This week: the Glorious Philadelphia Phillies Baseball Franchise is Phightin’ to Return to the World Series.

This Week in Public Interest News: SCOTUS reviews a $14 million jury award for an innocent man who spent 20+ years in jail; Baltimore public defenders may get busier; a $1.8 million cy pres award for some Chicago public interest organizations; Jim McGiffin, legal services lawyer and incoming Delaware Bar Assoc. president, seems like a cool dude; NoCal Innocence Project blasts shortcomings in disciplining California prosecutors; pro se resources for Wisconsinites; federal loan repayment funding for local prosecutors/public defenders coming to a state near you; new prisoner re-entry pro bono project at Rutgers Law;  indigent defendants getting billed by the state for the trouble they’ve caused; the mental health court community grows; law students go mobile to provide pro bono.

• 10.6.10 – the National Law Journal (password may be required) covers Supreme Court arguments in a case stemming from prosecutorial misconduct in New Orleans.  “Supreme Court justices on Wednesday appeared ready to give the green light to efforts by a New Orleans man to win compensation for prosecutorial misconduct that put him behind bars for more than two decades for a murder he did not commit.   The Court heard arguments in the case of Connick v. Thompson, in which former New Orleans district attorney Harry Connick argues that his office should not be held liable for what he contends was a single incident of failing to hand over exculpatory evidence to the defense before trial.”  Thompson, who had been on death row as a result of the wrongful conviction, made a Section 1983 civil rights claim against the DA’s office.  A $14 million jury award was upheld by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.  The main question in front of the Supreme Court is whether the DA’s office’s actions were enough to warrant the successful civil rights action.  (On a much more trivial note, here’s some trivia: Do you know who’s the son of former district attorney Harry Connick?  Hint: he tickled the ivories in an old episode of Cheers, and got shot down by an alien in the sci-fi cinema aberration Independence Day.) 

• 10.5.10 – Blog of the Legal Times (BLT) reports: “In a ruling that could have a major impact on the Maryland Public Defender’s Office, a state judge in Baltimore found that indigent criminal defendants have a right to counsel at their initial bail hearings … The court in Baltimore relied on a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Rothgery v. Gillespie County, Texas, which (quoting the BLT) “found that a criminal defendant’s initial appearance before a magistrate, where the defendant’s liberty is subject to restriction, marks the initiation of adversarial judicial proceedings and therefore triggers the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.”  An appeal of the Maryland decision is possible, according to the BLT post, which also noted that University of Maryland Law School Access to Justice and Bail Clinic was one of the victorious advocates in this case.  The Maryland Public Defender’s Office is situated as a defendant in the case (they were added as a defendant by an appellate court at a prior point in the litigation), and the PSLawNet Blog suspects that folks in that office are wondering how they would manage to adequately staff bail hearings. 

• 10.5.10 – last week the PSLawNet Blog covered (Item 3) news that organizations in the Chicago legal services community were sharing a $1.8 million cy pres award from a Cook County class-action settlement.  Earlier this week a Chicago Tribune article helped to contextualize how important this funding is for the recipient organizations, particularly the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago.  “The Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago received a $550,000 windfall last week, but it won’t be enough to prevent budget cuts amid a climate of declining resources and increasing demand for free legal services.”  According to the Tribune, the LAF is still going to have to lay off staff and close an office; the cy pres funding will go to replenishing the organization’s badly depleted operating reserves. 

• 10.5.10 – from the Dover Post in Delaware, we learn about Jim McGiffin, a longtime legal services lawyer and apparent time-management master who will be the Delaware Bar Association’s next president.  We’ve included this piece in the Public Interest News Bulletin because 1) it’s not all that typical for a legal services attorney to take the helm of a state bar association, and 2) McGiffin seems like a really cool cat: “In addition to his job as an attorney with the Poverty Law Program at Dover’s Community Legal Aid Society, McGiffin also represents the Third District on Dover’s City Council, is a marriage counselor in his church and, with wife Kathy Doyle, is a regular on the city’s entertainment circuit, contributing regularly to the Celtic Harvest band and other musical venues.”  Rock on, Jim McGiffin!

• 10.5.10 – according to the Los Angeles Times, the Northern California Innocence Project (housed at Santa Clara University School of Law) has issued a report highlighting a large number of instances of prosecutorial misconduct that go unpunished.  “Hundreds of prosecutors in California — including many in Los Angeles County — have committed misconduct with near impunity as authorities failed to either report or discipline them, according to a report released Monday…. The researchers discovered 707 cases in which state and federal courts and appellate courts found prosecutorial misconduct in opinions issued between 1997 and 2009. Of those, 67 prosecutors committed misconduct in more than one case, including three who committed misconduct four times and two who did so five times.  The authors of the report said most prosecutors follow the law and act ethically, but they criticized the State Bar for disciplining only six prosecutors during the period covered by the study.”  The head of the California District Attorneys Association “criticized the report for exaggerating the scale and severity of the prosecutorial misconduct,” and the State Bar argued that not every finding of misconduct – for instance, unintentional errors – requires discipline.  Here’s more information about the report on the NCIP’s Veritas Initiative website.

• 10.4.10 – through a press release run on the Wisconsin-based WisBusiness website, the Milwaukee Justice Center announced the launch of a website offering resources for pro se litigants.  Among other offerings the site contains self-help resources for litigants going through divorce, child support/custody, foreclosure, landlord-tenant,a nd name change proceedings.  “The underlying philosophy of the project is that self-represented litigants have a fundamental right to access the justice system even if they cannot afford an attorney or do not qualify for legal aid.”  As we’ve noted before on the PSLawNet Blog, in the recession’s wake under-resourced legal services providers are expanding pro se resources in hopes of offering at least some assistance to swelling numbers of pro se litigants. 

• 10.4.10 – John R. Justice Act loan repayment funds are being distributed throughout the states, including Arkansas and Washington State.  From Arkansas’s KTHV Television Station website we learn that a group of federal legislators announced that Arkansas-based prosecutors and public defenders will benefit from $100,000 in loan repayment assistance funding through the federal John R. Justice (JRJ) Act.  Here’s more coverage of the announcement from the website of Arkansas’s KATV.  In Washington State, prosecutors and public defenders have until 11/30 to apply for JRJ assistance through the Washington Higher Education Coordinating Board, as reported by the Seattle Post Intelligencer.  The JRJ Act was passed in 2008 but funds were only appropriated a few weeks ago, according to recent article in the Blog of the Legal Times.  To learn more about the JRJ Act and it’s benefits, check out Equal Justice Works’s resource page.

• 10.4.10 – the National Law Journal reports on a new pro bono project at the Rutgers School of Law – Camden: “The Federal Prisoner Re-entry Project at Rutgers-Camden pairs law student volunteers with recently released prisoners. Under the supervision of a managing attorney, the students work with their clients’ federal probation officers to handle issues such as obtaining drug and alcoholic treatment or securing housing…. Other law schools offer students the chance to assist prisoners in re-entry through clinics, but Rutgers’ program is unique in that it relies on student volunteers who don’t receive academic credit for the work…”

• 10.3.10 – USA Today covers two new reports (by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, and the ACLU, respectively) on states requiring indigent defendants and individuals with criminal convictions to pay various fees related to their time in the system.  USA Today’s coverage focuses on fees related to the provision of indigent defense services: “States increasingly are imposing fees on poor criminal defendants who use public defenders even when they can’t pay, causing some to go without attorneys, according to two reviews of the nation’s largest state criminal justice systems. A report out Monday by New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice found that 13 of the 15 states with the largest prison populations imposed some charge, including application fees, for access to counsel…. A separate report of five state justice systems out Monday by the ACLU produced similar findings.”  Here’s a link to the Brennan Center report – Criminal Justice Debt: A Barrier to Reentry – and here’s some additional coverage of its release, by the National Law Journal.  Finally, here’s a link to the ACLU report – “In for a Penny: the Rise of America’s New Debtors’ Prisons.”

• 10.3.10 – the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois reports on the launching of Peoria County’s mental health court, which will offer diversionary programs for defendants with mental illnesses who are charged with nonviolent crimes.  “[P]rosecutors, probation officers, public defenders and someone from the treatment community would meet regularly to discuss the progress or lack thereof of a person in the program. Only nonviolent offenses will be considered for mental health court, such as theft and trespassing.”  Mental health courts have been springing up across the nation.  We noted one beginning in Billings, Montana earlier this year (courtesy of the Billings Gazette).  On a related note, last March we covered the trend of courts taking into account the mental stresses faced by military veterans when they fell into the criminal justice system.

• 10.2.10 – the Justice Bus rides tomorrow!  According to Woodland California’s Daily Democrat, the Justice Bus, a mobile legal clinic sponsored by the University of San Francisco School of Law (whose students staff the clinic), the Public Interest Clearinghouse, and Legal Services of Northern California, is stopping in Woodland on 10/9 to hold a free employment law clinic.  “This clinic will offer free legal advice and referrals for all aspects of employment law from wrongful termination and wage and hour claims to workers compensation and benefits questions. Anyone with employment related questions is able to attend this free legal clinic.”  It’s great to see this project allowing students to engage with clients in under-served areas who need help.  And it’s not the only example of such an undertaking.  Indeed, it’s not the only Justice Bus.  In March, the PSLawNet Blog profiled the Justice Bus run by Arizona State law students.  And in August we covered the work of University of Detroit Mercy law students who run Project Salute, which aids low-income veterans and rolls in a “custom designed 31-foot Mobile Law Office, built and donated by General Motors.”  Our major malpractice concern in all of this is a student driving the bus.