Boo!!!, people.  Boo! because it’s Halloween and boo! because the Phillies got knocked out of the playoffs.  This week’s News Bulletin is bursting at the seams because we took a break last Friday.  This happened because we are lazy we were hosting and/or attending NALP’s Public Service Mini-Conference and the Equal Justice Works Conference and Career Fair.

We’ll put up a debriefing post about those events later, but without further ado here’s two weeks of public interest news, including: A Colorado district attorney isn’t high on public defenders; there’s nothing corny about access to justice in Iowa; a public law school’s clinic program subject to NJ open records laws; grayhairs…er…senior attorneys…volunteering on the access to justice front; federal hiring reform is happening about as quickly as most federal things happen; some domestic abuse prevention funding in Southeast PA; a foreclosure clinic at Albany Law; Canada’s feeling the legal services funding pain, too; misguided pro bono efforts in San Fran?; public defender and prosecutor almost come to blows?; speaking of, let’s return to prosecutors and defenders in Colorado; you’re welcome, Alaska Legal Services Corporation, for your organization’s new motto; LSC’s inspector general scrutinizing a Louisiana grantee program; law students fighting foreclosures in Beantown; a goofy and fortunate financial boost for a Chicago public interest organization; Microsoft forks over big donation bucks to Kids in Need of Defense (KIND); Kentucky hops on the AtJ commission bandwagon; New York State Bar’s president wants more government funding for legal services; so does the New York Times’ editorial board.

• 10.28.10 – Kerfuffle alert!  On 10/22, the Aspen Daily News in Colorado ran a story about the funding differences between the local public defender’s and prosecutor’s office.  We summarized that story in Item 11 below, and we indicated that the story closed with comments from District Attorney Martin Beeson that were sharply critical of the role of public defenders in the criminal justice system.  Well, those comments – “Public defenders are not defenders of the public. They are not serving the public good. They are taxpayer-funded attorneys for criminals.” – have caused a stir in the Colorado legal community.  In a more recent Aspen Daily News piece, critics characterized Beeson’s comments as “scary,” “spectacularly ignorant,” and showing a “shocking disregard” for constitutional principles.  Beeson is not backing down: ““I stand by my statement. The so-called public defenders do not defend the public. The law enforcement defends the public. The prosecutors defend the public.”

• 10.26.10 – In a letter to the editor published in the Des Moines Register, two legal services advocates highlight the importance – and the recent successes – of the Iowa Supreme Court in expanding access to justice for low-income Iowans.  The court’s justices have “encouraged Iowa lawyers to provide services to low-income Iowans. Last year alone, more than $2 million in donated legal services were provided.  The Iowa Supreme Court has also fostered the development of self-help court forms that allow unrepresented Iowans the tools needed to seek judicial remedies when they can’t afford to hire a lawyer.”

• 10.26.10 – the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Rutgers law school clinics must prepare for the sunshine: “Defying the wishes of several national associations dealing with legal education, an appeals court in New Jersey has denied the legal clinics of that state’s public law schools immunity from its open-records law, exposing them to new document requests that could greatly complicate their work.”  A Rutgers environmental law clinic is at the center of this decision.  After it represented a citizens’ group in opposing a real estate development plan, the developer tried to subject the clinic to disclosure provisions under the state’s Open Public Records Act.  On the trial court level, the clinic was successful in opposing the disclosure demands; the court found that the clinic’s unique status, not just as a publicly funded institution but as a law office with needs for preserving confidentiality, exempted it from the OPRA.  But the appellate court disagreed.  The clinic’s position was backed by the American Association of University Professors, the Clinical Legal Education Association, and the Society of American Law Teachers.  The Rutgers case and some others around the country involving challenges to law school clinics’ autonomy made waves earlier this year, as we noted in the final item of our 4/16/10 Public Interest News Bulletin.

• 10.26.10 – New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, the state’s top jurist, is making good use of attorneys who are long in the tooth and not short on altruism.  A while back we covered Chief Judge Lippman’s launching of an “attorney emeritus” program that allowed retired attorneys to remain active and provide pro bono services to low-income clients in a variety of civil matters.  This represents one step Lippman has taken in an impressive personal crusade to narrow the justice gap.  (For more see Item 1 and accompanying links).  More recently, according to the New York Law Journal, the emeritus program is expanding to accept more volunteers.  “Last month, the initiative was one of 10 programs in the state to be recognized by Harvard Kennedy School’s ‘Bright Ideas’ program, which was created to share ‘creative government initiatives’ around the country with public sector, nonprofit and academic communities.  Now, eligibility has been expanded to include non-retired lawyers who otherwise meet the program’s age and experience requirements.”

• 10.26.10 – from Federal Times.com we learn that Uncle Sam’s hiring-process streamlining is moving in the right direction, but slowly.  “The government has reduced average hiring times from 140 days to 110 days, but it is still far from meeting the Obama administration’s goal of 80 days from initial application to hiring.   By Nov. 1, OPM will begin reviewing how well agencies are meeting the administration’s goals to reform the hiring process. The White House issued a directive to agencies in May, ordering agencies to streamline the application process by using plain language, removing essay questions from initial applications and by notifying applicants about the progress of their applications.”

• 10.25.10 – the PSLawNet Blog is fond of all good news emanating from the Philadelphia region, so here’s a short blurb from the Delaware County Daily Times noting that the Domestic Abuse Project of Delaware County has received three different grants totaling $27,500 to support its work with domestic violence victims.  Not a windfall, but every little bit helps.

• 10.25.10 – the WTEN television station in Albany reports on a  new clinic at Albany Law School.  “Albany Law School has opened a new program to help some of the forgotten victims of this nationwide foreclosure crisis, it’s called the Tenant Foreclosure Protection Clinic …. Albany Law School received a $205,000 grant from the New York State Housing Trust Fund Corporation to fund the new clinic within the law school’s Clinic and Justice Center.  This funding news is a bit of a silver lining around an otherwise dark cloud.  See the bottom two items for bleaker news.

• 10.22.10 – don’t forget aboot the Canadians, eh.  From Lawyers Weekly, we learn that IOLTA money is important up north, too.  And in Alberta, IOLTA shortfalls meant that Alberta Legal Aid’s (ALA) receipts from the province’s law foundation dropped from $14.4 million to $1.1 million.  That’s a lot of toonies, and it’s straining the system badly.  ALA recently dropped its client income-eligibility limit by nearly a third as the province’s legal leaders search for solutions to stabilize funding in the long term.

• 10.22.10 – Latin scholars everywhere will have fits over the notion that pro bono could be…bad!?  A San Francisco Chronicle columnist examines whether a local pro bono program through which Biglaw attorneys and other volunteers defend the homeless in citation hearings is doing more harm than good.  The “volunteer work can bog down an already overwhelmed court system, diminish accountability for chronic offenders, and make citations meaningless for quality-of-life crimes like urinating on the street, panhandling and public drunkenness.”  The columnist thinks that these well intentioned pro bono efforts are perhaps misguided.

• 10.22.10 – Smackdown averted!  California’s Stockton Record reports that “San Joaquin County Public Defender Peter Fox has fallen under investigation for allegedly challenging a prosecutor to fight during a verbal tirade this week when tempers flared in a Stockton courtroom.   No blows were exchanged, but San Joaquin County Deputy District Attorney Ronald Goodreau – the other attorney in the Wednesday afternoon fracas – said Fox also peppered him with expletives, belittled him inches from his face and acted shamefully.”  Yikes.  The article notes that Fox had to lay off one third of his attorneys earlier this year, and the dispute had to do with the prosecutor’s unwillingness to delay a hearing.  Fox, according to the piece, is known as a typically level headed guy.  It seems like tension about resource shortages may have gone from simmer to boil.  Speaking of…

• 10.22.10 – Colorado’s Aspen Daily News looks at the differences in budgets between the local public defender’s and district attorney’s offices, and notes that while the elected DA is able to make his case for appropriations in front of county legislators, there is no elected public defender and indigent defense funding runs through a statewide program.  The article also compares salaries, and notes that defender salaries are generally lower than those of other public service attorneys.  “Entry-level defenders make about $48,000, and their average lawyer makes $55,000 in his or her first five years … On the district attorney’s side, entry-level prosecutors in county courts make about $50,000. District court deputies, who handle felonies, start at $60,000.”  Defender and unelected prosecutor salaries have been frozen since 2008, according to the article.  In the PSLawNet Blog’s several months of scanning the public interest news landscape, we’ve noticed that at least some prosecutors and defenders share mutual respect and see each other as playing valuable – if necessarily adversarial – roles in the criminal justice system.  Not so District Attorney Martin Beeson!  He’s quoted as saying that “Public defenders are not defenders of the public … They are not serving the public good. They are taxpayer-funded attorneys for criminals.”

• 10.21.10 – It’s news from Wasilla, Alaska that does not involve Mama Grizzlies or the dramatically dramatic lives of Bristol and Levi!  The Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman (great name!) reports that Alaska Legal Services Corporation has moved a staff attorney into the Valley (with the help of a local government grant) in order to serve its growing population.  Like its counterpart organizations down here in the Lower 48, ALSC struggles in stretching its limited resources to help as many clients as possible: “ALSC estimates that for every 100 callers who asked for legal aid in 2009, ALSC attorneys were able to help 54. Of the 46 rejected callers, 17 did not meet requirements for assistance, but 29 could have received some type of legal service if ALSC had more resources.”  Our favorite part of the story is a former ALSC client’s praise for the organization, noting that “[t]hey went balls to the wall” in handling her case.  How’s that for a memorable tagline?  “ALSC: Balls to the Wall for Our Clients”.  (And we’ll have you know, dear readers, that this expression is not naughty even though many people believe it is.  Go ahead: Google your Internets!)

• 10.21.10 –  the Center for Public Integrity is again taking aim at the Legal Services Corporation for budget management questions arising at LSC grantee organizations.  An article on the Center’s website reports that LSC’s inspector general has “challenged $318,768 in expenditures by the Capital Area Legal Services Corp. in Baton Rouge, La., that were charged to taxpayers.”  Capital Area Legal Services’ executive director, whose use of funds is under scrutiny, disputes the idea of wrongdoing on his end.  This past summer, a Center for Public Integrity report criticized LSC’s oversight of grantee organizations.  A U.S. Government Accountability Office audit of LSC practices had also been released in the summer.  For more on these developments, see Item 4 of our 7/16/10 News Bulletin.

• 10.19.10 – the PBS Newshour (which happens to be your author’s favorite news program) runs a piece on community activism in Boston to fight home foreclosures.  Harvard Law School’s Legal Aid Bureau is in the mix as students conduct door-to-door community outreach to let residents of properties in foreclosure know that they have rights and may be able to contest the proceedings and remain in their homes.

• 10.19.10 – Money is flowing to Chicago public interest organizations in wacky, wild ways.  Early this month we covered (see Item 3) a cy pres award that channeled over $3.5 million to the city’s legal services community.  More recently, and wackier, the Chicago Tribune reports that a litigant in Cook County paid out $1.1 million in judicially ordered fines to two charities, one of which is Chicago’s Coordinated Advice and Referral Program for Legal Services (CARPLS). The fines stem from a breach-of-contract suit between a hedge fund and a former fund executive that has nothing to do with public interest law.  The court fined the exec because he apparently used scrubbing software to erase electronic data that should have been preserved for the legal proceedings.  The fund, in seeking to have exec fined, asked that any fines issued by the court be directed to charity.  And, thusly, CARPLS gets over a half a million bucks.  From the Tribune story: “Allen Schwartz, executive director of CARPLS, said the money would create some fiscal stability after the organization lost one-fourth of its funding in 2008. But the funds likely would be used to replenish the organization’s reserves and not hire new staff, he said.”

• 10.18.10 – a blogger at the Blog of the Legal Times blogs that “Microsoft has donated $3 million to Kids in Need of Defense to aid in the organization’s effort to help children who come to the United States without a parent or legal guardian find pro bono lawyers to represent them in immigration court proceedings.”  Seed money from Microsoft had actually gone toward founding KIND in 2008.  In light of Microsoft’s largesse, we at the PSLawNet Blog would just like to note publicly that we’re super-huge fans of Windows and Bing and Seattle and even that crazy Microsoft Access program.  Donationshappilyacceptedthankyou!

• 10.15.10 – in the Lexington Herald-Leader, a short AP blurb notes that “Kentucky has joined nearly two dozen other states in forming a commission to help the judiciary deliver civil legal aid to low-income citizens.  Chief Justice John D. Minton announced on Thursday the creation of the Kentucky Access to Justice Commission, a 30-member body tasked with removing impediments to access to the justice system, developing effective plans for funding for civil legal services and expanding assistance available for self-represented litigants.”

• 10.15.10 – here’s an op-ed on the Buffalo News website from Stephen P. Younger, president of the New York State Bar Association, that’s been making the rounds in Empire State media outlets.  Younger notes that the state’s funding of legal services, at a time of acute need, is “woefully inadequate.”  He offers an interesting per capita statistic to contextualize legal services funding:  “Our state’s core operating funding for these critical legal services amounts to only $3.68 per indigent person, compared to an average of $23.51 funded by our neighboring states.”  Younger ultimately calls on the legislature to boost funding (and lauds the work of Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman on the issue).

• 10.14.10 – more New York.  The New York Times runs an editorial observing that adequate funding for legal services locally and nationally remains elusive, and calling on Congress to act: “After the election recess, Congress must approve the extra financing to provide legal services for struggling homeowners authorized in the financial reform law. It must also approve a substantial budget increase for the federal Legal Services Corporation, which helps finance these critical programs, and ditch senseless restrictions hampering its mission.”