User:Kary moss

Kary L. Moss is a civil rights attorney and social justice advocate. She served as the Executive Director of the ACLU of Michigan for twenty years until 2018 when she accepted a position on the ACLU senior leadership team as Director of Affiliate Support and Nationwide Initiatives. She has received many awards including Crain's 100 Most Influential Women, Michigander of the Year by The Detroit News, NAACP-Detroit Chapter's Ida Thurtell award, State Bar of Michigan’s Champion of Justice Award, Harvard Law Schools’ Wasserstein Fellowship, Michigan Trial Lawyer’s Weekly Lawyer of the Year Award, and many community awards. She was inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2011. She has also served as the Chair of the ACLU’s Executive Director Council, representing all state directors in the ACLU.

Education and Early Career

Moss, a Michigan native, received a B.A. from Michigan State University’s James Madison College, a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University, and a Juris Doctor from CUNY Law School at Queen’s College. She clerked at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then served as staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, founded by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ACLU of Michigan

Under her leadership, the ACLU of Michigan’s programs have included many high impact, important civil rights cases and policy initiatives including the country’s first challenge to the government’s effort to close immigration court hearings to the public and warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Administration. In Detroit News vs. Ashcroft, Judge Damon Keith ruled that closing deportation hearings to the press and public violated the First Amendment saying “Democracies died behind closed doors.”

Flint Water Crisis

The ACLU of Michigan was instrumental in exposing the Flint Water Crisis. Moss hired investigative journalist Curt Guyette to investigate the consequences of the state’s emergency manager law which had divested local communities of the power to elect their officials. At one point, over 50% of the state’s African Americans lived in jurisdictions under emergency manager control, including the City of Flint. Following the emergency manager’s decision to utilize the Flint River as a water source, residents began complaining about the color, smell and taste of water. Working closely with residents and Dr. Mark Edwards of Virginia Tech, Guyette’s work revealed that state officials had ignored and misled the public about water safety. Guyette received the prestigious Hillman prize for Web Journalism in 2016 as well as Journalist of the Year from the Michigan Press Association.

Following the exposure of the water crisis, the ACLU of Michigan filed two groundbreaking lawsuits. The first, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, sought to replace the city’s lead service lines and settled with a requirement that the pipes be replaced within three years. The second lawsuit, filed with the Education Law Center and the law firm White and Case, sought to ensure that children affected by exposure to lead receive needed educational services. The case partially settled with a historic agreement to establish an unprecedented program to provide universal screening, and in-depth assessments when necessary, to all Flint children impacted by the Flint water crisis.

Immigration

Under her leadership, the ACLU of Michigan represented 114 Iraqi Christian nationals who were arrested by federal immigration officials in 2017 in a class action to stop their deportation without giving them an opportunity to prove that they could face torture and death if returned to Iraq. The class action, supported by ACLU’s national immigration legal team and the firm Miller Canfield, was granted to apply to over 1,000 Iraqi nationals and resulted in the ability of each to have legal representation to challenge their removal orders and to hold hearings and release detainees who don't pose a risk. Additionally, the ACLU of Michigan helped to reunite a Honduran father and his three year old son who were separated under the “zero tolerance” immigration policy of the Trump Administration. The reunification came after a federal judge in California ordered in an ACLU case that all children under the age of 5 separated from their parents be reunified with their parents.

Voting Rights and Gerrymandering

Moss has championed access to the ballot as a cornerstone of democracy and, in 2017, initiated a ballot initiative in collaboration with the League of Women Voters and NAACP, State Conference, and ACLU National to bring about needed reforms in Michigan including automatic voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting, same-day registration, and a required annual audit. On July 9, 2018, the campaign - Promote the Vote - submitted 430,000 signatures to the Bureau of Elections. Additionally, the ACLU of Michigan was instrumental in contributing to the policy language for the anti-gerrymandering initiative led by Voters Not Politicians scheduled to be on the November 2018 ballot.

Right to an Education

Moss pioneered work at the ACLU of Michigan advocating that all children have a right to basic literacy. In 2012, the organization filed a class action on behalf of students in the Highland Park Public Schools whose education suffered from outrageously poor oversight, management and teaching controls on both the state and local levels and were often passed along from one grade to the next although functionally illiterate. In 2013, the Wayne County Circuit court refused to dismiss the case, stating that there is a “broad compelling state interest in the provision of an education to all children.” However, in November 2014, the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed by a vote of 2-1. The majority held that the Michigan Constitution “merely ‘encourages’ education, but does not mandate it.” In dissent, Judge Douglas Shapiro rejected as “miserly” the majority’s view of the education constitutionally due Michigan’s children, writing that the state is legally required “to provide some baseline level of adequacy of education.” The Michigan Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

University of Michigan Gerald Ford School of Public Policy

Moss taught as an adjunct lecturer at the Ford school from 2015-2017 earning a place on the teaching honor roll each year. Her course, Courts as Policy-Makers, examined the role that judicial decisions play in affecting public opinion and social justice advocacy on issues such as the right to an education, immigrants rights, LGBTQ rights, and the Flint Water Crisis.

Publications

Moss has authored numerous Op Eds and appeared as a commentator of national television and radio shows. Her publications include: Man Made Medicine: Women’s Health, Public Policy and Reform (Duke University Press); ACLU Guide to Women’s Rights; and many law review articles on environmental justice and racial profiling.

Family

Moss is married to Douglas Baker, an appellate criminal defense attorney, and has a daughter, Jessa Baker-Moss.

References

Michigan ACLU chief Moss sets site on Nation, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2018/07/12/aclu-michigan-executive-director-kary-moss-headed-new-york/694505002/

Group Submits 430,000 signatures for ballot measure to expand voting in Michigan, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/07/09/signatures-michigan-voting-measure/769754002/

Kary Moss, Crain’s Most 100 Influential Women, http://www.crainsdetroit.com/awards/mostinfluentialwomen/3407013/Kary-Moss

ACLU Appoints Michigan ACLU Head Kary L. Moss to National Senior Leadership Team https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-appoints-michigan-affiliate-head-kary-l-moss-national-senior-leadership-team

Kary Moss: Helped Expose the Flint Water Crisis, https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/michiganians-of-year/2017/09/14/kary-moss-aclu-flint-water-crisis/105621272/

How an Investigative Journalist Helped Prove that a City was being poisoned with its own water, https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/flint_water_lead_curt_guyette_aclu_michigan.php

Flint’s lead water pipes to be replaced under proposed settlement, http://www.aclumich.org/article/flint’s-lead-water-pipes-be-replaced-under-proposed-settlement-federal-safe-drinking-water

Standing up for Flint students following the water crisis, http://www.aclumich.org/cases/flint-schools

Settlement to launch groundbreaking program to assess impact on Flint children, http://www.aclumich.org/article/flint-water-crisis-settlement-launch-groundbreaking-program-assess-impacts-flint-children

University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy, http://fordschool.umich.edu/faculty/kary-moss

The Right to Read, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kary-moss/a-right-to-read-by-kary-m_b_1703482.html

The Right to Read, https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-408783266/the-right-to-read

Detroit judge halts deportations of more than 1400 Iraqi nationals nationwide, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/27/detroit-judge-halts-deportations-of-more-than-1400-iraqi-nationals-nationwide/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.65c6fffae453

ACLU Director to be honored as Champion of Justice by State Bar, http://legalnews.com/detroit/1007934

Destination Justice, https://www.michbar.org/file/barjournal/article/documents/pdf4article210.pdf ,

Environmental Justice at the Crossroads, http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr/vol24/iss1/3/

Past Wasserstein Fellows, https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/opia/career-contacts/past-wasserstein-fellows/