Crack the Disparity's National Month of Advocacy Special Pre-Opening Screening of "American Violet"

Seating is limited, so please RSVP asap to Anjuli Verma with the ACLU’s Drug Law Reform Project at averma@aclu.org, or Beverly Miller at beverly@aclu-nca.org or 202-457-0800. This is an excellent and moving Hollywood blockbuster film, starring Alfre Woodard and Charles Dutton, which poignantly explores issues of drug policy, fairness and criminal justice reform. The movie opens in theaters April 17, and tells the real life story of a young waitress wrongfully rounded up with others in a Tulia-style crack cocaine drug raid in Hearne, Texas nearly ten years ago. Her refusal to accept a plea helped expose that the massive drug sweep was a sham, based almost entirely on the word of an informant who was threatened with jail time and prison rape if he refused to implicate residents of a Hearne housing project. The ACLU’s Drug Policy Reform Project filed a civil suit on her behalf. Like the series of wrongful drug arrests in Tulia, Texas, the Hearne scandal was largely attributable to the federal Byrne Gant program, which not only creates the unaccountable, multi-jurisdictional drug task forces like those responsible for the abuses in Hearne and Tulia, but then also sets artificial, improper incentives by tying future funding to the number of arrests and drug seizures a task force makes. The Hearne tragedy would never have come to light without the massive media attention that was focused on Tulia. View the trailer at http://www.americanviolet.com/. A discussion will follow with American Violet filmmakers Bill Haney and Tim Disney, ACLU attorney Graham Boyd, and others. The event is brought to us by the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area and Samuel Goldwyn Films, with the ACLU of Maryland and the ACLU of Virginia. The Justice Roundtable’s “Crack the Disparity” Working Group is happy to support this screening and we invite you to join us!