This week: indigent defense budget wrangling between a county and state government; a new veterans clinic will operate out of a West Virginia Veterans Affairs building; Ithaca has gorges and a securities law clinic; it’s nice when a legal services lawyer is the GREATEST PERSON OF THE DAY; a 30-year prison ordeal ended for an innocent man following his exoneration in a Texas court (wow, if the PSLawNet Blog subtracted 30 years from his life he’d be writing this report in crayon and commuting to work on a Big Wheel); hail to the new LSC chief; a  new Top Ten Environmental Watch List from Vermont Law School; the “perfect storm” in legal services funding; the National Law Journal’s Pro Bono Awards; in California, you best not call yourself “legal aid” unless you’re really legal aid; mirroring a national trend, law-firm pro bono in Kansas City picked up during the recession; no honeymoon period for Texas’s new death-row appeals office; the remarkable story of a recovering drug addict who’s just become a California county’s chief prosecutor.

• 1.6.10 – according to the Poughkeepsie Journal, in a cost-saving move last year New York’s state government passed a bill that changed the nature of its relationship with Dutchess County for purposes of funding indigent defense services.  County officials are contending with a potential loss of revenue from the state unless the county moves away from an assigned-counsel system and toward a staffed public defense program.  This situation is but one illustration of the tension that will exist between state and county governments as they struggle with post-recession budget shortfalls.  Criminal justice is an area in which many state and municipal governments throughout the country have shared-cost arrangements, so it will be interesting to see how they maintain balances amidst fiscal pressures in the coming budget cycles.

• 1.5.10 – In West Virginia, the State Journal reports on a new veterans legal clinic that will station a lawyer at the VA building.  “The Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center has a new legal aid program for its veterans. Legal Aid of West Virginia, Equal Justice Works, AmeriCorps, The State Nursing Home, and the VA Hospital are all working together to offer free legal assistance to Veterans and their family members.”  Once per week, an Equal Justice Works/AmeriCorps Legal Fellow will set up shop in the VA to meet with those in need.

• 1.4.10 – from the Ithaca Journal, we learn of a recession-era legal clinic operating at Cornell: “The Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School is available to provide legal services to investors in the Southern Tier and central and western New York who have suffered losses due to fraud or other improper conduct, the clinic announced.”

• 1.4.10 – the Huffington Post’s “Greatest Person of the Day” on Tuesday was Anneliese Gryta, a legal services lawyer doing community economic development work in Toledo (go Mudhens!).  Anneliese’s doing some terrific work as an Equal Justice Works Fellow.  Check out our earlier blog post to learn more about her efforts.

• 1.4.10 – NPR was one of several news outlets that covered the release of an innocent Texan man after 30 years of incarceration.  The story focused on the release of Cornelius Dupree, Jr., and went on to note that there’s something of a trend afoot in Dallas.  “For the past five years, Dallas has watched a parade of men, nearly all black, march out of the state prison system after wasting decades of their lives. Dupree, who served more time than any other Texas prisoner exonerated by DNA evidence, is the 21st from Dallas — that’s more than all but two states.  Barry Scheck and his staff at the Innocence Project have been behind many of these exonerations, including Dupree’s.”  It’s not necessarily that Dallas County juries get it wrong more than others, but Dallas happens to do a good job of storing DNA from old criminal cases.  So advocates for the wrongfully imprisoned have more evidence to work with.

• 1.3.10 – as we reported in a blog post on Monday, the Legal Services Corporation announced that James Sandman has been appointed to serve as the organization’s president.  Here’s some Washington Post coverage of the announcement.  Sandman most recently served as chief counsel for the D.C. public school system.  He’s a former managing partner at Arnold & Porter, and has been a career-long advocate for increasing pro bono and access to justice.  The Post reports that “Sandman is slated to take office at the end of the month. Acting President Victor M. Fortuno is expected to return to his role as general counsel…”

• 1.3.10 – Vermont Law School, which has one of the nation’s most respected environmental law programs, has released its “inaugural Top 10 Environmental Watch List spotlighting the nation’s most critical environmental law and policy issues of 2010 and how they may play out in 2011 … The report evaluates 10 judicial, regulatory, legislative and other actions that significantly affect humans and the natural world.”  Number 10 pertains to the “Pentagon’s efforts to use more renewable energy and decrease its reliance on fossil fuels.”  Number 9 “explores the conflict over transferring polluted water from one water body to another.”  That’s all you get from us.  Read Vermont Law’s press release (which lists the 10) and the full report for more.

• 1.3.10 – here’s a well reported National Law Journal piece about the extreme funding challenges – crises in some areas – that have befallen legal services providers around the country.  “Law firms may be benefiting from the slow economic recovery, but legal aid groups face the most dire circumstances in decades. The problem is a perfect storm of IOLTA funding declines, cuts in state and local funding, uncertain federal support and a tight private fundraising environment. The situation is exacerbated by steep increases in demand for free legal services as millions of low-income Americans face long-term unemployment, foreclosure and other serious problems.”  We blogged about this storly earlier this week, focusing on the bad employment news – layoffs and staff constrictions – that has come as legal services programs struggle to make ends meet.

• 1.3.10 – news of a more uplifting variety from the National Law Journal: NLJ ran a series of stories this week highlighting the work of its Pro Bono Awards winners.  Six law firms were honored for the above-and-beyond work of their attorneys: Cohen Milstein, Hunton & Williams (including friend-of-the-PSLawNet-Blog Jim Rubin!), McCarter & English, Reed Smith, Robins Kaplan, and Steptoe & Johnson.  Attorneys at these firms have volunteered to help Haiti earthquake victims, exploited Nepalese workers, and a death-row client, among others.

• 1.3.10 – going after the unscrupulous few who play fast and loose with the term “legal aid”!  The Los Angeles Business Journal reports that, relying on a California law that prohibits for-profit law and “legal services” businesses from using the term “legal aid,” the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA) and Neighborhood Legal Services of L.A. County have been policing those outfits that have names implying that they provide free services when they in fact charge clients.  Most such outfits have responded to cease-and-desist letters, but LAFLA and NLS have had to sue one, which is alleged to do business “using names such as “Legal Aid,” Legal Aide,” [and] “Legal Aid a Low Income Service.”

• 1.1.10 – a piece in the Kansas City Star highlights pro bono contributions by law firms on the local level and notes the uptick in pro bono work nationally over the past couple of years.  “Nationwide, 134 of the largest law firms contributed nearly 5 million hours of free work in 2009, according to an annual tracking survey by the Pro Bono Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. The same year — the last for which data are available — the trade journal American Lawyer found that lawyers in the nation’s 200 highest-grossing firms spent, on average, more than 60 hours on pro bono matters.  That non-billable workload reflects almost a doubling of pro bono services since 1999, when the American Bar Association and other groups began monitoring and imploring law firms to step up their benevolence…”

• 12.31.10 – just several months ago, Texas created the Office of Capital Writs to handle capital appellate matters.  This, according to the Austin American-Statesman, stemmed from concern by state legislators that court-appointed appellate counsel were providing poor representation.  Unfortunately for the Office of Capital Writs (OCW), though, its creation coincided with a horrific, recession-fueled state budget crisis.  The OCW has already fallen victim to budget cuts, and an additional cut looms.  OCW staff have been stretching resources by crashing with family and friends when they travel on business and buying their own supplies, but another budget cut may prompt a staff reduction that the office can ill afford.  The American-Statesman piece goes on to review the history of “shoddy legal work” that led to the OCW’s creation.  (It was in part the newspaper’s investigative work that revealed problems in the pre-OCW system.)

• 12.30.10 – as we blogged earlier this week, the Daily Triplicate has a nice profile on the new Del Norte County, California district attorney.  A few years ago, Jon Alexander suffered from a drug addiction that was plunging him into a fast-moving downward spiral.  A state appellate judge convinced him to enter treatment, and boy did Alexander ever turn his life around.  He kicked drugs, went to law school, became a public defender, and just this past Monday was sworn is as the county’s district attorney.