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american civil liberties union
The Criminalization of Tyreek Hill
The detainment of the Miami Dolphins star is an example of what happens when society refuses to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.
Sep 14, 2024
In the old 1990s Nike commercials, Mars Blackmon, played by Spike Lee, asks basketball great Michael Jordan, “Is it the shoes?”
In a much more serious, disturbing incident, Tyreek Hill, star wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, was taken down, handcuffed, kneed in the back, and manhandled by Miami-Dade police not far from the stadium where he plays.
I can guarantee you it wasn’t the shoes that got the attention of officers in a potentially deadly encounter.
It was the car, the constant criminalization of Black men, and a refusal to hold cops accountable for their actions—especially when violating Black people.
But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?
Hill, a well-paid athlete, was driving an expensive car. He’s paid his dues, sacrificed, and should be able to enjoy the fruits of his labors. He was a short distance from his Black job.
But “Driving While Black” has long been a crisis in America, and you don’t have to drive a fine car to be targeted.
“Almost every African-American or Latino can tell a story about being pulled over by the police for no apparent reason other than the color of his or her skin, especially if he or she happened to be driving in the ‘wrong place’ at the ‘wrong time’ or even driving the ‘wrong car,’” said the American Civil Liberties Union, citing cases stretching back to the 1990s.
Hill was born March 1, 1994.
“Victims of these racially motivated traffic stops rarely receive a traffic ticket or are found guilty of any violation of the law. It’s a practice called Driving While Black,” said the ACLU. “The U.S. Supreme Court established an open season on motorists in 1996 when it ruled that police could use any traffic offense as an excuse to pull a car over.” Black and White drivers engaged in illegalities “at about the same rate—28.4% in searches of Blacks and 28.8% in searches of whites.”
Yet, the ACLU noted, 41% of Black Americans say they have been stopped or detained by police because of their race and 21% of Black adults, including 30% of Black men, reported being victims of police violence.
Hill came before microphones September 8 saying he did nothing wrong and was confused about what happened and why. He calmly explained how his mother taught him to be respectful and cooperative, how he wanted to be a police officer and respected them. There are bad apples everywhere, he continued. But, he added, what if he had not been a bigtime athlete? What’s the worst case scenario?
Death.
“If Dexter Reed had not been stopped by Chicago police, he would still be with us,” Laura Washington wrote earlier this year about a controversial Chicago case.
Body cam footage of his killing, which many call an execution, captured the 26-year-old Black man sitting in his SUV. Five cops in street clothes jumped out on him in a city known for often violent, deadly carjackings.
“One demanded that Reed roll down his car window. At first, Reed complied, then rolled the window back up. Officers screamed and shouted more demands. Reed started shooting,” Washington wrote. A civilian oversight body said an officer was wounded in the wrist.
“The officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds. Reed staggered out of the car on the driver’s side and stumbled to the ground. The officers kept shooting. Three of those shots came while Reed was lying ‘motionless on the ground,’ according to Andrea Kersten of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability,” wrote Washington.
“This tragedy leaves us with so many questions. For example, the police say he was being stopped for not wearing a seat belt. How did the officers know he wasn’t wearing the belt, since his car had tinted windows? On the video, the officers, wearing street clothes, drive hard and fast, jump out, and surround Reed’s car.”
“Did Reed shoot out of terror?” she asked in a Chicago Tribune piece.
Organizing around Reed’s death has been going on in the Windy City with many outraged and demanding justice.
“Chicago police officers reported making more than a half million stops last year on the city streets, continuing to stop Black and Brown motorists at rates disproportionate to their numbers in the driving population,” the ACLU reported in 2024. “In 2023, CPD officers stopped Black drivers at a rate 3.75 times that of white drivers and stopped Latino drivers at a rate 2.73 times that of white drivers. These disparities are similar to racial disparities reported in prior years in Chicago. CPD has never explained why it disproportionately stops Black and Latino drivers.”
There are bad apples in every system. But when institutions fail to act to correct wrongs—especially with folks having guns, handcuffs, and badges—the whole system is rotten.
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High Court's Ruling, Say Critics, Endorses 'Torturing People to Death'
"Under the Court's new rule, it would not matter whether the State intended to use midazolam, or instead to have petitioners drawn and quartered, slowly tortured to death, or actually burned at the stake," write dissenting justices.
Jun 29, 2015
In the most closely-watched death penalty case in years, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled 5-4 (pdf) that Oklahoma can use the controversial and experimental execution drug midazolam that was behind last year's horrific killing of 38-year-old man Clayton Lockett--who writhed and groaned for 43 minutes before ultimately succumbing to a heart attack.
The decision not only gives the approval for states to use a killing method that many regard as torture, but it also amounts to an ideological defense of the death penalty itself--however cruel. Writing for the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito stated:
Our decisions in this area have been animated in part by the recognition that because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional, "[i]t necessarily follows that there must be a [constitutional] means of carrying it out." And because some risk of pain is inherent in any method of execution, we have held that the Constitution does not require the avoidance of all risk of pain. After all, while most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good fortune. Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether.
The ruling was slammed by dissenting justices as deeply inhumane.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor--joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan--wrote that the majority decision "leaves petitioners exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake."
"[U]nder the Court's new rule, it would not matter whether the State intended to use midazolam, or instead to have petitioners drawn and quartered, slowly tortured to death, or actually burned at the stake: because petitioners failed to prove the availability of sodium thiopental or pentobarbital, the State could execute them using whatever means it designated," the dissent states.
In a separate dissent authored by Breyer and joined by Ginsburg, the justices question the lawfulness of state executions overall, writing it is "highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment."
Four people incarcerated on death row--one of whom has since been executed--brought the case Glossip v. Gross, arguing that the state's use of midazolam in lethal injections violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The drug has been used in executions across the country due to a shortage of other lethal injection drugs--driven by a European boycott of the death penalty.
For its lethal injection procedure, Oklahoma uses three drugs: to anesthetize, paralyze, and stop the person's heart. The plaintiffs argued that use of midazolam as an anesthetic does not adequately protect them against pain, as it is a sedative used to treat anxiety and does not have the ability to make individuals unconscious.
Sixteen pharmacology professors agreed with this argument in an amicus brief: "Midazolam is incapable of rendering an inmate unconscious prior to the injection of the second and third drugs in the State of Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol."
Meanwhile, the credibility of Oklahoma's key witness, Dr. Roswell Lee Evans, was called into question by numerous factors, including his use of 150 pages of printouts from drugs.com, a website whose disclaimer indicates its contents are "not intended for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment."
Critics charged that the Supreme Court's decision flies in the face of evidence and underscores the cruelty of the death penalty overall.
"Today's 5-4 decision ignores the evidence and endorses a state's right to torture people to death absent any other alternative," said Cassandra Stubbs, director of the Capital Punishment Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, in a press statement released Monday.
"As powerfully set forth in the dissent, capital punishment in the United States is unreliable and arbitrary, racially biased and geographically skewed," Stubbs continued. "Much of America has turned away from the death penalty, leaving only a handful of counties insisting on putting people to death. The time has come to end this nation's disastrous experiment with capital punishment."
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Families of Drone Victims: No Hope for Justice in US Courts
'I have no faith left in a judiciary that refuses even to hear whether Abdulrahman, an American child, was wrongfully killed by his own government.'
Jun 04, 2014
The surviving family members of three American citizens killed in U.S. drone strikes in Yemen decided this week to discontinue an effort to hold top military and CIA officials accountable in U.S. courts for targeted executions without trial, saying their faith that they can achieve justice has been "shattered."
"I have now spent years asking American courts to decide whether the U.S. government can deprive even its own citizens of life as part of a killing program that has devastated families like ours, and the courts have repeatedly accepted the government's broad claims of national security and told me they will not decide," said Nasser Al Aulaqi, who lost his son and grandson in the attacks, in a statement emailed to Common Dreams. "This isn't justice."
U.S. drone strikes in September 2011 killed U.S. citizens Anwar Al Aulaqi, who had been placed on a "kill list," and Samir Khan, as well as three other people. Just weeks later, another U.S. drone attack on a restaurant in Yemen killed Anwar Al-Aulaqi's son Abdulrahman, also a U.S. citizen, and six other civilians.
"I have no faith left in a judiciary that refuses even to hear whether Abdulrahman, an American child, was wrongfully killed by his own government." --Nasser Al Aulaqi
The father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, Nasser Al-Aulaqi, and mother of Samir Khan, Sarah Khan, sued four top officials--including Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Leon C. Panetta and former CIA Director David Petraeus--in July 2012, charging they had taken the lives of U.S. citizens without due process. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union helped levy the lawsuit.
"In claiming the power to target and kill individuals, including U.S. citizens, without due process and far from any field of armed conflict, the U.S. government is effectively turning the whole world into a potential battlefield with incalculable harm to the lives of people everywhere," declared CCR in a fact sheet about the case.
In April 2014, years after the lawsuit was filed, federal judge Rosemary M. Collyer of the DC District Court dismissed of the case.
Family members chose not to appeal the dismissal, and the deadline for filing an appeal expired Tuesday. "My faith was shattered by the district court's opinion, which went out of its way to defer to the government's claims of killing authority, without allowing those claims to be challenged," said Nasser Al Aulaqi. "I have no faith left in a judiciary that refuses even to hear whether Abdulrahman, an American child, was wrongfully killed by his own government."
Nasser Al Aulaqi also sued the Obama administration in 2010 in a bid to prevent the targeted killing of his son, but that effort was dismissed as well.
In a statement by the ACLU and CCR, emailed to Common Dreams on Wednesday, the organizations declared, "The U.S. government killed three Americans without due process. Their families asked a U.S. court to fulfill its crucial role in deciding whether the government's claims of killing authority are lawful. Getting answers in court for the state's killing of citizens should not be too much to ask in a democracy, but our system of checks and balances failed these families."
In this short video produced by CCR and the ACLU, Nasser Al Aulaqi discusses the life and loss of his grandson, Abdulrahman:
An American Teenager Killed, A Grandfather Seeks AccountabilityFor more, go to: https://www.aclu.org/targetedkillings https://www.ccrjustice.org/targetedkillings Nasser Al-Aulaqi lost his grandson, ...
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