stabbed to death by a parolee. that night there were 82 beds available on skid row. the business improvement district outreach team could persuade only two people living on the streets to use them. those people have lots of advocates that were living on the streets who didn't have much of a political voice or advocates who are the immigrant entrepreneurs who would, in the morning, have to clean hypodermic needles and feces from their doorsteps or other business owners who needed to get to work. they're mostly immigrant workers. so, i think that there is also -- it's not just individual rights against the government and the common good. i think that simplifies it. it's one group of individuals against another group of individuals, who are not, these days, very well served by our

advocacy groups or by the courts. the judges in downtown l.a., who have been ruling on these rolling set of lawsuits that have been brought don't seem to have spent much time on skid row to actually see the efforts of the police there to try and convince people to get treatment, to take advantage of the services that are available to them and improve life for everybody. >> okay. now all of these issues deserve panels of their own, don't they? we have four students here. it's their school. i want to bring them in here. they can raise some of these. i'll start with you, akiel

elaine? >> aleem. >> i ready that there has been some -- i read that there has been some controversy in the aclu ranks over the united decision. i also read that they filed a brief over the petition in that case before the supreme court. of course, that was -- that raised a lot of dander with critics of that decision. so, i was wondering whether the aclu's current position on government regulation of political campaign contributions has changed or whether it's remained the same. either way, what can you tell us? in particular, mr. shapiro and romero, what can you tell us about any impact that had on any internal debate. >> you raised this at the beginning. you said this was a great moment for the aclu, right? >> i did. >> citizens united. >> i don't recall whether i mentioned citizens united. >> i did.

>> well, okay. i want him. >> but i didn't -- i'll be glad to say a word or two about citizens united because i know a little bit about it. but the amicus briefs that were filed supporting, i would say, as the right of organizations to participate in the political process by expressing their views about the qualifications of candidates for office, the amicus briefs were filed by the aclu, fico, nra, u.s. chamber of commerce, the republican party, the democratic party. there was an immense, broad spectrum of amicus briefs supporting what was ultimately the supreme court's decision. the case involved a nonprofit entity that was created to be an

advocacy organization. it was formed as a corporation. just like the aclu. and, by the way, the naacp, also an amicus brief in that case. and so i thought -- and i think the question relates to what the aclu has done subsequently with respect to contributions. i don't think you've changed position with respect to expenditures by organizations that happen to be formed into a corporation. nonprofit corporation, small business corporation, hardware store corporation. >> press corporation. >> "the new york times" corporation, bless its heart, is -- has written maybe 22,000 editorials against the citizens united case. maybe it's fewer than that. and one of the things "the new york times" says in its editorials about that is that it's just wrong that corporations have these

constitutional rights. overlooking the fact that "the new york times" versus sullivan is one of the leading cases in the fermement of the aclu and everyone else that believes in freedom of the press and so forth. so, it's a complicated issue. i could go on and on about citizens united, because i thought that the principle that was being vindicated there was that the maximum amount of speech about the qualifications and competence of -- and the desirability of people running for their highest office in the united states was something that was fundamentally at the core of the first amendment freedom of speech and freedom of the press and the american people would benefit the more speech they

heard. that's my position on it, but i was representing citizens united. >> that's the principle. but your question goes to the aftermath, i think. it stirred up a lot of opposition that's happened as a result. >> well, it has generated a lot of controversy. it's generated a lot of controversy within the aclu. i think it's fair to say that there is no policy within the aclu that has been intimated more times internally than the campaign finance policy, including subsequent to the citizens united decision. at the end of the day, the organization always comes back to the same fundamental point. and that is that we are not going to solve the problems that plague the american political system by limiting speech. once you say that you can limit speech, you have to give

somebody the power to decide how much speech is enough and who gets to speak and when they've said enough. and there is nothing in our history to lead you to believe that the government can perform that job competently or that you want to entrust the government with that power. and so our position has been, over the years, that if you want to decrease the influence of money in politics, the way to do that is not by decreasing the supply of money -- because the other lesson we've learned over the last 40 years is that the money always finds other loopholes to seep through. but by decreasing the demand. you decrease the demand by creating a fair and equitable way of financing. if we're willing to invest money in elections, willing to invest one day in the war in afghanistan, politicians would not have to spend all day on the phone raising money from private

contributors and all the problems that people think are associated with that. so at the end of the day, that's where we stand. and that's where we stood before citizens united and that's where we stand after citizens united. >> what's "the new york times" problem, adam? i don't get it. >> so the editorial page is unrelated to anything that i -- as a newspaper reporter, i have no opinions of any kind. but if i were to think back to a different life, because i practiced first amendment law for about 15 years before i turned to reporting. i would find it hard to argue with ted and steve, that if the first amendment is about something, it's about protecting speech about politics, from whomever. and giving people the maximum amount of information. and, therefore we talked about difficult cases. given the constituency and the way most right-thinking liberals

think about this issue, it must be very tough to keep the line that steve just drew. it will be interesting for me to see. there's another case coming up out of montana, whether we're going to see an aclu brief in there. >> yeah. >> good for them. >> let me be clear in the spirit of full disclosure. in the aftermath of citizens united, ted, aclu national board did change its policy on campaign finance to accept what they would see as reasonable limits on campaign contributions. >> contributions, not expenditures. >> not expenditures. i think that was a mistake. i spoke against it. i actually think that i end up -- you can see i have to carry the flag, even if i don't like carrying all the flags. this is the one where i don't agree with. everything else, i buy. but i think this goes right to the heart of what's most important. i mean, first off, the political system is fundamentally corrupt. i mean, let's be clear.

you can't cover the sky with one's hand, right? my grandmother used to say that to me. it is corrupt, the political process. the question is what the fix is. it's always been public finance for us. to make candidates viable, some way to calculate whether they're viable or not. look at the california governorship. money can make you lose an office, for instance. so, to have viable candidates who can run campaigns, public financing is the way to go. the solution of how you limit the corrupting influence of money in politics is what gets all the girls' knickers in a twist. often what my constituents and other constituents want to do is limit the power of someone else's money going to a party or candidate they don't like. i find hypocrisy of liberals who will denounce and fund some of

the largest billionaire philanthropists i can't name because i have to keep asking them for money will fund campaign finance reform efforts and yet they'll spend $50 million to unseat george bush in the last presidential election. i find it astonishing. campaign finance for you, not for me. it's often the problem of saying -- of being concerned about the money coming from, going to individuals that you don't like. now, what's the solution? so if you don't like where we are at citizen's united and you don't like the fact that korpg s corporations have free speech rights. aclu has the freedom of speech, freedom of association. if you want to ban the rights of corporations, all corporation free speech, that's a fine way to do it. that's not what i would suggest. now that you have sit zns united, what is the solution? maybe the montana case. get another bite at the apple if you're a reformer. i don't think so. maybe -- and you have individuals who have been

advocating this. it's time to have a constitutional amendment process to revisit the constitutional first amendment that free speech is for individuals not for corporations. if you are thinking this is a good time to revisit the first amendment i ask you to please put down the beer you're drinking at home. because the idea that you're going to reopen the interpretation of the first amendment right now in this context, in this climate with this congress and you're going to try to carve out the big, bad contributions from corporations that corrupt the political process and you're not going to do damage to the type of free speech rights you probably want to support like labor unions, aclu or pacs like the planned parenthood pact, you're delusional. i go absolutely vexed. it's the question i have to

answer the most. it's probably the issue we do the least. i don't know what the solution is cancer. i can't find the cure to cancer. it's not just in the court of law. not moving in my direction to find the cure to cancer. the same thing with campaign finance issues. if someone has a perfect silver bullet that's going to do all good and no harm, then bring it on. but right now the fixations of a heated political context, polarized country, money coming from and two individuals don't like. that's america. let the rebust political process be robust. there's no such thing as too much speech and too much concern when politics is at play. >> okay. that stirred them up. all right. rachel jacob has a question

about the death penalty. >> i was wondering if you could discuss the statute just pass d passed -- touted by law enforcement. [ inaudible ] >> do you have a point of view on this? >> this is holding the dna of everybody who has been stopped by the police or where does it draw the line? familiarize me with the case. >> i believe it's anybody. >> including marijuana arrests. >> anybody that has been convicted of a crime? >> holding it in data banks for -- >> future criminal investigations. >> yeah. that is, again -- all of these are balancing cases, but i think that the benefits to possibly being able to solve crimes either retroactively or in the

future outweigh the risks to personal privacy. i think if somebody has already been convicted of a crime, their interest in the privacy of their dna has to be outweighed by the fact that there is likely to have other -- there's a possibility of involvement in other crimes as well. so, i think law enforcement is right there, that this is an extraordinarily powerful tool that can help save lives. and dna is getting to be a more and more accurate science. as you say, dna can exonerate people. so, i don't think that the downside risk here is that great, compared to the upside risk. >> i don't follow you. >> i was going to say one

sentence. one of the issues, i think, is that the -- we are simply arresting and convicting far too many people. this would be a less serious question if, in fact, we were arresting and convicting fewer people. but when we are -- criminalize as much as we have criminalized in this country, we are creating an entire underclass that now not only has their dna on file for the rest of their lives, but is denied the right to vote in many states for the rest of their lives, has difficulty getting jobs when they get out because they have a felony conviction. i think you can separate the database issue from the question of who is going into the database. and who is going into the database is it far too many people. >> thank you. >> so, i quite agree with everything steve just said. i want to use this, in part, to sort of -- it's fascinating that the sort of topic of the panel is the aclu and its role in

american life and we're talking about the issues that are sort of the substance matter of american life, which is great. but it's interesting -- in an interesting way, proven my earlier point, that these are the issues that really draw us and that's why the aclu sometimes is controversial. in response to your particular question, right, i'm less concerned about the laws that say after conviction, turn over dna. then laws that have been proposed is everybody that is stopped and picked up. i'm still concerned about it for the reasons that steve outlined but i'm somewhat less concerned. what concerned me most in the death penalty context of these issues of dna being used to exonerate questions of privacy and other kinds of rights issues, in the death penalty we've seen a contraction and a contraction of the number of issues. and the number of moments at which it's possible for a court to hear, visit evidence.

some states are pushing back against that. that's been very productive. it goes to the question -- the broader question, right? the role of the courts here. and the role of the courts are asking the aclu generally asks the court to play, right? so it's less concerning if you have this kind of policy. if you know that there's going to be a moment. ideally, a repeated moment, where the vindication of the rights on either side in court, either for the clear adjudication, to exonerate or convict, right? or the adjudication of an individual right of privacy that's being advanced. instead what we've seen -- and one of the roles i think the aclu has played that's most important in the security context is a contraction of the role the courts are willing to play, right? so even as the technology has grown, even as the number of issues rose, if the courts

maintain this view that anything in that category, we can't do, right, and if the legislator continues to narrow the conviction of the courts, broad issues, nobody has a chance to litigate. right? that's what worries me. that's a process failure. it's the moment when there's secrecy in the political process. the political process isn't working and you don't even have the courts, right, as a process fa fallback. across the board, whether it's criminal issues and exoneration or conviction, security issues and so forth, it's the insistence that the courts have -- are a co-equal branch of government and continue to have an essential role to play. >> so, just to -- i promise to be quick i know we have questions from the students. one is just the scale of this database is going to be so large, we're quite sure we're going to -- it's going to be as foolproof as possible in terms of just the level of dna samples that will be collected, stored,

retained and analyzed. i mean, it's an open question about -- >> google do will it. >> second, the idea of dna being collected byfingerprints. once dna, you can unlock your entire health history. your genetic history. with those cotton swabs and stored properly by police lab, you can have all sorts of access to the person's body and their history and their background, and there are history of cases where police officers have used police data banks to go after their girl friends, for instance, or their divorced wives as way of retaliation. we have to be quite sure that's not go to have that privacy krups. third one i can't help but tweet the police department when you're here. can you explain to me, heather why -- >> i love that. >> can you explain to me why,able whether you support the idea you would carve out marijuana arrests as not being in the dna data bank? that you can be -- you can be in the dna data bank if you jump a

turnstile because you left your metro card at home but actually carrying dope and smoking on the street you're not in the dna data bank. how does that compute? it may about rhetorical question. the reason the police department allowed that, i think, because they're marijuana arrests are so racially skewed that there would be impossible for them to say, that this is -- this does have a racial disparate impact and you look at data. white kids smoke pot on the same and equal levels as african-american, latino kids. drug use is across the race lines, and yet the marijuana arrests in new york city are predominantly black and latino. and so they carved out the kind of marijuana arrests because they knew that that population of convicted criminals was racially so concentrate aid mong people of color they didn't want to fight that battle, frankly. >> i would say they probably

carved it out because it is a battle right now and they weren't willing to fight that because of the voe cases that marijuana arrests are driven by race as opposed to public use of marijuana, but they're frankly, unfortunately, there is not a single criminal law that does not have a racially disparate impact, and the victims of that are the law abiding members of minority neighborhoods who are disproportionately victimized by crime. so i don't think that disparate impact is a legitimate argument to push, pull back on facially neutral laws that are being applied in a neutral way. the shooting per capita rate in brownsville, brooklyn is 81 times higher than in bay ridge, brooklyn.

that's not an artifact of racist policing. that is because people living in brownsville are victimizing their fellow neighbors at that high a rate and people are dying there at a higher rate. and that's why -- that's why police are conducting stop and frisks at a much higher rate in brownsville than in bay ridge. >> excuse me. you can't allow that assertion just to go unchallenged. because it makes it sound as if the african-american, latino residents of brownsville are, therefore, innately in inherently more violent and that good old white folks. >> nothing to do with innateness. it's simple lay fact. 81 per capita difference. >> has everything to do with opportunity, heather, and we we take away limited action programs, which you oppose and take away the safety net, the manhattan has been aggressive in champions the efforts to

evirsate the safety net and pull out the rug from we'll have few punts to make a life for themselves, that's when you see the violence, all due respect. i am no different than my cousins serving time in jail. what is different is that i was given a chance. my cousin cliffy, as smart as i am. and i went to princeton. he did time. got great parents. same neighborhood. opportunity defines one the life progress, and at the manhattan institute we're more focused on creating opportunities for the poor and disinfranchised then you would see the crime rate come down in brownsville. >> there's nothing that has created -- [ applause ] >> there's nothing that has created more opportunity in brownsville than the drop in crime, because you have given now people the basic civil liberty of freedom from fear, which is what people in park avenue -- >> okay. next question. >> yes. i have a question regarding the

lgbt movement for marriage quality specifically with -- v. brown. do you think the ninth circuit's court reservation to address the issue of due process and heavy reliance on people's actions, that that, did that undermine the argument there is a fundamental right to same-sex marriage? >> i guess this is addressed to me. >> yes. >> do you know anything about this case? >> yeah. >> the, what the ninth circuit did, the panel decision of the ninth circuit we're talking about, i hope everybody heard the question, it had to do with the decision by the panel with respect to the basis upon which it ed or affirmed the district court striking down proposition 8. what the panel did was focus on particularly on peculiarity is of the california system.

where the california supreme court had determined that there was a right, a constitutional right under the constitution of california for citizens to marry someone of the same sex. and the -- when the case gets to the ninth circuit, the ninth circuit is focusing on the fact that the supreme court of the united states in the romer case had determined that similar constitutional amendment in colorado taking away the rights of gay and lesbian citizens violated the constitution, the equal protection clause and the due process clause. those two clauses of the constitution are folded in every time we talk about this issue. whether it's the lawrence versus texas case or the romer case or other cases that deal with this, and when we litigated the case we litigated it as a fundamental right to marriage and an equal protection claim. what the ninth circuit did was make a relatively narrow decision, but also talked about all of the justifications that

california had offered for its active discrimination against people in the, on the basis of marriage, and essentially systematically found every single one of those justifications without any rational or reasonable basis. so while the decision was focused somewhat narrowly on a couple of supreme court opinion, happened to have been written by judge justice anthony kennedy, that in no way, we believe, undermined the extensive factual and legal record that was compiled in the district court and formed the basis for the district court's 134-page opinions. but what will happen from the ninth circuit we don't know. right now there's a petition for rehearing pending, setting there for about six weeks. it will take 13 out of the 25 active judges in the ninth circuit to grant rehearing on this. some think it's going to happen. some people think it's not going to happen. in either event, i suspect it

will go to the supreme court. and if i haven't answered that, i wanted to do it sensitive to the time constraints. >> anybody else want to weigh in on that? all right. >> well, so -- >> i have a ton of questions on this, but not right now. >> all right. agatha cole? >> thank you. my question is about internal polarization as well, and etiology, aclu initiatives promoting digital rights and due process. is there a contradiction in values between your first amendment advocacy effort and pro-government regulation effort to advance consumer privacy and relatedly, is there a tension between the liberal values and pro-government progressivism within the aclu. if you want to take this opportunity to talk about health care as well, feel free to do so. >> go ahead. >> well, i have no credibility on health care, because i

thought it would be an easy way and whatever else is going to happen it's not going to be an easy one. you know, this gets back to a comment somebody made at the very beginning of the panel which is there are times. i don't think it is the most prevalent conflict that we face. generally speaking our cases involve claims of individual right, some assertion of authority by the government. there are many circumstances we have to confront with or individual rights on both sides of the equation, and those are the most difficult for us. and i'm not sure there's a simple equation that enables to us resolve those problems. we approach each one on its merits and try to balance the competing rights as best as we possibly can, and in most situations, i think, we like to believe that it is not a zero sum game. it's not either/or. there's a way to