[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Maya Harris
Executive Director
ACLU of Northern California

Today is the day we’ve been working for—a watershed for basic fairness and human dignity. The California Supreme Court has recognized that equality means that everyone must be free to marry the person they love.

Profound social change starts in California, and does not end here. It influences the rest of the nation. Today’s decision means that Californians will extend the franchise of fairness to gay and lesbian couples who enter into the committed, loving relationship we call “marriage.” And this decision will take its rightful historic place alongside those that have formally recognized what we, as Americans, have always aspired to: a more perfect, more egalitarian union of free people, free to choose our destiny, including whom to marry.

Californians consider bans on interracial marriage an embarrassing relic of bigotry—and so does the rest of the country. But in 1948, when the California Supreme Court struck down the state law barring interracial marriage, it blazed a brave new path for California and the nation. That decision changed California, and then it changed America.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Natasha Minsker

Heads up, Californians. Your state's death row is a money pit, and the government is throwing tons of taxpayer cash into it despite a wealth of evidence that it is a bad investment.

On Friday, March 28, the ACLU of Northern California released two reports on the state's capital punishment system. The Hidden Death Tax reveals for the first time the exorbitant cost of death penalty trials. In its analysis, the report tallies up a total post-conviction prosecution and law enforcement bill of $117 million to California taxpayers every year.

And it's no wonder the price is so steep, when you consider all of the hours prosecutors work on these cases. In the death penalty trial of Scott Peterson, for example, prosecution staff spent more than 20,000 hours on the case. In the death penalty trial of Rex Allen Krebs, prosecution staff spent more than 8,700 hours on the case. In the non-death penalty trial, prosecution staff logged only 1,600 hours.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Maya Harris
Executive Director
ACLU of Northern California

California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments today challenging the constitutionality of denying same-sex couples the benefits and protections of marriage in the state (Watch oral arguments online, on television, or at a community viewing center starting around 9 a.m.).

The ACLU, Lambda Legal, Heller Ehrman LLP, the Law Office of David Codell, and lead counsel National Center for Lesbian Rights are representing 15 committed gay and lesbian couples as well as Equality California and Our Family Coalition.

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Maya Harris
Executive Director
ACLU of Northern California

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Maya Harris
Executive Director
ACLU of Northern California