In 2006, I was sentenced to death for a crime I didn’t commit. The jury in my case was split 8-4 about the death sentence. Eight people thought I should be executed, and four people thought I should not be. Despite the divided jury, I was sentenced to death.

At the time in Florida, it was possible for a person to be sentenced to death by a non-unanimous jury. Only in 2017 did the law change to require a unanimous jury. But this year, Florida took a step backwards, reinstating non-unanimous juries for the death penalty.

Florida is one of two states that still sends people to death row even if the jury is split. It’s no surprise that Florida also has more wrongfully convicted people exonerated from death row than any other state — in almost every case, the exonerated person was sentenced to death by a non-unanimous jury.

When I was sent to death row, I was afraid. Like many people, I believed the people on death row were monsters, the worst of the worst. As soon as I got there, each one of the guys asked me my name and what county I was from. They passed around a pillowcase and each person shared a little something — food, cigarettes, coffee — so I could have something for my first days on the row. I saw the real human part of the guys, and those people are not monsters.

I was on death row for three years until 2009, when the Florida Supreme Court vacated my conviction. In a unanimous decision, the justices said the government didn’t have enough evidence and I shouldn’t have been convicted. I’m the 23rd person to be exonerated from Florida’s death row.

Even though I was exonerated, I still had a criminal record. It took me four years to get the state to update my record to show my conviction had been vacated. But I still have difficulty with the background check when I apply for jobs or for an apartment — all they see is that I’ve been arrested for murder, not that I was wrongfully convicted. I still don’t have my voting rights restored. Only last year did I get my first real job after my trial. The process to erase a record and get compensation for a wrongful conviction in Florida is extremely difficult. It’s not enough that my conviction was vacated by a unanimous Florida Supreme Court. A person seeking compensation for a wrongful conviction also has to produce a certificate of innocence from a prosecutor or judge.

Fourteen years later, I still have physical and emotional effects from the row: anxiety, high blood pressure, a chronic sinus infection. Even though I’ve been exonerated, I feel like I’m serving a life sentence.

It is still hard for me to sleep — I have to imagine myself in a story. These days, I imagine I’m a superhero — people don’t know my identity, and I advocate for justice in the Florida legislature.

In this case, it’s not just a story for me to sleep; it’s my reality. I became an advocate for ending the death penalty and reforming the criminal justice system soon after returning home. Today, I’m the executive director of Witness to Innocence, an organization that empowers death row exonerees and works to end the death penalty.

Earlier this year, I advocated against the law that reinstated non-unanimous juries in Florida for the death penalty. Despite being living proof that non-unanimous juries are not in the interest of justice, the state legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis passed the law. I hear many politicians and lawmakers say they want to be tough on crime, but that isn’t going to lower the crime rate.

Despite what’s happening in Florida’s state politics, I know that Floridians are stronger when we are united, rather than divided.

When I was in the courtroom and I heard “We, the people of Florida, sentence you to die,” I heard a lot of power in that phrase. We the people are the power. As Floridians we have to stop allowing division to keep us from making things right in Florida: from the criminal justice system, to the rights of LGBTQ people, to immigration. We all want life and freedom here in Florida. We want fairness and equality. We have to stand together to make that a reality. That’s why this summer, I’m organizing a speaking tour across the state to bring us together. I use my voice to unite us across our differences. That’s how I understand my experience of wrongful conviction and the death penalty.

One of the first times I spoke about my experience was at a Catholic Mass. The priest introducing me explained that God tests us to be a powerful voice, and those stories are carried through history and become powerful enough to touch people. He considered my experience one of those powerful stories.

If you look at the stories in the Bible, God took people and gave them an assignment. And I feel like God chose me and took me through death row to be an advocate for justice and to help people. Despite what I’m going through, that is the job I’m going to keep doing until the day I die.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has new leadership, with the appointment last week of P.J. Lechleitner as acting director. ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed director since the Obama administration, making Lechleitner’s appointment as acting director more significant — and potentially likely to last through the end of Biden’s term.

The big question is whether Lechleitner is willing to move forward on a reform agenda that has been stalled for the last year. The good news is that in June, the Supreme Court removed a major obstacle to ICE reforms, shutting down litigation brought by anti-immigrant attorneys general in Texas and Louisiana that had aimed to force Biden to pursue a draconian deportation agenda. (The ACLU filed an amicus brief in the case).

The ugly politics of immigration remain a major barrier. House Republicans are still trying to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — Lechleitner’s boss — over his handling of the border, although they have not been able to muster the votes. Lechleitner will need to overcome the chilling effect of the threatened impeachment proceedings, as well as pre-presidential election anxieties around immigration.

But there are common-sense, impactful changes that Lechleitner can make as acting ICE director — ones that will help President Biden show that he’s made good on his campaign promises. Here are three of them:

On average, ICE is detaining about 29,000 people a day in dozens of detention sites around the country — the overwhelming majority of which are run or operated by for-profit prison companies.

During his campaign, then-candidate Biden promised to “end for-profit detention centers.” In April 2021, he told activists in Georgia that “there should be no private prisons, period, none, period. … Private detention centers: they should not exist, and we are working to close all of them.” A poll we commissioned supported Biden’s convictions: 68 percent of voters wanted to see the federal government stop pursuing contracts with for-profit prison corporations.

Though Biden’s pledge only focused on for-profit detention, activists and the ACLU have called on him to dismantle the mass detention system more broadly. So far, ICE has closed or discontinued use of a handful of facilities, but far more is needed. ICE’s new acting director should order a new, comprehensive review of ICE detention facilities for health, safety and due process issues — and swiftly act to close abusive facilities.

Credit: AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

High on his list should be Baker County Detention Center in Macclenny, Florida, described as a “living hell” by a person formerly detained there. The ACLU of Florida has documented sexual voyeurism, such as staff watching women when they use the restroom; women being denied sanitary napkins and clean clothes as punishment, leading to infections and being forced to sleep in blood-soaked sheets; medical neglect and beatings; and much more.

These examples are disturbing, but sadly, not exceptional. The ACLU and our partners have documented horrific conditions and shameful treatment in ICE detention sites across the country — under Biden’s watch. Leichleitner should lean into the issue — and move forward on closing detention sites.

President Biden also promised to roll back ICE’s 287(g) program, which taps local law enforcement to help identify people for arrest and deportation. Through 287(g) and related programs, local police have helped ICE ensnare thousands of people in an indiscriminate deportation dragnet — the opposite of the limited approach the Biden administration initially promised. As a candidate, Biden recognized that turning local police into immigration agents harms public safety by making people in immigrant and mixed-status households afraid to access protection and public services . He pledged to end agreements initiated in the prior four years.

The Trump administration aggressively recruited sheriffs to join the 287(g) program, using anti-immigrant hate as a selling point, and the program exploded to five times its Obama-era size. Despite its alarming growth under Trump — and recent protests by activists around the country — the Biden administration has left the 287(g) program mostly intact. An April 2022 ACLU report detailed how, through the 287(g) program, the Biden administration is empowering sheriffs with records of racism, anti-immigrant hate, and civil rights violations in direct contravention of its racial justice commitments.

American Civil Liberties Union

License to Abuse: How ICE’s 287(g) Program Empowers Racist Sheriffs

This ACLU research report examines the records of sheriff offices and other law enforcement agencies that participate in the 287(g) program.

Biden has likely failed to cut back on 287(g) because reform-minded officials believed that ICE’s enforcement priorities, which direct ICE agents to focus their arrests and deportations on immigrants with particular immigration or criminal law violations, would staunch abuses by local law enforcement agencies. But history suggested it wouldn’t work, as we warned early on. Priorities are far from a panacea: Data obtained by the American Immigration Council and Immigrant Legal Resource Center shows that under Biden nearly half of ICE’s requests to other law enforcement agencies to hold people for deportation purposes (known as detainers) were for people who fell outside ICE’s enforcement priorities.

And because many ICE agents are not applying the priorities in practice, anti-immigrant local law enforcement officers can use 287(g) as a tool to promote indiscriminate deportations. Empowering those officers, particularly ones from departments with a track record of anti-immigrant and racist statements and actions, to make decisions about immigration enforcement effectively invites abusive practices like stopping Black and Brown individuals in traffic stops under pretexts, and funneling them into a deportation pipeline.

Lechleitner should move to end 287(g) agreements with abusive sheriffs, starting with the ACLU’s list of 54 sheriffs with egregious records.

The Biden administration fulfilled an important pledge to end worksite raids, which the Trump administration had used alongside other mass raids, for political ends. But it’s all too easy to imagine a future administration deploying ICE agents on America’s streets in a drive to make this a hostile, dangerous place for our immigrant neighbors and loved ones.

As we have documented, in the past ICE agents have impersonated police, disguised themselves as day laborers, represented themselves as probation officers and tricked people into locating a family member so they can arrest them. The ACLU has filed lawsuits challenging these practices in California and Illinois.

American Civil Liberties Union

This Deceptive ICE Tactic Violates the Fourth Amendment | ACLU

For years, ICE has impersonated the police and used other ruses to lure immigrants into detention and deportation.

Lechleitner should look at lasting reforms to ICE’s arrest practices, including putting ICE agents under meaningful supervisory pre-approval constraints and prohibiting them from impersonating local police.

These are just three ways that the Biden administration, under Lechleitner’s new tenure, can take meaningful steps toward reforming harmful ICE detention and enforcement practices. But the work doesn’t end there, and we will continue to push the administration to use all the tools at its disposal to build a more humane immigration system.

Privacy laws serve as vital guardrails against the potential abuse of personal information in an increasingly interconnected world. As a nationwide organization dedicated to defending civil liberties, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recognizes the paramount importance of privacy in today’s digital age, and we firmly believe that transparency and accountability are necessary to protect all of our rights to privacy.

Right now, Americans risk being tracked and surveilled without any notice every time we open an app, walk into a store carrying a phone, or do an online search. As Congress works to draft a comprehensive privacy law, states are trying to fill that critical gap by passing their own privacy legislation. In response to this evolving landscape of privacy laws, including the new Colorado Privacy Act that goes into effect on July 1, the ACLU has developed an updated and comprehensive privacy policy to adhere to the values we hold dear.

The ACLU is in a unique position as both an advocacy organization fighting for stronger privacy laws, and a nonprofit dependent on reaching donors, action-takers, volunteers, and other supporters through data-driven tools and strategies in order to further our legislative, advocacy, and organizing work. This natural tension has invited hard but critical conversations, as we debate the values and drawbacks of technology and data practices internally. But we see this tension as a strength. It has allowed us to learn and improve, challenge norms, and work diligently to push for better legislative solutions, as well as better internal policy solutions that ensure we are truly living our values.

We published our first privacy policy more than two decades ago to be open and transparent about our data practices and demonstrate our commitment to our members’ and constituents’ data privacy. Over the years, we have revised our privacy policy every few years, and will continue to revise our policy as consumer privacy laws are passed and privacy practices, data practices, and technologies evolve. This process of continuously updating and refining our privacy statement reflects our ongoing commitment to communicate openly with our members and supporters and to adapt to evolving technologies as well as new laws and norms. The ACLU is committed to being a leader in this field.

In this blog post, we aim to shed light on the steps we are taking to safeguard your personal information, as well as explain how the ACLU collects, uses, shares, and otherwise processes personal information as we work to defend the civil liberties of all people, and fight back against injustice in courts, statehouses, and communities across the country.

• Transparency: We commit to sharing our privacy policy and data practices to make clear what we are collecting, how we’re collecting it, and for which purposes. Our privacy policy details specific disclosures and encompasses both our approach to handling information we collect about you, and information about you that is already publicly available. You can read our full policy here and data principles here.
• Accountability and rigor: We know that privacy standards and technology are constantly evolving, and we need to continuously hold ourselves accountable to evaluate how we do our work. We created a dedicated privacy and data governance team to ensure consistency across our national organization. We also continue to conduct trainings for our teams on how to apply privacy practices to a changing world.
• Agency over your data: We have made it easier for you to review, correct, and delete your personal data, as well as opt out of certain practices through our website. We believe choice is key — you shouldn’t have to dig through the small print to opt-out. You can do it right here.

We won’t beat around the bush: The ACLU does collect personal information to build our community of supporters and advance our work to fight back against abuses of power and protect the rights of all people nationwide. We could not do our work effectively without using various data-driven tools and strategies and accessing information. For example, when we ask supporters to sign a petition or contact your member of Congress, completing those actions captures information such as your email and interest in the issue area, allowing us to contact you in the future and continue to advocate for that policy.

We take our responsibility to those who entrust us with their stories and information very seriously, which is why we are clear about what the ACLU collects, how we use that information, and for what purpose. Specifically, in service of our supporter engagement, organizing, advocacy, and litigation work, we collect and steward personal information through a variety of methods, including:

• Direct collection (e.g., through a web form you submit);
• Automated data collection (e.g., through tracking technologies to understand how people navigate our websites);
• Third-party sources (e.g., voter data from government and commercial sources); and
• Inferring personal information about you (e.g., your potential interest in joining a discrimination lawsuit based on information we have collected from you and/or information acquired from third-party sources or if you and another person share an address, we may assume you’re in the same household, which would prevent duplicative outreach).

We then use various tools and tactics that use this information to do the work. For example, to win political battles in states across the country where fundamental civil liberties are being stripped away, we use voter files that are available through commercial and government sources. In our fight to pass ballot initiatives that would help secure the right to abortion in Ohio and Michigan, we unfortunately cannot knock on every voter’s door — voter files allow us to better understand which voters we should engage and turn out to protect abortion access.

Additionally, we infer interest from “lookalike audiences” when considering audiences for things like digital advertising – that is audiences who have similar interests to our existing members (perhaps they liked the same allied groups or engaged with similar posts). This helps us connect with people who are like our existing supporters but haven’t yet joined the ACLU community. While we do receive information that social media sites provide us, such as we know how many people clicked on a specific Facebook ad, we do not have that information at an individual level so we do not and cannot add it to the information we have on a person.

To win court battles on our core issue areas, the ACLU uses personal information to research violations of civil liberties and seek potential clients whose rights might have been violated. We also review demographic and legal data through FOIA requests of government agencies to determine if there is a disparate impact of policies and how to remedy that. For example, in our recent redistricting case in Alabama, Allen v. Milligan, we reviewed and analyzed legislative district maps and census data to assemble evidence for filing the case. The facts derived from that data allowed us to move quickly to file a legal challenge to the gerrymandered maps. This work led to a win at the Supreme Court, which ruled that Alabama’s congressional map diluted Black political power and affirmed the order that Alabama must redraw its congressional map to correct that.

Whether it is for advocacy, litigation, fundraising, or research, when we collect personal information, our usage aligns not only with state and federal laws — but also with the ACLU’s privacy and transparency values, for example:

• When collecting information, we strive to minimize what is collected and retained to the information that is needed for specific, limited, and legitimate purposes in support of our mission to safeguard, protect, and expand civil liberties for all people;
• We don’t use precise geolocation data, which means we don’t have information on your exact location or whereabouts;
• We don’t use “retargeting pixels,” which uses tracking technology to identify users as they travel across the internet and serve them ads based on that identification; and
• We work to keep your data safe and protect against unauthorized access to, and improper use of, personal information we collect online and offline through physical, technical, and administrative safeguards.

We are continually updating our practices, assessing our opportunities for growth, alerting our users to meaningful changes in our policies, and training our teams on vulnerabilities for protecting your data.

We strive to work with business partners and retain service providers whose privacy practices we feel confident about. That said, the reality is that not all of our business partners and service providers share our privacy values — companies that due to size and scale are unavoidable providers for nearly every organization today. What we do differently, however, is we push service providers and business partners to be better when we can, and when we cannot, we reevaluate what is truly needed and may forgo non-essential capabilities.

Here are some practices we have put in place to ensure our expectations on privacy are met by our core partners. When working with service providers who must access, store, handle, or process personal information in our possession, our Privacy & Data Governance team reviews their data practices. We also contractually require them to verify that they will meet our same confidentiality and security standards and make explicitly clear they cannot use the personal information we steward for their own purposes.

It is standard in the nonprofit sector for organizations to participate in list sharing arrangements and join nonprofit data co-ops. These practices allow us to do our work effectively, though we recognize they are imperfect and require constant scrutiny. So while we push for better industry standards to govern our entire sector, including for privacy laws that do not exempt nonprofits, we have implemented a few requirements we hold ourselves to. First, we only rent or exchange with reputable nonpartisan organizations on a single use basis. Second, we only join nonprofit data co-ops that promise not to share a person’s ACLU association with other co-op members. Third, information is only shared with service providers, not organizations themselves, to ensure the organization cannot repurpose the information.

The ACLU offers choices on how we process your information and makes it easy to change that information at any point. You can use this form to correct your information, ask us to tell you about the information we have about you, and request we delete or stop using your information. Our website already included the options for users to update their communication preferences, correct or update any information you may have shared, opt out of data sharing with non-ACLU platforms (i.e., targeted advertising), and opt out of list sharing with other organizations.

Recently, we took these options a step further: Now you can request information about what type of data we have collected about you, ask us to delete data, or request a copy of the information we have about you. ACLU National offers these choices to everyone, regardless of what state they live in and regardless of whether we are legally required to do so. The ACLU of Colorado and the ACLU of Virginia also offer these options. As we roll out this new and comprehensive function, it may take us some time to be as speedy as we hope to one day be, and we appreciate your patience while we improve and operationalize this critical offering.

As privacy and technology continue to evolve, we remain committed to upholding the highest standards when handling your personal information and updating our policy to reflect that evolution. We are equally committed to fighting for privacy laws that protect your information beyond your engagement with the ACLU. Here’s a snapshot of three efforts we’re leading to advance the right to privacy across the country:

• The ACLU is leading a nationwide movement to ensure communities — not private entities or government agencies — get to decide if and how surveillance technologies are used in their communities. Already, as part of ACLU-led campaigns, multiple towns and cities, including San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, California; Syracuse, New York; and Springfield, Boston, and Cambridge, Massachusetts have adopted bans on the government’s use of face recognition. Following another ACLU effort, the state of California bans use of the technology on police body cams.
• In Maine, we’ve been working to pass a biometrics privacy bill that would impose strict regulations on companies obtaining, selling, or retaining individuals’ facial, fingerprint, or eye scans. This bill is modeled after an Illinois law we helped pass back in 2008 that is known as the “gold standard” biometric privacy law.
• At a federal level, we are supporting the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would stop the government from skirting the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement and surveillance laws by purchasing Americans’ data from third-party brokers.

Additionally, we continue to push for federal legislation to establish a national baseline that provides robust privacy protections and places the onus on the entities that wish to collect and use our data – and have pushed for protections for our data from agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and others.

As we continue to fight for your privacy at the state and federal level across the country, we’ll work to ensure the values that drive our advocacy are reflected in our internal practices. We also acknowledge that no organization is immune to challenges when it comes to privacy. We have learned from our own challenges and experiences, as well as from those of our partner organizations, and recognize the need for rigorous evaluation and continuous improvement of our privacy practices. If you’d like to adjust the way we use your data, change the information we collect, or have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out.