It’s Been a Month to Forget for Local ACLU Office

It has been a month of unusual firsts for the American Civil Liberties Union in Orange County. But they have not been the sort of milestones that the noted defender of domestic freedoms would have sought.

On July 22, a Newport Beach police sergeant won a $20,000 jury verdict against the ACLU. Richard Long accused ACLU officials of violating his rights when they ejected him from a public seminar after falsely implying that he was a police spy.

Local officials said it was the first time the group, more accustomed to handling civil rights causes, had ever lost such a case.

Three weeks later, Gail Harrington, a law student who worked on several ACLU lawsuits challenging conditions in the Orange County Jail, was charged with smuggling drugs to an inmate, convicted murderer Willie Ray Wisely. She was also accused of “mutual sexual touching” with Wisely.

At the time, Paul Hoffman, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California and acting executive director, called the charges “incomprehensible” and questioned the motives of prosecutors.

On Thursday, a day after Harrington revealed that she had secretly married Wisely in December, Hoffman called the news “extraordinary.”

“Between Harrington and Long, we haven’t been exactly on a roll lately,” he said.

While Harrington is not on the ACLU payroll, she worked on prisoner-rights cases for Dick Herman, a private attorney who has handled litigation for the ACLU, most notably longstanding cases challenging conditions and overcrowding in the County Jail.

“This particular situation is not a win-or-lose situation, it’s an unfortunate personal tragedy for her,” said Hoffman, in reference to the controversy.

Harrington did some work on ACLU-related cases, but purely through Herman, Hoffman said. Other legal work, such as what she has done on behalf of Wisely’s criminal appeal of his murder conviction, would have been funded from other sources, probably the county, Hoffman said.

“She’s not an ACLU law clerk in the sense that she’s a law clerk paid by the organization,” he said. Twenty law students work directly for and are paid by the ACLU, several of them doing work in Los Angeles jails.

“To be honest with you, I’d never heard the name prior to this event,” Hoffman said. “Obviously, Dick (Herman) knew her. I didn’t, (and) no one else in the ACLU knew she was working on our case, either.”

Hoffman insisted he was not trying to “distance” the group from Harrington. He said he was trying “to be accurate without making it appear like we’re tossing her away.”

He said she would do no further ACLU work, at least for the time being.

No one knew about the marriage, said Hoffman, adding that disclosure of the marriage raises questions about whether her relationship with Wisely would have “impaired her ability to gather information in an objective way for use.”

The Harrington case is the first instance “in the entire history of the ACLU that a law student has been charged with something like this,” Hoffman said.

People need to be reminded that Harrington is innocent until proven guilty, but he said the publicity does concern his group: “Obviously, we’re always concerned about the ACLU’s name being associated with things that don’t have a good image.” He added:

“I’m not sure the ACLU can be held responsible for whatever occurred in this relationship, if it did occur. There’s such a tenuous relationship between this woman and the ACLU as an organization, it certainly would be inappropriate to hold the ACLU responsible for anything this woman has done.”