutory time limits, they had to be released. The trial judges did not find that the SJC’s orders postponing trials due to COVID-19 affected the calculation of time limits set by sections 58A and 58B. The Commonwealth appealed and the SJC reversed.

How Does Massachusetts’ Proposed “Revenge Porn” Law Compare to Other State’s Laws?

Published on: November 26, 2019 | by Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP

By: Leah Durst, Legal Intern

Former California Congresswoman Katie Hill recently resigned after sexually explicit photos of Hill and a staffer engaged in consensual sexual activity were leaked, allegedly by her abusive ex-husband. Her resignation should trigger broader discussions about the consequences of living in a digital age: how do we view and treat victims and perpetrators of “revenge porn”? What legal rights are there for people whose sexual privacy has been invaded, and what legal consequences are there for those who access and distribute such material? It turns out that Massachusetts is one of the last states to take up this question at the legislative level.

Conservative Christian Group’s Title IX Complaint Against Transgender Athletes Ignores the Meaning of “Sex” Under Title IX Law

Published on: June 26, 2019 | by Naomi Shatz

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Last week, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian organization purporting to focus on religious liberty issues, filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on behalf of three female high school athletes in Connecticut. The complaint alleges that the three Complainants—cisgender elite track athletes—are being discriminated against because the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) permits transgender female athletes to compete in girls’ sports. The ADF has a history of instituting suits on behalf of cisgender students, arguing that recognizing transgender students’ gender identities harms their cisgender peers.

Although courts around this country have made clear that being transgender does not make someone any less a girl in the eyes of the law, the ADF Complaint consistently and incorrectly refers to transgender female athletes as “boys” and argues that allowing these “boys” to compete against girls violates girls’ rights to equal athletic opportunities. The Complaint sets forth statistics about male and female athletes to show that in almost every sport male athletes would beat female athletes if they competed head to head. It then argues: “the CIAC permits males with all the hormonal and physiological advantages that come with male puberty and male levels of testosterone to enter and win in girls’ athletic competitions of all sorts, without any exceptions.”

Exclusionary Rule Safe in Massachusetts – For Now

Published on: April 30, 2019 | by Ana Muñoz

Last week, the Supreme Judicial Court reaffirmed that in Massachusetts, evidence unlawfully obtained from a police search will be excluded in criminal trials even in cases in which the police had good reason to believe the search was legal. That ruling buttresses a longstanding difference between federal law and Massachusetts law. In federal court, prosecutors can insulate police errors by arguing the police had a good faith basis to use an illegal tactic, and therefore evidence should not be suppressed. Not so in Massachusetts – at least for now.
CONTINUE READING ›

SJC Clarifies that GPS Monitoring is a Search Subject to Constitutional Protections

Published on: April 10, 2019 | by Emma Quinn-Judge

Massachusetts courts often require individuals on probation, particularly sex offenders, to wear GPS monitors that track their every movement. Imposing this requirement, the state’s highest court said for the first time recently, is a search, meaning that a judge can only lawfully require such monitoring after making an individualized determination that balances “the Commonwealth’s need to impose monitoring against the privacy invasion occasioned by such monitoring.”

The two decisions issued by the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), Commonwealth v. Feliz and Commonwealth v. Johnson, are the first to apply Grady v. North Carolina, a 2015 Supreme Court decision holding that GPS monitoring is in fact a search protected under the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable” searches. While the SJC had previously treated GPS monitoring as something else, calling it, for instance, “punishment” for committing an offense, Feliz and Johnson clarify that under both federal and state constitutional law, GPS monitoring is in fact a search. Applying its own new standard, the SJC reached contrasting results, deciding that GPS monitoring was unreasonable in Feliz but reasonable in Johnson.

New Ruling Allows for Secret Recording of Public Officials Engaged in Public Duties in Public Places

Published on: January 31, 2019 | by David Duncan

As we have previously discussed on this blog, the Massachusetts wiretap statute makes it a crime to “secretly record” any person without their consent. The law has been used to prosecute and convict people who secretly record police activities. In Martin v. Gross and Project Veritas Action Fund v. Conley, an individual and a public-interest organization challenged the statute on First Amendment grounds. Chief Judge Saris of the U.S. District Court agreed with the challengers. In a decision published on December 10 of last year, Judge Saris held that the statute was unconstitutional insofar as it prohibited the secret recording of public officials (including police) engaged in their official duties in a public place. Police, and other public officials in Massachusetts, must now assume that their acts and statements are being recorded, whether they are told so or not. CONTINUE READING ›

Does the Man Suing over #MeToo List About Men in Media Have a Shot?

Published on: October 19, 2018 | by Naomi Shatz

In the fall of 2017, writer Moira Donegan created the “Shitty Media Men” list—an “anonymous, crowd-sourced” spreadsheet that collected rumors and allegations of sexual misconduct by men in media and publishing. The spreadsheet was up on the internet for only 12 hours before Donegan pulled it, but it went viral and became much more public than Donegan intended. Donegan said she had not foreseen this outcome; her goal had been to “create an alternate avenue to report this kind of behavior and warn others without fear of retaliation.” That fear of reprisal has become reality: last week, one of the men named on the list, writer Stephen Elliott, sued Donegan and 30 other anonymous women for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

What do these legal claims mean, and does Elliott have a case?