PSJD Public Interest News Digest – December 1, 2017
Sam Halpert, NALP Director of Public Service Initiatives
Hello there, interested public! Hope you all enjoyed Thanksgiving. Recent news concerning our community involves a few themes, including strategic disputes when considering court reforms (cash bail and right to council in eviction cases, in California), concerns about the Sixth Amendment (in South Carolina and California, again), and the role of technology in access to justice (in Ontario and among law schools).
Welcome to December,
Sam
Student Loans
Immigration
- In New York City, about 100 public defenders protested outside the criminal courthouse against ICE’s continuing arrests of individuals making local court appearances.
Access to Justice – Criminal
- The Huffington Post drew nation-wide parallels between far-flung disputes over indigent defense shortfalls in Missouri, Louisiana, and Nevada (covered previously in the Digest) as well as in several other states.
- In Oskaloosa, Iowa, the city council approved an ordinance eliminating jail penalties for many city ordinances in order to reduce the cost of its indigent defense program.
- In Louisiana, funding for indigent defense in capital cases ran out for the year and defenders’ offices began refusing clients.
- In California, a dispute arose around how best to reform problems with cash bail, as San Francisco’s chief Public Defender criticized the state judiciary for expressing an interest in moving to an algorithm-based system for determining whom to remand and whom to release in criminal cases, as popular support builds for a state bill that would provide “widespread release for all misdemeanors and low-level felonies.”
- In South Carolina, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court issued a memo ordering lower court judges to stop issuing bench warrants for traffic violations because these warrants often resulted in Sixth Amendment violations.
- West Virginia University College of Law received a five-year grant of $100,000 from Wilson, Frame, and Metheny to fund its Innocence Project clinic.
Access to Justice – Civil
- The Ontario Attorney General announced “Putting Justice Within Reach: The Foundation for User-Focused Justice in Ontario,” a roadmap for digitizing justice services and streamlining court processes in the province to increase access to justice. Legal Aid Ontario also officially launched its legal advice phone hotline after a 10-week soft-launch.
- Professor Dan Linna (of Michigan State University), the Director of The Center for Legal Services Innovation, argued in an interview discussing his Center’s new “Legal Services Innovation Index” that “[the legal profession] must innovate and think big, especially in law school” in order to solve the United States’ access to justice problem.
- In a three-part opinion column, a California attorney argued that differences in the relative size of federal judicial districts in California, when compared with similar areas on the eastern seaboard, effectively means that “Californian’s [sic] have second class status when it comes to having access to federal justice.”
- The ABA, the Veterans Consortium, and the National Law School Veterans Clinic Consortium joined the Department of Veterans’ Affairs in a memorandum of agreement facilitating veterans’ access to pro bono legal services–ideally through existing VA facilities.
- As San Francisco, California, moves toward a right to council in eviction cases a dispute has arisen between a grassroots proposal and a more narrowly-drawn right promoted by members of the City Council.
- CityLandNYC covered a panel discussion held earlier in November covering New York City’s new law providing a right to council in eviction cases.
Music Bonus!
All that, and a trombone: