We took a break for Turkey Day last week (and hope you did too!), but we are back with your weekly public interest news blast.  This week:  New York’s top jurist continues his crusade to bolster support for legal services; Yale Law students put their skills to use creating opportunities for New Haven public school students; UDC’s law school launches initiatives to serve at-risk youth; SCOTUS looks at California’s prisons, which are bursting at their seams; a rise in domestic violence against immigrant women is troubling to West Virginia DV prevention advocates; new public defender positions in Wisconsin – you did not misread that: NEW PUBLIC DEFENDER POSITIONS in Wisconsin; the fight about subjecting a state law school’s clinic to open public records provisions continues in NJ; Kids in Need of Defense is making an impact in Houston; 32 candidates want to be the head public defender in Cincinnati – maybe some of them should move to Wisconsin; speaking of defenders, caseload woes in Missouri persist; praise for the Georgia Supreme Court; pro bono efforts of Wal-mart’s in-house counsel in Arkansas; EJW’s growth and pursuing a public interest career; Dade County Bar Association thinking outside the box to fundraise for local Legal Aid Society; Millennial law students vs. Gen-X predecessors:  who is more public-service oriented;  does Indiana need to define “law enforcement costs” for county prosecutors?; and sentencing for the former Maryland Legal Aid Bureau Chief of Finance and his partner for stealing more than $1 million from the nonprofit.

• 12.1.10 – exciting news for legal services in the Empire State this week with Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman calling for the state legislature to increase civil legal services’ spending by $100 million.  This increase for civil legal services funding in the judicial branch’s budget proposal is a result of recommendations by the Task Force to Expand Access to Civil Legal Services in New York.  According to WNYC News the Chief Judge explained that while the state is experiencing tough economic times, it still makes sense to increase civil legal services spending “[b]ecause the ones hit hardest by this economic collapse in the state is the poor and the most vulnerable among us and if you let these people fall off the cliff, the consequences in every way are damaging.”  Under this proposal, the spending increase would be phased in over a four year period and by 2015 result in a 50% increase in civil legal services spending in NY.  The New York State Bar Association and the Urban Justice Center are both applauding the recommended funding increase.

• 11.30.10 – student members of Yale Law School’s Community and Development Clinic have helped draft a multi-million dollar agreement between Yale University and the city of New Haven to establish the New Haven Promise Program.  This program “will pay the full college or university tuition of New Haven public school students who meet its requirements for achievement, starting with current freshman,” for at least four New Haven public school classes.   Contract negotiations began in September and resulted in a formal announcement of the program on November 9.

• 11.30.10 – the Washington Post reports on new initiatives at the University of the District of Columbia’s (UDC) law schoo to protect at-risk youth.  The momentum – and funding – for these projects comes from the law firm of Crowell & Moring, which granted UDC over $600K to create the Took Crowell Institute for At-risk Youth.  One of the Institute’s projects will aim to provide lawyers for students who challenge school suspensions so that they can return to the classroom.  According to the Post:  “In an effort to keep serious school misbehavior from spiraling into even more serious juvenile delinquency, the law school at the University of the District of Columbia is taking up cases of public school students who have been suspended for weeks or months.  Critics of [long-term suspensions] say that far from encouraging better behavior, the suspensions often open the door to more trouble.”  Here’s a fact sheet on the the Institute, a press release about its launch, and past coverage from the Blog of the Legal Times.

• 11.29.2010 – Tuesday the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding overcrowding in California’s prisons and access to health care for prisoners.  This past January, a federal district court held that “overcrowding in the state’s prison system, the nation’s largest, is the main cause of substandard medical and mental health care that violates the prisoners’ Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment . . . The state houses 164,000 inmates in a system designed to hold about 80,000, and the prisons have been beyond capacity for two decades.  The judges ordered the state to cap the inmate population at 137.5% of their capacity within two years, which would be about 110,000 inmates this year.” Inmates, together with prison guards, support the lower court’s decision while the state of California contends that the court “overstepped” its authority and should be overturned.     How did the overcrowding get so bad?  During the 90’s the state legislature adopted tougher sentencing laws, including 3-strikes-and-your-out and parole crackdowns.  What is California’s plan to address the overcrowding?  “[R]eleasing low level offenders, sending fewer nonviolent criminals to prison by changing sentencing laws and building new prisons.”  Stay tuned, a decision from the Court is expected in Summer 2011.

• 11.29.10 – the News and Sentinel reports that domestic violence advocates in West Virginia are seeing a rise in cases involving immigrant women.  In addition to the obstacles faced by every victim of domestic violence, immigrants face additional challenges:  “they speak little or no English, they are isolated, have no support system, can’t work because they don’t have the proper paperwork and have no financial support” (and are not eligible for public benefits).  Further this is not an issue isolated to West Virginia, in an earlier national study, domestic violence was estimated to be three times more prevalent in marriages between immigrant women and U.S. citizens than in the general population. “An estimated 70% of abusive U.S. citizen spouses, including those who consummate relationships through [International Marriage Brokers], withhold the filing of the proper paperwork necessary to validate the legal status of their immigrant female partners to cause them to fall out of legal status and to hold the threat of jail or deportation over the woman.” . . . Further underscoring the depth of this problem is the National Justice Institute’s estimate that more than 73% of domestic violence cases are unreported.

• 11.29.10 – Wisconsin’s public defender office is “adding 30 full-time public defenders next summer because of an unexpected increase in caseload,” according to the WBAY TV station website.  Wisconsin recently expanded the income-eligibility guidelines for indigent defense, so that’s why there is an anticipated uptick in the number of clients.  In light of these developments, the Winnebago County District Attorney is wishing that some state funding would have gone to expanding the ranks of prosecutors too.

• 11.28.10 – in New Jersey’s Star-Ledger, Rutgers School of Law’s dean strikes back regarding a recent appellate decision that effectively subjected a legal clinic to the state Open Public Records Act even though the clinic represents private clients and, like any other law office, maintains confidential files.  Dean John Farmer, Jr. notes that other state-funded providers of legal services to private clients are exempted from the law’s presumption of access.  Further, the “New Jersey Supreme Court had held, in 1989, that Rutgers Law School clinicians are not state employees for purposes of the state-conflict of interest laws, precisely because they represent private clients.”  Why, then, did the recent appellate decision subject the clinic to OPRA?  Dean Farmer doesn’t get it, and he writes that the school “has every intention” of taking the matter to the state’s high court.  For some past coverage of the appellate decision, see this October article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

• 11.28.10 – the Houston Chronicle reports the pro bono efforts of attorneys partnering with Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) have helped 220 illegal immigrant children and teenagers who are unaccompanied by parents/guardians in the Houston area.  “Each year, about 7,000 to 9,500 illegal immigrant children and teenagers are detained crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally without immediate family members.   Although many are returned to the care of relatives in their home countries, thousands end up in U.S. immigration courts without attorneys to represent them or parents to support them.”  The Chronicle‘s coverage follows the story of a Marathon Oil attorney and a 17-year-old boy from El Salvador.

• 11.25.10 – according to the Cincinnati Enquirer count-em “32 lawyers are vying to be Hamilton County’s next public defender . . . the list of applicants for the job . . . is a who’s who of local attorneys, public defender staff attorneys, and out-of-town lawyers” (one all the way from Alaska).  The new PD will lead a staff of 70 lawyers and manage the appointment of lawyers for 60,000 indigent clients/year.  The transition also comes on the heels of some much needed improvement for the historically underfunded and understaffed PDO including  increasing staff attorneys’ work week from 35 to 40 hours and bringing up staff attorney salaries to match prosecutor earnings on Jan. 1.

• 11.24.10 – in other public defender news . . . the Missouri Public Defender Commission has filed an appeal with the Missouri Supreme Court — bypassing a district appellate court — in hopes of a swift resolution” to the debate over “whether the PD office has the authority to close offices when caseloads get too high” and “whether judges have the authority to override those closures to provide legal representation for defendants.”  The case involves a man charged with burglary and forgery who a Christian County judge appointed a public defender in spite of the motion from the public defender’s office to not be appointed as counsel.  The PD Commission is arguing that “continuing to assign public defenders to cases beyond caseload limits endangers the criminal justice system itself.”  Earlier this month, the Columbia Missourian reported that state’s Public Defender had rejected (for the second time) an application for a public defender made by a triple-homicide suspect.

• 11.23.10 – the president and COO of Language Line Services, Louis Provenzano, penned an op-ed for the Huffington Post praising the Georgia Supreme Court’s recent decision ruling that “defendants with limited ability to speak English have a constitutional right to court interpreters.” The underlying case involved a criminal defendant in a Georgia court who spoke Mandarin, and whose English-speaking lawyer could not communicate with her.  She also literally could not understand what was transpiring in her child abuse trial, the upshot of which was a guilty verdict and a 10-year sentence.  Provenzano, whose organization provides interpretation and other language services, goes on to highlight the importance of having qualified interpreters available in the judicial system, and notes that laws about having interpreters in court are inconsistent throughout state jurisdictions.

• 11.23.10 – Wal-Mart’s in-house counsel’s office is creating a pro bono program to help low-income Arkansans (Arkansas being Wal-Mart’s headquarters state).  The office recently became a signatory to the Corporate Pro Bono Challenge initiative, which seeks to enlist in-house counsel to do pro bono.  But wait, there’s more!  According to the Arkansas Business Online website, Wal-Mart’s “legal department and the Wal-Mart Foundation also announced a $115,000 donation to Legal Aid of Arkansas and the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission.”  IOLTA funding in the Razorback State  has been pretty much nonexistent in the past couple of years, so this cash infusion is good news from the AtJ community.

• 11.23.10 – the Lawyers and Settlements website blog features and interview with Equal Justice Works’s executive director, David Stern.  Stern discusses lawyers’ motivation to choose public service career paths, how they can manage student debt, as well as Equal Justice Works’s successes and growth.  According to the blog post: “[o]ver the last decade[Equal Justice Work’s] budget has grown from roughly $1.5 million to $8 million and the number of postgraduate fellowships has grown from roughly 20 to more than 100.”

• 11.22.10 – Here’s an interesting legal services fundraiser.  The Dade County Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Committee is hosting the “Patently Impossible Project” this very evening.  According to  a promo piece in the South Florida Caribbean News, attorneys register for a competition in which they’re given “various parts, tools, and a patent registration … [Competitors’] job is to complete the assembly of the invention” ahead of other contestants.  The piece notes that proceeds will go to the Legal Aid Society in Miami-Dade County, which has recently experienced “devastating funding cuts.”

• 11.21.10 – Are Millenial law students more public-service oriented than their Gen-X predecessors?  The London-based Financial Times reports on a perceived uptick in pro bono interest among today’s law students.  The story quotes sources in Spain and London, and also gives a shout-out to Cornell Law School here in the U.S., which has a robust student pro bono program.  Apparently, some folks attribute the heightened public service commitment to a difference between Millennials and their Glorious Gen-X older siblings.  Well, be that as it may.  But we Gen-Xers are better looking.

• 11.20.10 – an Indy law firm is bringing suit against 78 county prosecutors, claiming they are “willfully flouting state law by hoarding seized asset funds” that should be designated for the state’s public schools.  The firm hopes for a resolution that will “transfer nearly $17 million to the Common School Fund, which makes loans for construction and technology projects.  State law requires county prosecutors to send any funds seized from suspected criminals to the Common School Fund, but permits counties to retain the percentage of the funds necessary to cover law enforcement costs.  The controversy arises from the lack of statutory guidance given concerning how to define “law enforcement costs” – currently each county has their own method.  The Indiana Attorney General has yet to weigh in on the case — he could decide to take over the law suit and pursue it on behalf of the state, take the county prosecutor’s position and defend against the firm’s suit, dismiss the case, or let the case alone.

• 11.19.10 – the Baltimore Sun reported that Wendell “Sonny” Jackson has been sentenced to 15 months in prison, ordered to pay restitution of $1.14 million and will have to complete 100 hours of community service for his role in helping steal more than $1 million from the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau between the late 1990s and 2008.  Mr. Jackson conspired with the Chief of Finance for Maryland Legal Aid Bureau to open a phony office supply business in order to steal from the nonprofit.  The Chief of Finance pled guilty and is set to be sentenced on December 14.