A recent Michigan Court of Appeals decision in People v. Rogers points the way to civil rights protections for Michigan’s LGBTQ+ community.

In July 2018, Kimora Steuball, a transgender woman, had a terrifying encounter with Deonton Autez Rogers at a Detroit gas station. Rogers started harassing Steuball when he saw that she was transgender, then shot her in the shoulder after refusing to show him her genitalia. 

Along with two assault with deadly firearm charges, Wayne County prosecutors also brought charges against Rogers under the Ethnic Intimidation Act, Michigan’s hate crimes law. However, Rogers argued that the Ethnic Intimidation Act, unlike federal hate crime laws, didn’t include transgender people.

When the trial court agreed to dismiss Rogers’ charges, Wayne County prosecutors appealed to the Michigan Court of Appeals, which upheld the dismissal, stating that transgender people weren’t covered under the Ethnic Intimidation Act under the designated category of gender.

The Court of Appeals reached this conclusion even though numerous federal courts, including the Sixth Circuit of Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Michigan, had already ruled that discrimination against transgender people violates civil rights laws and the term “gender” is synonymous with sex.

The Court of Appeals decision was concerning because the most recent FBI Hate Crimes Report documented that hate crimes against transgender people have increased over the past two years. In 2019 alone, at least 27 transgender or gender non-conforming people were fatally shot or killed.

With that in mind, the case was appealed to the Michigan Supreme Court. The ACLU of Michigan, with the National ACLU, filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Michigan Supreme Court, urging the Court to reverse the Court of Appeals’ decision that transgender people aren’t covered under Michigan’s hate crimes law. 

In our brief, we asked the Court to consider the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Bostock v Clayton County. In this case, the ACLU’s friend and client, Aimee Stephens, a successful and empathetic funeral director, was fired for coming out as transgender. As a result, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark victory that discrimination against gay and transgender employees is sex discrimination and violates federal civil rights law. 

While the ACLU doesn’t support criminal penalties in a legal system that disproportionately targets people of color, we believe that the Court of Appeals’ interpretation regarding the hate crimes law would’ve had harmful implications for LGBTQ+ people seeking civil rights protection.

In light of the Bostock ruling, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered the Court of Appeals to reconsider Steuball’s case decision. On August 5, 2021, the Court of Appeals reversed its initial decision. It determined that crimes against transgender people are covered under Michigan’s hate crime law under the category of gender, representing a significant victory for LGBTQ+ people. This decision is essential for redressing violent incidents against transgender people and providing guidance in a current critical civil rights case — Rouch World v. Michigan Department of Civil Rights. 

In Rouch World, the Michigan Supreme Court will decide whether Michigan’s civil rights laws, which prohibit sex discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public accommodations, cover LGBTQ+ people. 

No doubt, the Court will consider both the Bostock legal analysis and the Rogers decision. Bearing that in mind, we believe there is a legal path to finding full civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people in Michigan, and the Rogers decision is a helpful step along the way.

To read the full article on the Pride Source, click here.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, our country repeatedly suffered his administration’s attacks on the First Amendment, including freedom of the press. Now, the Biden administration Department of Justice is quietly taking up the Trump mantle to fight free press, free speech, and government transparency in court.

The U.S. Freedom Press Tracker has documented the recent demise of press freedom, marking an unprecedented year of attacks on press in 2020 during Black Lives Matter and other anti-police violence protests across the country. Last year, the ACLU of Oregon challenged federal law enforcement’s targeting of journalists and legal observers who were documenting the severe violence that local and federal police unleashed on Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland. The ACLU of Oregon and co-counsel from BraunHagey & Borden secured critical judicial orders against the Portland police and federal Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals Service officers that prohibited them from dispersing, arresting, and using excessive force against press and legal observers.

But now, Biden’s lawyers are trying to undo that work while refusing to make any changes to federal policing policy that would ensure journalists and legal observers are protected while documenting police activity at protests. This would be a huge step back in preserving our fundamental right to freedom of the press. This is why the ACLU, the ACLU of Oregon, and partner organizations sent a letter today calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to permanently adopt protections for journalists and legal observers at protests, and place restrictions on law enforcement’s ability to interfere with journalists and legal observers covering protests.

Freedom of the press is part of the fabric of our democracy. It acts as both a check against government power and a tool for enabling the public to make informed decisions.This is why it’s critical for journalists to have the protections they need to keep the public informed. The ACLU’s letter to Attorney General Garland asks that the DOJ’s Law Enforcement Guidelines for First Amendment Protected Events be updated to include the same basic protections for press and legal observers that the court’s previous order established, including:

• Prohibiting federal officials from arresting, threatening to arrest, or using physical force against any person whom they know or reasonably should know is a journalist or legal observer, unless there is probable cause to believe that person committed a crime.
• Not requiring journalists and legal observers to disperse following a dispersal order, even though they are bound by all other laws and may not interfere with law enforcement’s lawful activities.
• Prohibiting federal officials from ordering any journalist or legal observer to stop recording, photographing, recording, or observing a protest, unless that person is arrested based on probable cause.

The ACLU of Oregon’s lawsuit seeks to protect the public’s ability to know what its government is doing when it chooses to use violence on its own people. It was one of many lawsuits that flooded the courts last year, from Portland to Minneapolis to Indianapolis to Seattle, as police responded to calls to end police violence with more police violence. The ACLU of Oregon lawsuit is one of four cases that the ACLU of Oregon filed against federal law enforcement in Portland alone.

While the Biden administration has publicly extolled the importance of freedom of the press to our democracy, counsel for the federal government in these cases began trying to dismiss our clients’ claims from court and explicitly defending the Trump administration’s policing of the protests and the policies that guided it. The DOJ maintains that even though it refuses to make any changes to how federal officers police protests — and seeks to preserve law enforcement’s ability to violently disperse reporters and legal observers trying to cover the protests — the claims are now “moot” because our clients no longer face a substantial risk of harm given changes in federal leadership and in the tempo of Portland protests. Rather than coming to the table to seek resolution with our clients, they seem to want to rest easy behind the facade of: New President, who dis?

The Biden DOJ’s choice to resist accountability for the Trump administration’s racism and brutality in court, while lauding its own small acts of doing the right thing, does nothing more than maintain the status quo of decades of harmful federal policing. Forgive us, Mr. President, if we do not find comfort in the “just trust us” approach.

If the Trump era taught us anything, it was that protecting our most basic human rights requires tight reins on law enforcement, independent of the whims of leadership. If our country’s broader history has taught us anything, it is that Black lives will not be safe if American society continues its reliance on broad police authority for our general welfare. George Floyd’s murder being captured on camera underscores the importance of being able to document police violence and abuse. We call on Attorney General Garland and the Biden administration to take responsibility for the violence of our federal agencies, review their policies, and rewrite them so that what happened last year to protesters and press never happens again.

UPDATE 9/30/21: In response to our letter, Senators Wyden, Merkley, Booker, Ossof and Van Hollen sent a collective letter urging the DOJ to protect journalists’ First Amendment rights, including urging the DOJ to permanently adopt protections for journalists and legal observers at protests in the DOJ’s Law Enforcement Guidelines for First Amendment Protected Events.

If you’ve been to a restaurant lately and scanned a QR code rather than order from a physical menu, you likely paid for that meal with not just your money, but your privacy and security too. Businesses are taking advantage of the rise of touchless services during the pandemic to harvest massive amounts of sensitive information about who we are, where we go, and what we do, including our eating and drinking habits — when all we want to do is just eat a meal.

In the past decade, technology companies and the advertising industry have created a vast and extremely lucrative online spying apparatus. They try to collect information about every click we make online and package it into profiles to be shared, sold, and used in ways we couldn’t even imagine, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. These surveillance capitalists have long wanted to link online profiling to our physical movements to pry even further into our private lives. Manipulating us into scanning QR codes instead of ordering from a physical menu is a way for these companies to achieve their dream of online-offline tracking by inserting all the machinery of the online advertising ecosystem between you and your food.

You may not have thought much about what actually happens when you open your phone and click on a QR code at a restaurant. Sometimes it just opens the restaurant’s web page. But many of the QR codes you see in restaurants are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information with other companies. In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior. Plus, as your phone opens the website or app, all the terrible privacy practices of our current online and mobile environments come into play: cookies, your phone’s advertising ID number, and device fingerprinting. There is an entire industry dedicated to using these and other technologies to identify you — precisely — so that a visit to a restaurant can be connected to all your other tracked activities to create a detailed profile of who you are, where you go, what you do, and your interests and habits.

In China, this technology has been used to create a network of mandatory checkpoints used to track citizens as they moved throughout society. While that hopefully could never happen in the United States, if the codes become pervasive enough, an advertising-based equivalent could certainly arise. And your personal information collected by companies can be shared with or accessed by the government for surveillance. In recent years, we’ve seen how information collected by prayer apps has been used to target and surveil Muslim Americans, and how location information of devices has been used to surveil people protesting for racial justice. In Australia, where QR codes have been put to widespread use for COVID contact tracing, the police have already tapped into these treasure troves of personal information.

When restaurants make owning a smartphone and being able to scan a QR code the default for being served a meal, that also has significant implications for equity. Many people do not have a smartphone, including more than 40 percent of people over 65 and 25 percent of people who make less than $30,000 per year. People with disabilities and the unhoused are also less likely to own one. These are some of our most vulnerable communities.

QR codes can also pose security risks. A QR code transfers data directly into your phone that you can’t read, and it could trigger an action that you can’t scrutinize before it happens. That’s an inherently risky thing to do, like blindly clicking a link in an unknown e-mail. Depending on your operating system, QR code reader app, or the QR code itself, you may not get the chance to inspect the proposed action, or you might be distracted or hungry and take the action without considering it carefully. Some scammers have been known to put their own QR code sticker over a legitimate QR code, redirecting anyone who scans it to a subtly different payment target, or to a website that hosts malware. Some QR code software is not trustworthy, and an honest but naïve business may inadvertently steer people to a malware site. Even a legitimate URL can be repurposed by an attacker if the website gets compromised or its domain name expires.

Whether technology helps or harms us depends on its purpose, the people who build it, and how we control and use these technologies. Based on current privacy and security risks of QR codes, we recommend that people:

• Treat any QR code like a link in an unknown email: Be wary and pay attention to the context in which it appears.
• When not certain a code can be trusted, consider seeking the information another way, such as by manually navigating to the business or organization’s website.
• Use software that allows you to inspect the QR code or the action it will take before it is passed to your browser or any other app.
• Keep an eye out for any QR code that has been pasted on top of another one.
• In restaurants, continue to use a physical menu. We now know that it’s highly unlikely to spread the virus by touching a piece of paper.

With the privacy threats, equity concerns, and security risks of QR codes, no business should require anyone to scan a QR code or make it difficult for people to continue to use a physical menu if they want one. COVID has already cost our communities so much. Now is the time to make sure that any technology we use is working for us, not putting more of our personal information and power into the hands of companies who profit at our expense.