By: Steve Grumm

Happy Friday, dear readers!  This week’s Bulletin goes to press as we East Coasters are besieged by Mother Nature, who is showcasing her full arsenal of Weapons to Remind People That They Are Not As in Control of Things as They’d Like to Believe.  Best wishes to the folks who will take the brunt of this weekend’s hurricane.  I have followed the practices of my elderly Aunt Mimi by purchasing 6 gallons of milk, 4 dozen eggs, and enough bread to feed all the birds in Rock Creek Park for a month.  Thus I envision a lot of rain and French Toast in my immediate future.

As for public interest news, this week: the ACLU comes down hard on Utah’s patchwork indigent defense system; slow-but-steady progress toward establishing a public defender’s office in a central Texas county; difficult funding cuts have compelled New Hampshire Legal Assistance to close offices and reduce staff; the NYT’s interesting editorial on closing the civil justice gap; $1.4 million in grants from the South Carolina Bar Foundation; dealing with IOLTA shortfalls in DC; Topeka’s district attorney battling against a county budget cut; checking in on the new Texas Office of Capital Writs, a watchdog tasked with ensuring fairness in capital proceedings.  

• 8.24.11 – as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, an ACLU report is highly critical of the Beehive State’s indigent defense system (to the extent that it even has one).  “Utah’s public defender system is failing to protect citizens’ constitutional rights as Utah remains one of only two states that do not provide state funds or oversight for public defense services, a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah claims. The report released Wednesday, titled ‘Failing Gideon: Utah’s Flawed County-by-County Public Defender System,’ addresses the state as a whole, but focuses specifically on nine Utah counties: Box Elder, Daggett, Duchesne, Iron, Kane, San Juan, Sevier, Uintah and Weber.”  Here’s a link to the ACLU report.  (Incidentally, to my great dismay the other state that doesn’t provide funding for indigent defense is the otherwise glorious Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.)

• 8.24.11 – according to the River Cities Daily Tribune, a political squabble has been impeding progress toward establishing a public defender’s office in Burnet County, Texas.  The disputes have come to a resolution, although it is somewhat uneasy.  “A clash of ideologies seems to be simmering down as local trial judges and the Burnet County Commissioners Court reach a compromise on how to create and maintain a proposed public defender’s office.  A four-year state grant will fund the office as a county department, allowing the commissioners to say they’re saving taxpayers’ money while making sure those who can’t afford an attorney are still guaranteed a legal defense…. The catch? The commissioners and other non-lawyers want a say-so in the oversight of the department.”  This doesn’t sit well with the trial judges. 

• 8.24.11 – a compelling Nashua Telegraph article documents the closure of New Hampshire Legal Assistance’s Nashua office on the heels of a state funding cut, as well as larger cuts affecting the whole organization as other funding sources have diminished.  “In 2008, New Hampshire Legal Assistance had a statewide staff of 53, according to its executive director John Tobin. Between the recent state cuts and a loss of charitable funding from the New Hampshire Bar Foundation, NHLA’s staff now numbers 28, he said.”  Tough times for a very strong legal services program. 

• 8.23.11 – this New York Times editorial on narrowing the justice gap is thought-provoking, if a bit scattered.  Right after noting that “[t]here is plenty the government, the legal profession, and others can do to improve this shameful [justice gap],” the piece notes that with so many un- or underemployed law graduates looking for work, there may be ways to situate them to serve the poor.  So it sounds like we’re moving toward a sweeping proposal. But then the piece, after correctly calling for increased LSC funding, proposes a set of admirable-but-not-sweeping solutions: mandatory reporting of attorney pro bono hours in states that don’t already require it; allowing nonlawyers to do more process and form work; more firmly integrating public advocacy into the legal education curriculum; and expanding law school LRAP programs.  All of those proposals are worthwhile.  But even combined, they’ll do only so much (little?) to narrow the gap separating the have’s and have-not’s when it comes to meaningfully accessing the justice system.  (But I do love the NYT’s support for LSC funding!) 

• 8.23.11 – the South Carolina Bar Foundation is raining down money upon grantees, according to Bluffton Today.  (We like that name by the way.  It’s all well and good for a newspaper to be a “Sentinel” or an “Argus-Leader”, but Bluffton Today is just saying, ‘Hey, here’s what’s happening today, in Bluffton.’)  Where were we?  Oh, the total pot of money was $1.4 million, and grantees include South Carolina Legal Services (which took the lion’s share: $1mil.), the South Carolina Center for Fathers and Families, and the SC Access to Justice Commission.

• 8.21.11 – five years ago this would have been a cash-cow for the DC legal services community.  Nowadays, not so much.  The Washington Post looks at a 2010 change in the District of Columbia’s IOLTA system, making it mandatory.  While the number of IOLTA accounts grew by almost 10% in the change’s wake, IOLTA revenues are all but flat, and well down from what they were before the recession’s impact was fully felt.  “2011 [IOLTA] revenue is down dramatically from the $2.4 million in IOLTA funds generated in 2008. That’s largely because participating banks, which until mid-2008 had been paying interest rates of up to 4 percent, are now — with a few exceptions — paying no more than 0.25 percent, in accordance with the federal funds target rate.”  With rates expected to remain flat for a while, the DC Access to Justice Commission has tried to make lemonade, instituting the Raising the Bar program “that asks law firms to set aside a portion of revenue from their [DC] office for legal services providers.  Eighteen law firms have agreed to donate between .075 and .11 percent, and the commission is recruiting more.”

• 8.21.11 – the Topeka Capital-Journal reports that Shawnee County District Attorney Chad Taylor is strongly opposing a proposed 10% cut to his budget by the county.  (Topeka sits in Shawnee County.)  “A weary-looking Taylor said he had lost sleep thinking about how the 10 percent cut…would force him to reduce staffing in his office, where more than 92% of the budget goes to pay salaries and benefits.”

• 8.21.11  the Houston Chronicle checks in with Brad Levenson, who “heads the year-old Texas Office of Capital Writs, an independent state agency tasked with scrutinizing capital murder trials to ensure they were legally proper.  The Texas Legislature created the office two years ago after repeated embarrassing instances of shoddy legal work by appeals attorneys representing capital murder convicts. The agency now handles the state appellate process for nearly all new Texas death penalty cases…. More than a dozen states have similar operations, but Texas was the largest without a public office to address death penalty appeals. None of the other states with capital punishment executes people as frequently as Texas…. Levenson directs a team of attorneys, investigators and staff working out of quarters just a few blocks north of the capital building in Austin. Working with an annual budget of about $850,000, they focus on habeas writs, essentially trying to determine if mistakes were made at the trial.”