The 10 Worst Civil Liberties Violations of 2014

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/12/civil_liberties_violations_of_2014_civil_forfeiture_grand_juries_religion.html

t’s been an exceptionally awful year.

By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern


Trust between police and citizens fell precipitously in 2014.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call; Scott Olson/Getty Images; Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The world may not actually be falling apart—but it feels like America is. From police brutality and botched executions to voter suppression and election corruption, 2014 was a terrible year for civil liberties in the United States. Protests were quelled by military-grade weapons in scenes worthy of a banana republic, and the divide between the rich and the poor in the freedom and justice they are afforded is Dickensian in its scope. While the country has evolved on marriage equality, it often appears to be backtracking on just about every other advance we have made, from the racial and gender progress of the 1960s to the most basic principles of the criminal justice system. Below, we’ve listed the top 10 civil liberties nightmares of 2014 in no particular order. Here’s hoping this list is harder to put together next year.

10. The Supreme Court adds more sectarian religion to our lives.

In Town of Greece v. Galloway, the Supreme Court’s five conservatives ruled that legislative sessions in town council meetings can open with explicitly sectarian prayers. Almost immediately, town boards began inviting Christians to speak at their meetings while excluding speakers of minority faiths (and, naturally, atheists). In short order the Galloway majority’s gauzy vision of pluralistic civic tolerance began to look a lot more like a governmental endorsement of Christianity at the expense of minority religions. Increasingly, to the conservatives of the Roberts court, “religious liberty” means the freedom of religious majorities to push their religious beliefs on the rest of us. Speaking of which …

9. The Supreme Court invites our corporate bosses to takes away our birth control.

In the court’s Hobby Lobby decision, the same five conservatives ruled that “closely held corporations” had a religious right to deny female employees certain forms of birth control, if those employers believe the device or method causes abortions. It matters not at all whether the device or method in fact causes abortions. Writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito downplayed the notion that women’s health and autonomy are “compelling interests,” leaving female employees’ intensely private health care choices at the mercy of their bosses. Alito reasoned that employees could rely on the government’s birth control accommodation granted to religious hospitals and colleges —then the court immediately suggested that the accommodation might be against the law, too.

8. Secrecy and botched executions.

In January the state of Oklahoma executed Michael Lee Wilson using a secret chemical cocktail. Twenty seconds after the injection of the drugs—which Oklahoma claimed would ensure a painless death—Wilson said, “I can feel my whole body burning.” Three months later, Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett with another secret drug cocktail; the procedure turned into a brutal torture session after the drugs left Lockett “writhing and bucking” on the gurney. In July the state of Arizona executed Joseph R. Wood III using a protocol of secret drugs. The procedure took two excruciating hours during which, according to witnesses, Wood gasped and snorted. Arizona officials insisted that Wood hadn’t suffered—then added that if he had, he would’ve deserved it.

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