On a late summer night last year, at around 10pm, 50-year-old army veteran Douglas Edmisten began twisting and turning in his bed. Something wasn’t right.  He moaned in agony, grabbing his stomach. He was experiencing abdominal pain so severe that he vomited blood and lost all color in his face.  Those around him called for help, fearing his life was in immediate danger, but their pleas were in vain.  By dawn, Douglas Edmisten had died an excruciating death from internal bleeding.

He could have been saved.  He deserved to be saved. But Douglas was a prisoner. And the staff at Cibola County Detention Center, who failed to provide him medical treatment for seven hours, didn’t value his life enough to call him an ambulance until it was too late. 

The minor misdemeanor offenses he was charged with turned into a death sentence

The minor misdemeanor offenses he was charged with turned into a death sentence. Worse yet, Edmisten was scheduled to be released on bond the day before he died, but for an unknown reason, the bondsmen pulled the bond back.

Video footage and court documents in a wrongful-death suit brought by his family reveal gross negligence on the part of prison leadership and medical personnel, who continually sent him back from the medical unit to his jail pod in general population, even after he’d collapsed and defecated blood. 

It was left to fellow inmates to comfort Douglas.  One prisoner held his head while another read to him from a bible. At one point, a group of inmates held hands and prayed around him.

Sadly, what happened to Douglas is not unusual.  Every day, men, women, and children suffer behind bars, deprived of adequate medical care and of their constitutional rights.  Even though the courts have affirmed for nearly forty years that ignoring a prisoner’s serious medical needs amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, thousands of inmates are denied sufficient medical care each year. 

New Mexico desperately needs jail and prison reform that will end cruel, inhuman, and degrading conditions of confinement that strip inmates of their dignity and health.

But we need more than that.

We need to revise pre-trial policies that make underprivileged Americans, like Douglas, dependent on the bail bond industry for their freedom. Locking people up because they lack sufficient financial resources for release runs counter to the American principle that one is innocent until proven guilty.

In November 2016, New Mexico took a step in the right direction.  We passed a constitutional amendment stipulating that only those defendants who pose great danger to the community should be held without bail.  The amendment states that those who pose no such danger and are not a flight risk are eligible for release, even if they can’t afford bail so that defendants are no longer locked up “solely because of financial inability.” In late June of this year, the Supreme Court issued rules that govern how the amendment is to be carried out.

These rules were not in effect at the time Douglas was sent to pre-trial detention, but if they were he’d likely still be alive.

While we’re hopeful that the new pretrial detention rules may alter an egregious pattern of disproportionately incarcerating the poor, we remain vigilant.  We must keep a careful watch on the courts and the district attorneys to ensure they comply with Supreme Courts rules, as well as on the for-profit bail bond industry, which has a strong and powerful lobbying arm.

And we must continue fighting to ensure that inmates get the lifesaving healthcare they are entitled to under the law. Denying inmates medical treatment is not only morally repugnant, it’s unconstitutional.

Douglas lost his freedom because he lacked the money to post bond. He lost his life because Cibola County Detention Center didn’t think his life was worth the cost of a hospital bill.  The rights to life and liberty shouldn’t come with a price tag, and the cost of poverty shouldn’t be death.

In 2014, the U.S. Marshals raided the Sarasota Police Department before the break of dawn. Their mission: to steal police records that were slated to be turned over to the ACLU of Florida in just a few short hours. These records, which were requested by the ACLU under Florida public records law, contained information about the department’s use of Stingrays, controversial cellphone surveillance devices so shrouded in secrecy that the federal government would rather raid a police department than risk the public knowing the details of their use.

Stingrays, also known as “cell site simulators” or “IMSI catchers” work by mimicking cellphone towers and tricking phones within range into transmitting their locations and identifying information.  And it’s not just criminal suspects’ information that’s being swept up. The devices collect the cellular data of unsuspecting bystanders who happen to be in the area.

You could be the victim of Stingray surveillance at any time, and you’d likely never know.

You could be the victim of Stingray surveillance at any time, and you’d likely never know. The only indications that your phone may be connecting to a Stingray device might be small glitches, like a dropped call, downgrade in connection level, or a change in the time on your phone.

The Department of Justice’s Electronic Surveillance Manual indicates that the devices are capable of not only accessing the precise location of cellphone users, but also of retrieving cellphone browser activity, SMS text messages, and the content of phone calls. Given the personal nature of the communications, images, and data stored on the average American’s phone, the indiscriminate and invasive nature of Stingray technology should deeply trouble us all.

The Marshal's unlawful seizure of public records in Florida epitomizes the lengths that law enforcement agencies will go to keep the details of these sophisticated snooping devices hidden from you, the public, at all costs. Defense attorneys across the nation report instances of prosecutors dropping cases or offering plea bargains to people suspected of violent crimes when the source of police evidence is challenged.  If it comes down to a choice between revealing the use of Stingray technology or letting potentially violent criminals go free, law enforcement chooses the latter.

While not always this extreme, law enforcement departments routinely stonewall public records requests for information about this technology all over the country.

And it's happening here in New Mexico.

In May, we filed a public records request with the City of Albuquerque to determine if the Albuquerque Police Department uses Stingrays and what procedures govern their use. Citing the “law enforcement exemption” in IPRA law—a favorite stonewalling tactic—APD denied our request.

So, we sued. The only way to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the use of these powerful surveillance devices is to demand transparency.   

It is unclear to us where and how often the government deploys these devices, what rules govern their use, and how long Stingray data is stored because a matrix of non-disclosure agreements between the largest manufacturer of Stingray technology, the Harris Corporation, federal agencies, and local law enforcement, keep the use of these devices shrouded in secrecy. These agreements prevent local law enforcement from disclosing ownership and use of the technology to the public and even to the courts. 

What is clear, however, is the lack of transparency around these powerful devices opens the door to widespread abuse of law enforcement power at the state and federal levels and at the expense of American citizens.

We know these devices are used in at least 24 states and the District of Columbia, as well as by 13 federal agencies.  But many questions remain and the ACLU is dedicated to fighting for answers.

Just last month, the ACLU of Florida won an important victory in its long-term battle to secure public records seized by the U.S. Marshals Service in Sarasota back in 2014 when the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in its favor.  While this case is still not fully resolved, it shows that determined privacy rights advocates like the ACLU are beginning to chip away at the walls our government has erected around its domestic surveillance programs. No one should have to worry that police are sifting through their data without a warrant, and we won't stop until fighting until your digital privacy is secured.