On October 19, 2007, the feature film Rendition, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Alan Arkin, Peter Sarsgaard, and Meryl Streep, opened nationwide. The film tells the story of an American family torn apart when the father, Anwar El-Ibrahimi, is kidnapped by the C.I.A. from a Washington, D.C., airport. Anwar is flown to North Africa, where he is held captive and brutally tortured.
By Eric EaganThe New Mexico Supreme Court will review a decision by the NM Court of Appeals overturning a permanent injunction against an ordinance that enables Albuquerque police to seize and forfeit vehicles for a first-time arrest—not conviction—for DWI. In response to an ACLU of New Mexico lawsuit, State District Court Judge Theresa Baca struck down the ordinance in August, 2005 saying that it “has huge problems with procedural due process.”
Last May, the Court of Appeals reversed the district court on standing grounds, saying that the plaintiffs in the suit—the ACLU-NM and ACLU-NM Executive Director
The opportunity to have the State Supreme Court review the decision is crucial. Organizations like the ACLU must be able to challenge unconstitutional laws without waiting for someone to be harmed by the law first. Otherwise we might wait years before someone who is harmed by the law steps forward to be plaintiff in a civil rights law suit. And dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people will suffer unconstitutional takings of their personal property in the meantime. Families who run afoul of the law will lose their main means of seeing kids to school and parents to work.
Drunk driving shouldn’t be tolerated, but neither should people be punished for a crime that they may not have committed.
By Citizen Kayne
It's a shame that, in 2002, the Supreme Court had to go deciding that high schools had the right to subject the kids in the chess club to random drug tests. It's a shame not only because it seems like an invasion of privacy on a monumental level, but also because such a widely publicized ruling is bound to put the idea of random drug testing into the heads of school administrators who were too thick to come up with it themselves. Take Rio Rancho, for example. Some folks there would like to pass out pee cups to the kids who engage in school-sanctioned extracurricular activities. Like the choir. The marching band. And student government. Yep, gotta nip that kind of dangerous activity in the bud so these at-risk kids won't grow up to become drug pushers. Or politicians.
I guess things have changed a lot since I was in high school. Way back then I was always under the distinct impression that it was the kids who were smoking pot after school that had the drug problem, not the kids who were on the yearbook committee. My high school extracurricular activity of choice was the speech and debate team. I don't recall that we talked much about drugs, but we certainly didn't do them. I do recall that we talked a lot about sex, and we weren't doing that either.
The only time I think it's more or less legitimate to test people for drug use is when they, as a function of their jobs, operate heavy machinery, thereby posing a danger to themselves and others. You know, when the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. Apparently, since the members of high school marching bands everywhere now pose such a serious risk to public safety, I can only conclude that musical instruments have gotten much heavier and are now motorized. I had no idea.
I can't honestly say whether or not the specter of surprise drug testing would have kept me away from competing in speech tournaments. But I do know that it would have been a shame if it had. Participating on the speech and debate team was a lot of fun, I learned a lot about teamwork, and I learned to speak in front of people without fainting, and that's no small accomplishment. There's no telling how many high school students these days refrain from the kind of positive experiences that are offered by, say, the French club, because a few adults think they can't be trusted.
There are kids, I am certain, who will refrain not because they fear the test results, but simply on principle. They won't submit to such indignation because they know that the kids doing drugs after school don't waste their time hanging out with a bunch of foreign-language nerds. They also know that adults with advanced degrees in education should be smart enough to figure that out on their own. The adults who can't are the ones who should be tested — not for drug use but for the presence of signs of intelligence.
Sharon Kayne's "Citizen Kayne" column was published for seven long years in Crosswinds Weekly. She still can't get enough.
