By: Steve Grumm and Jamie Bence

Happy Friday, Dear Readers!  Much of the content for this week’s Bulletin was drafted with assistance from Intern Extraordinaire Jamie Bence.  It takes a special kind of nerdiness to put together this news bulletin.  And Jamie’s got it!

This week: $12.5 million to New York State legal services providers; but in Montana, funding woes force a legal services branch office closure; speaking of funding woes, mounting pushback against Garden State legal services cuts; from the Upstream Swim Department, an Illinois prosecutor is pushing to raise his attorneys’ salaries(!); salt-in-wound: the debt-ceiling madness even managed to produce bad news for grad student loans; the San Diego D.A.’s prisoner re-entry program earns kudos; pretty big changes to Seattle’s indigent defense system; what will deficit-cutting measures mean for Uncle Sam’s civil servants?; LSC announces its star-studded Pro Bono Task Force; a Bay Area debate about employers looking at prior convictions of job applicants; NDAA appoints its first woman president; the growth in unpaid legal internships; a report on the Empire State’s strained indigent defense program; an op-ed out of Seattle in opposition the proposed 26% LSC budget cuts; more opposition to legal services funding cuts in New Jersey; Wisconsin’s public defenders are way, way short-staffed; and New York State’s new indigent defense office gets moving. 

• 8.3.11 – good news, for a change, concerning legal services funding.  In New York, the state judiciary has begun making good on its plan to bolster legal services by distributing $12.5 million among 56 organizations.  The New York Law Journal reports that the funds will be applied to serving clients who face troubles with the “essentials of life,” like housing, public benefits, and safety from domestic abusers.  The funding is seen by Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman as the beginning of a steadier stream of funding to support legal services providers at a time when other funding streams have diminished.

• 8.3.11 – bad news from the Treasure State.  The Montana Legal Services Association is being forced to close its office in Butte, and to relocate that office’s sole staff attorney to Helena.  The Montana Standard reports, “Butte District Judge Brad Newman said Tuesday while the effect of the closure remains to be seen, he said that the office provided ‘critical legal services that would be difficult to replace’.”

• 8.3.11 – in New Jersey, the battle for legal aid funding continues. The Assembly Judiciary Committee requested a public hearing over the recent line-item veto, Shore News Today reports. Even fiscally conservative members point out that current funding will probably not sustain an already stressed system.

• 8.2.11 – in Kane County, top prosecutor Joe McMahon is seeking better salaries so that he can retain his experienced staff. McMahon pointed out that keeping a top-flight staff requires several years of training before new attorneys can prosecute the more difficult cases, and by that time they may move on to more lucrative private-sector jobs. “We need to take a significant step in closing the gap in the disparity of pay,” McMahon said according to the Courier News.

• 8.2.11 – while many in Washington were excited to avert a downgrade in the nation’s credit rating this week, our friend Heather Jarvis points out that the Budget Control Act of 2011 has some unfortunate consequences for graduate students. “The elimination of the graduate and professional in-school interest subsidy and the direct loan repayment incentives are estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to produce a savings of $21.6 billion.   $17 billion of that savings will go to shore up the Pell Grant program, and $4.6 billion will be used to reduce the deficit.”

• 8.2.11 – congratulations are in order for the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, which recently won prestigious Achievement Award from the National Association of Counties (NACo) for the DA’s Helping Others Pursue Excellence (HOPE), a prisoner reentry program. Corrections.com has the story.

• 8.1.11 – more news from the Left Coast. This time, the City of Seattle is making changes to its indigent defense contracting.  The Seattle Times reports: “For the first time in 40 years, the King County public defense firm The Defender Association will not have a presence in Seattle Municipal Court.  On Monday, the Seattle City Council awarded a $1.5 million annual contract for a portion of the city’s misdemeanor public defense work to Northwest Defenders Association, said Eileen Farley, executive director of the Northwest Defenders Association. The city’s decision not to award the contract to The Defender Association had been met with a restraining order, a lawsuit and an appeal. But The Defender Association lost its legal battle.”

• 8.1.11 – Washington Post points out that the debt deal discussed above could also squeeze federal jobs. “I am pleased to see that the deal does not include any immediate cuts to federal pay or pensions,” National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen M. Kelley said in a statement Monday. “However, the impact on the federal workforce remains uncertain and agencies are likely to face reductions in their budgets.”   Government Executive has additional details, as well as perspectives from federal employees unions.

• 8.1.11 – LSC has appointed over three dozen public interest luminaries to its pro bono task force. The Blog of the Legal Times reports: “The task force is a project of the Legal Services Corp., the federally funded nonprofit that is the largest source of funding for civil legal aid. Republicans in Congress have warned the organization that it faces potentially deep budget cuts, and they’ve pushed it to find new ways to help the poor with problems like home foreclosures and domestic violence cases.”  Here’s a press release from LSC that lists all task force members.   This push for pro bono has historically been a double-edged sword.  On one hand, it’s absolutely vital to engage the private bar in efforts to support legal services.  On the other, pro bono should not be seen as a means to substitute for funding.  Pro bono to supplement the work of legal services providers: yep.  Pro bono to substitute for the work: nope.  We’ve already offered our thoughts on this topic in a prior blog post.

• 8.1.11 – Time Magazine reports from San Francisco on a new movement to keep employers from considering prior convictions when they review job applications. “‘These people are in the community regardless,’ said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón. ‘Do we want to marginalize them and keep them on the edge’?”

• 8.1.11 – as we reported earlier this week, the National District Attorneys Association has named Sacramento District Attorney Jan Scully their new president. Ms. Scully becomes the first female president of that organization, but as PublicCEO points out, it’s merely the latest in a series of groundbreaking roles for her.

• 8.1.11 – PilotOnline investigates the growing number of unpaid internships for law students, and how many unpaid positions are becoming remarkably competitive. Even students at elite schools, and those working for large government agencies, face an increasingly tight market.

• August, 2011 – New York’s public defender and legal aid systems are in crisis, but with the state budget quickly shrinking, it’s unclear whether they will get a desperately needed overhaul. Some in the state are questioning whether public defenders, faced with growing caseloads, are meeting the constitutional standard of care, Gotham Gazette reports.

• 7.31.11 – LSC board chair John Levi and LSC board member Harry Korrell take to the pages of Korrell’s hometown newspaper, the Seattle Times, to pen an op-ed laying out the potential 26% funding cut that LSC is facing, and explaining how this will hurt Washingtonians: “In Washington, nearly a quarter of the population is eligible for civil legal assistance.  At the Northwest Justice Project, there are pleas from women trying to escape domestic violence and protect their children. There are requests for help from elderly people deceived by scam artists. Families who are desperate call, worried about losing the roof over their heads because of foreclosure or eviction. Often callers are seeking unemployment benefits, or feel financially overwhelmed and see bankruptcy as the only path to a fresh start.”

• 7.31.11 – more from the growing legal aid funding crisis in New Jersey. The New Jersey Record said the following in a Sunday editorial: “Legal Services President Melville Miller Jr. told legislators the new bottom line most likely will mean 100 fewer lawyers, the closure of at least three offices and 10,000 fewer people getting legal help by the end of the year. As a result of the last cuts, Miller estimates that two out of three people seeking help are turned away. This new round may mean three out of four people with a real need for attorneys’ services are out of luck. It’s a deplorable state of affairs.”  There has been considerable backlash on the legal services funding cut, and it will be interesting to see if Gov. Christie reconsiders.

• 7.29.11 – as we blogged about earlier this week, Wisconsin’s public defenders face a dire situation. Less than 25% of offices have enough attorneys to staff the cases referred to them. In many counties, public defense has been contracted out to private firms. WTAQ has the full story.

• 7.29.11 – New York’s newly created State Office of Indigent Legal Services has sent out its first contracts this week, Gotham Gazette reports. “If [you’re] a cynic you can look at it as a small step,” ILS director William Leahy said of sending out the first contracts, “but we look at it as an important step forward.” Leahy said that when discussing indigent services with county officials he was repeatedly told, that it was the first time they had ever, “talked to anyone from the state about public defense and what they need.”