This week: a controversial testing method for an NYC homelessness prevention program; TARP funds to prop up corporate interests, but not legal services for low-income homeowners?; the Skadden Fellowship Class of 2011 contains 29 budding public interest attorneys; funding calamity averted for D.C. legal services programs; will we lose more local/state government jobs in the recession’s wake?; significant changes in how NYC indigent defense cases are assigned to counsel; an Innocence Project report sees widespread prosecutorial misconduct in California; the Cleveland Plain Dealer looks at inefficiencies in the local criminal courts.

• 12.9.10 – in the New York Times, we look at a controversial social welfare program evaluation tool.  Borrowing an idea from the medical research arena, the City is essentially denying a homelessness prevention program’s assistance to half of a group of “test subjects” (who are actual people on the verge of homelessness), while giving assistance to the other half.  By doing so, the City will learn how effective the program – called Homebase – really is.  Given what’s at stake though – the welfare of families in crisis – many local public interest advocates have voiced concerns.  On the other hand, the piece notes that “randomized controlled trials” are increasingly used by philanthropies and governments because of their value in answering fundamental questions about social programs’ effectiveness.  And, due to funding shortages the program at issue in NYC is not able to serve all applicants anyway, so the net number of applicants denied is not actually rising as a result of the study.

• 12.9.10 – writing in The Nation, liberal commentator Katrina Vanden Heuvel laments that the Department of the Treasury, relying on an interpretation of current statutory authority, opposes the future use of some TARP funds by states to support civil legal aid for homeowners in distress.  There are pieces of legislation in the House and Senate, respectively, which would explicitly authorize states to channel TARP funding toward legal aid.

• 12.7.10 – The new class of Skadden Fellows has been announced.  Twenty-nine fellowships were awarded to students hailing from 21 law schools.  Four schools have multiple awards: Harvard (5), Michigan (2), Penn (2), and Stanford (3).  The 18 schools which have one Class-of-2011 fellow are a fairly varied bunch, including: Arkansas, Boston College, CUNY, Texas, UVA, and Widener.  Based upon our analysis of the past four annual classes, there has been increasing breadth and diversity with respect to the schools producing Skadden Fellows.  See our recent blog post containing comparative numbers for the classes of 2010, 2009, and 2008.

• 12.6.10 – legal services advocates in the District of Columbia were bracing for an enormous cut in government funding.  A proposed austerity budget could have slashed the appropriation by over 50%.  However, in some rare good news in this arena, this week the D.C. Council came through on legal services funding.  According to our friend Jess Rosenbaum, executive director of the D.C. Access to Justice Commission, “ATJ funding was restored to approximately $3.1 million ($2.951 for grants program plus full restoration of LRAP to $221,000).  This represents a 10% cut to the ATJ grants program, as opposed to the over 50% cut that was proposed.  It also puts the FY11 level 10% higher than what was ultimately funded in FY10 ($2.639).  We are deeply grateful to the City Council for preserving funds for the program which provides critical legal services to the city’s most vulnerable residents.  However, this news is hard to celebrate in the face of horrific cuts to TANF and other programs our clients urgently rely on.”  As was reported by the Blog of the Legal Times, the ABA’s president, Stephen Zack had written in support of preserving legal services funding in D.C. Certainly this extra weight on the scale didn’t hurt.

• 12.5.10 – here’s a piece from The Atlantic’s website painting a grim picture regarding state/local government job losses.  (It literally paints a bleak picture, with an accompanying chart illustrating that state/local governments are still shedding jobs in the recession’s wake while other employment sectors are rebounding slightly.)  In analyzing a longer New York Times article on state/local government budget woes (and one well worth reading), The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson writes, “[T]he worst time for state budgets is often in the years after a recession, when rainy-day funds have been depleted the easy cuts are off the table. The state stimulus tap is effectively dry by 2011. That means you should expect to see states and local government continue to lead the country in job losses over the next few months.”

• 12.3.10 – Changes are afoot in New York City indigent defense case distribution.  NYC is a huge jurisdiction (jurisdictions, technically), and the assigned counsel system has always been more complex than in smaller cities.  Until very recently, no fewer than seven different entities provided indigent defense services, the largest among them being the Legal Aid Society.  There’s a shakeup, though, according to the New York Law Journal: “The distribution of indigent criminal defense cases among the groups that serve as primary providers in New York City has been significantly altered by the Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator.  Based on figures the office has released to the groups, the Legal Aid Society will be responsible for 20,000 fewer cases, and five of the remaining six groups will receive 54,000 more.  The one group that lost out in the bidding for renewal contracts is Staten Island Defense Services, which for the past 14 years has been the primary defender of indigent cases in Richmond County.”

• 12.1.10 – have California prosecutors been getting away with widespread misconduct for more than a decade?  A piece in the December edition of the ABA Journal reviews Preventable Error: A Report on Prosecutorial Misconduct in California: 1997-2009, a report released this fall by the Northern California Innocence Project.   From the ABA piece: “The report contends that prosecutorial misconduct in the nation’s most populous state continues to be a problem, and that prosecutors are seldom held accountable for misconduct—a charge that prosecutors and the State Bar of California dispute.”  The piece goes on to highlight some of the report’s key findings, and the challenges to the report raised by prosecutors.  In October, the L.A. Times had also covered the report’s release; see Item 5 in our 10/8/10 News Bulletin.

• Last but not least, we regret that we missed this in-depth series from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, published last month: “In the past decade, Cuyahoga County judges have dismissed 364 cases mid-trial because they said prosecutors failed to provide the most basic evidence to sustain a conviction. The Plain Dealer examined those cases. The judges’ rulings indicate that county Prosecutor Bill Mason’s office has pushed hundreds of marginal criminal cases to trial in the past decade.”  [Emphases in original.]  It’s a five-part series, and well worth looking at if you follow the nitty-gritty workings of the criminal justice system.  Needless to say, the report generated a lot of back and forth between the prosecutor’s office (Hey, our conviction rate’s 92% and some of the blame lies with the judges), and the criminal defense bar (Those prosecutors don’t adequately screen cases).  Also, a Cuyahoga County judge threw fuel on the fire earlier this week, chiming in with an opinion piece which blames the defense bar for not taking case assignments until they’re past the indictment stage.  This piece generated some thoughtful responses in the comments section.