Lawyer and ACLU Member on Housing Authority Bans ~ Annapolis Capital Punishment
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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Lawyer and ACLU Member on Housing Authority Bans

The Maryland Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is taking the Housing Authority of the Community of Annapolis (HACA) to court because it believes that HACA's banning of certain people from coming on to HACA property is illegal. The following comments have been provided by Albert A. Foer, a lawyer and member of the board of the National Capital Area, ACLU. Mr. Foer's comments are solely his own and do not necessarily reflect the position of any ACLU body or anyone else. Foer is related to CP Publisher Paul Foer. For more background see ACLU-Feb. 1 .

I note in the recent column and editorial in The Capital what seems to be a confusion about who is a "criminal", a term thrown around rather loosely as the justification for banning visitors to public housing. Is a criminal someone who was arrested but not convicted? No. That can't be. Getting arrested doesn't make you a criminal, and we surely don't want the police to be able to define a person's rights merely by arresting them.
By "criminal" does HACA mean someone currently incarcerated? No. That wouldn't make sense. People in jail appropriately don't have the opportunity to dine at their mother's home. Someone on parole? Subject to supervision, such a person's visits might be restricted in various ways, but how many banned "criminals" would fall into this category?

So perhaps what columnist Eric Hartley is worried about as a "criminal" is one who already served a sentence and has returned to the community? But with the exception of sex offenders whose guilt some believe should never be erased, we are supposed to grant most rights back to those who served their sentence or what we commonly describe as having "paid their debt to society." Indeed, we want such people re-integrated into the community, to have socializing bonds that will help them stay on the right side of the law. If we tell them, no, you can't get back into the community in meaningful ways, we help assure that they will end up as incarcerated recidivists.
Whom should the police or HACA be punishing? For surely it is a form of punishment to be prohibited from entering a community, especially one that is public, on the basis of a police suspicion or a HACA suspicion that a person might, perhaps, maybe, possibly commit a crime while he or she is visiting.
It seems to me that if there is to be a ban on visitors, it must be scrupulously limited to immediate and identifiable threats to the community. Otherwise, it runs the risk of undermining constitutional values such as the presumption of innocence, due process, and (more generally) freedom, that should be of greater importance to the community. Good for the ACLU in putting the police and HACA to the test of justifying their policy in depth before a neutral judge.


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Posted by Paul Foer at 7:20 AM

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

An excellently reasoned analysis in the opinion of this ordinary guy.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009 10:54:00 AM  
Paul Foer said...

I do appreciate your feedback...even though it would be much more appreciated if we knew who you are.I an beginning to think you are a lawyer. Actually, I do have a pretty good idea of who you are.....meow...cat and mouse game...

Tuesday, February 03, 2009 12:59:00 PM  

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