With the exception of Thurgood Marshall, no Supreme Court justice did more to realize the Constitution’s promise of “equal protection of the law” than Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday. Where Marshall, as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, succeeded in dismantling Jim Crow segregation, Ginsburg, as the first director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, persuaded the Supreme Court that women and men, long treated differently under the law, must be accepted as equals.

Neither acted alone; they carried the torches of the civil rights and women’s rights movements, respectively. Their courtroom arguments were buoyed by broader political currents. But both achieved far-reaching, historic changes in constitutional law. And both did it incrementally, through careful, painstaking work, aimed at appealing to those not already with them. As Ginsburg said, “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

In the last years of her life, Ginsburg became an unlikely celebrity. RBG T-shirts, mugs, earrings, bobblehead dolls, workout gear, and books all became best-sellers. In 2018, both a documentary, RBG, and a Hollywood feature film, On the Basis of Sex, appeared, to popular and critical acclaim. Chief Justice John Roberts quipped, at the unveiling of a portrait of Ginsburg, that his children asked him why he, too, didn’t have a rapper’s moniker. She deserved every bit of the praise. One of only nine women in a class of about five hundred at Harvard Law School, she broke many barriers, and her work made it possible for young women today to take for granted that they cannot be denied admission, jobs, or other benefits simply because of their sex. That’s radical.

Note: This piece was first published in the New York Review of Books on September 20, 2020

David Cole, ACLU Legal Director

In the past 10 weeks, the federal government has executed more people than in the last 57 years combined. This streak of fatalities are the result of Trump’s crude and cruel election-year efforts to prove himself as the “law and order president.”   

Now, the ACLU has received new, bombshell information about the high cost of President Trump and Attorney General William Barr’s rushed execution policy. The new data — which became available after the ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act request last month — speak loudly about just how willing this administration is to disregard the health and safety of the many to push its law and order agenda forward.

According to the documents, a BOP staff member worked with “a lot” of staff and “a lot of prisoners” while sick with Covid-19, without wearing a mask. The BOP tested just 22 staff, even though a previous declaration shows that the infected staff member was likely in contact with at least 100 people. The documents show that several of the staff members who came in contact with him declined testing, and the BOP adopted a risky new policy that allowed infected staff to return to work after just 10 days of no symptoms, without being retested for the virus.

Three people at Terre Haute prison have died from COVID-19 — two just last week — and many more have become sick, hospitalized, and held in solitary confinement as COVID-19 ravages the facility. This was all the predictable, preventable, and senseless result of the federal government carrying out the first federal executions in 17 years during a pandemic.

Trump’s deliberate decision to “play down” the threat of the pandemic undoubtedly encouraged the lax administrative conduct of the BOP and the reckless conduct of individual prison employees. From Bob Woodward’s Rage, we know from Trump himself that eight months of declaring COVID-19 a hoax, of sidelining and disparaging public health experts, and maligning mask-wearing Democrats, was a lie — a level of mendacity unheard of in the American political tradition. Two hundred thousand American lives have been lost to the pandemic, and to Trump’s version of American exceptionalism.

Given the revelations in Rage, is there any wonder that Trump and his DOJ would break and bend the law and legal processes in carrying out five executions this summer?  Trump’s executions broke every rule for reducing COVID-19 risks, and spikes in COVID-19 cases at Terre Haute were the predictable result. People without death sentences are dying so that Trump can kill death row prisoners during a pandemic.

Such collateral damage was all but guaranteed, given the well documented super-spreader nature of prisons, and the compounding factors of travel required by these federal executions. The BOP didn’t even bother to require staff to wear masks, according to the FOIA documents we received.

In July 2019, the Federal Government announced that it planned to move forward to schedule executions of federal prisoners for the first time nearly two decades. Then, on June 15, 2020, new execution dates were made public. Just days after this announcement, the United States had back-to-back record highs in daily new COVID-19 infections. In response to these growing numbers, accompanied by a rising death toll, many states paused their reopening plans and some even began imposing restrictions they had lifter earlier.

Meanwhile, the Federal Government gathered hundreds of people at FCC Terre Haute, a facility with known cases of COVID-19, for the purpose of carrying out the executions of Daniel Lee on July 14, Wesley Purkey on July 16, and Dustin Honken on July 17. Following the back to-back July executions, the county where the prison is located experienced a major surge in confirmed COVID-19 cases.

In spite of this public health outcome, the federal government proceeded to execute Lezmond Mitchell and Keith Nelson at FCC Terre Haute on August 26 and 28, respectively. This week, the federal government plans to execute two more people: William LeCroy and Christopher Vialva.

So, let’s review what the ACLU’s FOIA findings tell us about Trump and Barr’s execution spree:

• The lives of BOP staff members do not matter
• The lives of family members (of victims and of prisoners) who participate in federal executions don’t matter
• The lives of lawyers and journalists whose professional responsibility compels them to participate in the execution process, do not matter

The federal government’s failure to protect the American people from COVID-19 cannot be obfuscated by its decision to rush through the first federal executions in nearly two decades. Indeed, the data make clear that those topics are intrinsically related. The pandemic has shown us that our health and well-being are more connected to one another’s than we even realized. Despite Trump and Barr’s wishes, there is simply no way to ignore the health, safety, and humanity of incarcerated people, without degrading our own. 

Henderson Hill, Senior Staff Attorney, Capital Punishment Project, ACLU

Dear Florida Legislators:

Across Florida, returning citizens continue fighting for our right to vote. After Florida voters passed the Voter Restoration Amendment (Amendment 4) in 2018 with 65 percent of the vote, it automatically restored voting rights to returning citizens who completed their sentences, except those who committed murder or felony sexual offenses. But those with power quickly instituted a poll tax, requiring all returning citizens to pay all outstanding legal financial obligations before regaining the right to vote. Many brave Floridians challenged this poll tax, Senate Bill 7066 (SB7066), in the federal courts, and recently, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Florida voters and returning citizens. A majority of the appeals court blessed Florida’s pay-to-vote scheme.

Despite the appeals court’s ruling, those with power must understand SB7066 is part of a larger effort to deny those who have served their sentences their dignity and fundamental rights. After completing our sentences, many returning citizens struggle to find sustainable employment and housing. Although we have served our time, we are often on the receiving end of stigmatization and ostracization by our neighbors and the larger community, which makes it more challenging for us to become contributing members of our communities. Further, many others in government, who claim to champion democracy, continue to propose laws to eliminate returning citizens’ abilities to participate in civic engagement by criminalizing our votes and prohibiting us from becoming full-fledged, productive members of our community. This government action eliminates returning citizens’ abilities to become reintegrated.

Having a real second chance to make positive change and become a contributing member of our communities is met with numerous hurdles and obstacles the day we re-enter society. It harms us, and it harms our families and our loved ones.

Our elected leaders must understand having the ability to vote supports rehabilitation. Acknowledging returning citizens’ humanity and dignity makes our redemption and full rehabilitation possible. An unconstitutional poll tax most of us cannot afford to pay should not destroy our chance at redemption.

Returning citizens’ voices should be heard, and our votes should be counted for our children’s welfare. Please do not silence us and deprive us of the right to preserve our rights and our loved ones’ rights.

The state provides scant resources for returning citizens’ rehabilitation. The lack of meaningful resources for returning citizens who primarily come from low-income communities renders rehabilitation illusory when the government releases us into the same broken communities those in power already see as worthless. This perpetuates a cycle of poverty and disproportionately impacts and discriminates against low-income communities of color. Depriving us our ability to vote makes creating positive change within our communities impossible.

SB7066 makes it nearly impossible for returning citizens to have the second chance in life that the Voter Restoration Amendment promised us and our families. When SB7066 is combined with other suppression policies, our voices are silenced at the ballot box, we are held back from employment opportunities, and resources are withheld from the communities to which we return. Returning citizens are not asking for a handout, but a hand up from the social injustices stifling our futures.

We must also hear and remember the people still in overcrowded jails and prisons who are threatened by or suffering from COVID-19 with little-to-no protections or medical treatments.  Their lives and voices also matter.

Please, hear us. We have paid our debts to society and deserve a second chance. Give us a reason to believe our government also cares about us. Twelve-year-old Keedron Bryant recently wrote a song protesting police brutality containing a message we embrace that we also want you to hear: “We just want to live. God, please protect us”.

Tranassa White is a prison reform advocate and resident of Escambia County.