Last week Office of Personnel Management officials spoke about the problems that job-seekers have experienced with the recently launched USAJobs website.  OPM folks were surprised by the immediate, postlaunch user traffic, and in some respects the new system was overwhelmed by it.  Officials, while apologizing to those who experienced problems, also noted that many of the service requests they received stemmed from user error.   Read the full Government Executive story here.

by Kristen Pavón

Here’s some warm & fuzzy public interest news to kick off your weekend!

The Columbia Spectator reported today that Ahmed A., a 37-year-old gay man from the West African country Mauritania, was granted asylum  last month with the help of Columbia Law’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic.

“When I saw the headline, ‘Immigration approval’ and the small red stamp ‘Approval guaranteed’ on the bottom, I couldn’t believe myself,” says Ahmed, who identifies as gay and applied for asylum with the help of Columbia Law School’s Sexuality & Gender Law Clinic. “I was crying.” . . .

Columbia’s Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic, which is the only of its kind, adopts one or two asylum candidates every year. The clients, who are referred by the non-profit Immigration Equality, all seek to flee their countries for fear of persecution due to sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or HIV status. Mauritania is one of seven countries in the world where same-sex sexual activity is punishable by death. . . .

Ahmed said that because of his sexual orientation, his tribe banished him, his father signed away his legal relation to him, and his sister’s husband, who now works for the Mauritanian government, asked her for a divorce.

After calling Columbia clinical law professor Suzanne Goldberg [about his approval], Ahmed celebrated by sleeping, something he had barely been able to do for the six months that he waited for his application to be processed.

Ahmed’s case is a great reminder of why we, the public interest enthusiasts, do what we do.

By: Steve Grumm

Happy Friday, dear readers. From my perch at the NALP Global Headquarters I’m looking out at a gray-but-still-beautiful autumn morning.  Well, actually now I’m looking out at a trash truck picking up garbage from a restaurant.  So much of urban beauty is in the eye of the beholder.   

This week: LSC funding movement on the Hill (or in French: le Hill); how Virginia prosecutors and defenders are weathering funding challenges; speaking of, are layoffs coming to the Chicago PD’s office?; the lawyers representing “Occupy” protestors; DV funding for New Hampshire Legal Assistance; controversy surrounding a proposal to put caseload limits on Washington State defenders (story from the glorious city of Yakima, which I once called home). 

• 11.2.11 – our friends at the National Legal Aid & Defender Association offered a useful update about Legal Services Corp. appropriation developments in Congress: “Yesterday the Senate approved by a vote of 69 to 30 a package of three appropriations bills, including the Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS) appropriation bill for FY 2012.   The measure includes an appropriation for the Legal Services Corporation of $396.1 million for next year.  This amounts to a 2 percent cut from the current level of $404.2 million…”  Read on for discussion of how this may be reconciled with the much lower House LSC appropriation.
• The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog opened up debate about the importance of funding LSC.  You can read the blog post and some commentary (which is pretty good by Internet standards) here.

• 11.1.11 – a piece in the Virginian-Pilot provides numbers on how Virginia prosecutors and PDs are handling funding challenges.  Some data points:
• “In Virginia, the State Compensation Board decreased the budgets for commonwealth’s attorneys statewide by 10 percent in 2010.”
• “Norfolk has lost five prosecutors since last July, dropping the number of attorneys from 44 to 39, Commonwealth’s Attorney Gregory Underwood said.”
• “Chesapeake Commonwealth’s Attorney Nancy Parr said in an email that she…lost two attorney positions, which she said she was able to do through attrition rather than layoffs.”
• “A handful of open positions in the Portsmouth Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office have remained unfilled, prosecutor Earle C. Mobley said.”
• “Virginia Beach public defender Peter Legler said his office has gone several years without raises but has not lost any attorney positions.”

• 10.31.11 – layoffs among Chicago public defenders?  Quite possible.  From the Sun-Times: “Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle sent out the first wave of layoff notices Monday to roughly 100 employees under her authority, a spokesman said….The layoffs will hit a range of offices under her control, from the public defender’s office to the highway department….County Public Defender Abishi Cunningham didn’t have a precise count of workers in his office receiving notices today but said he hopes the county and the unions will work out a deal as they did before.  ‘We’re still negotiating,’ Cunningham said, adding that he initially thought he was going to have layoffs in his office at the start of this year but negotiations avoided that through furloughs.”

• 10.30.11 – a McClatchy piece looks at the role of lawyers assisting “Occupy” protestors throughout the country.  Noting that many protestors are running into legal entanglements, the piece goes on, “The resulting legal skirmishes have spurred the largest mobilization of pro bono protest attorneys since the anti-war movement of the 1960s and ’70s. ‘It’s probably bigger than the anti-war movement, because there are so many simultaneous demonstrations. I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Carol Sobel, co-chair of the Mass Defense Committee of the National Lawyers Guild.  Some of the volunteer lawyers draft and file motions, or simply monitor the protests as legal observers. Some advise the activists on how to negotiate with city leaders. Others show up in court – usually on short notice – to represent jailed protesters at their initial court appearances.” 

• 10.29.11 – New Hampshire Legal Assistance received good funding news: the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women renewed a grant which allows NHLA to serve DV victims.  The Nashua Telegraph reports: “The grant, $540,000 over two years, is the prime funding source for the statewide program that offers civil legal services to low-income victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence….”  It’s been a tumultuous funding year for NHLA (as has been the case with so many other programs), so this is certainly welcome news.  (Congrats, John and company!)

• 10.29.11 – the Yakima Herald-Republic reports on the controversy surrounding the Washington State Supeme Court’s consideration of a proposal to put upward limits on public defender caseloads:  “In an effort to make sure indigent clients are receiving adequate legal representation, the state Bar Association recently recommended limiting the number of cases public defenders can handle at any one time.”  The story focuses on arguments against the proposal by Washington cities, including Yakima, which don’t have a way to finance the costs that could attend the rule’s promulgation.  (Unsolicited autobiographical tidbit: I spent a post-college year volunteering with a legal services program in Yakima.  Such a wonderful, formative experience.  And I sure miss hiking the eastern Cascades.)   

by Kristen Pavón

On July 2, 2010, Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles T. Canady established the Florida Innocence Commission to offer solutions to the Florida Supreme Court for decreasing wrongful convictions.

The commission met on October 10 to discuss recommending mandatory recording of interrogations in serious cases.

Ultimately, the group voted on recommending a mandate that Florida law enforcement investigators electronically record custodial interrogations of suspects in cases of serious felonies, with a cautionary jury instruction as the sanction for failing to record interrogations.

Opponents of the recommendation took issue with the light sanction attached to the mandate.

Florida International University College of Law Dean Alex Acosta, along with University of Florida Levin College of Law professor Kenneth Nunn and Senator Joe Negron, R-Palm City, argued that excluding statements should be the sanction for failing to record interrogations.

“I believe if you mandate something and the sanctions are relatively meaningless, you haven’t mandated anything,” said Jacksonville criminal defense attorney Hank Coxe. . . .

Kenneth Nunn, a University of Florida law professor, said: “What I am concerned about here is whether or not this jury instruction is the big bad junkyard dog with teeth that everybody says it is.” . . .

“Why not say to a police agency — if they can’t say they had good cause not to record that statement, that it wasn’t in a location where it was appropriate to do so, that the suspect said he didn’t want it recorded, or there was equipment failure — why not say you can’t use the statement? To me, that seems to be the biggest sanction you can have,” Nunn said.

Nunn joined Acosta and Coxe in asking whether the commission’s job is to come up with the strongest recommendations on best practices to prevent wrongful convictions — or to compromise on what is politically feasible.

Interesting. I have the same concern as Professor Nunn, will the jury instructions have enough bite to get law enforcement officials to record interrogations? You can read more here.

Thoughts?

From a National Legal Aid & Defender Association email:

Yesterday the Senate approved by a vote of 69 to 30 a package of three appropriations bills, including the Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS) appropriation bill for FY 2012.   The measure includes an appropriation for the Legal Services Corporation of $396.1 million for next year.  This amounts to a 2 percent cut from the current level of $404.2 million.   The entire 2 percent comes from basic field funding.  Both LSC management and the Office of Inspector General are funded at the same levels as FY 2011.

The House Appropriations Committee has previously allocated $300 million for FY 2012, a cut of $104.2 million (27.5 percent) from FY 2011 levels.  It appears likely that negotiations between the House and Senate on the three appropriations bills passed by the Senate will proceed without any final House floor action on the CJS appropriations bills.  The bill also includes funding packages for the Agriculture Department and Transportation – HUD.

The Senate bill was passed under budget level authority agreed to by the House and Senate during the debt ceiling debate last August.  The House bill passed the committee under significantly lower overall budget authority included in the House budget resolution authored by Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI).   If House-Senate negotiators stick with the overall $1.043 trillion spending ceiling previously agreed upon in August, the process could proceed relatively smoothly toward a reconciliation of the two bills.   Negotiations could begin as early as today.  However, a number of House members have indicated their opposition to the overall spending ceiling adopted in August, and such opposition could slow down negotiations on the Senate package that includes LSC funding.   

Government Executive reports that not everyone’s happy with the latest version of USAJobs:

Readers of Government Executive have been less than impressed with USAJobs 3.0. Of the nearly 160 responses to an open-ended query as of Tuesday, only seven praised the website’s Oct. 11 relaunch.

…

The most frequent complaints centered on the site’s search function. Commentators said the tool for filtering search results isn’t working properly — for example, location-based searches return results outside of the specified regions.

Many readers also complained about losing the searches they had saved under USAJOBS 2.0, although OPM had stated on its website and via emails to users prior to the relaunch that no saved searches would carry over.

Bugs in the results pages, login difficulties and long load times also were high on readers’ list of grievances.

The folks at the Office of Personnel Management (which administers USAJobs) are, however, undeterred:

OPM stands by the product, updating the public via daily reports on the site.

“Through refinement efforts, USAJobs 3.0 is continuing to see success, and the most recent testing by OPM shows that the site remains stable and secure, and its capacity is at full strength,” OPM Chief Information Officer Matthew Perry wrote in an Oct. 31 public report. The agency is planning an additional technical briefing on the site for later this week.

by Kristen Pavón

November is National Homelessness Awareness Month and to kick it off, the National Center for Family Homelessness hosted a policy briefing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) here in D.C.

The briefing featured the following panelists:

• Christina Murphy, Director of Campaign to End Child Homelessness, The National Center on Family Homelessness
• Jeremy Rosen, Policy Director, National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
• Asa Fanelli, President, Horizons for Homeless Children
• Sarah Bolton, Legislative Assistant, Office of Senator Patty Murray
• Amy Grassette, Consumer Advisory Board Member, The National Center for Family Homelessness

In addition to the program’s panelists, Assistant Secretary of Community Planning and Development for HUD, Mercedes Marquez, gave the opening remarks.

The amount of information given at the briefing was a bit overwhelming but also alarming, inspiring and motivating.

In particular, I was moved by Amy Grassette’s story. She spoke about her family’s hardship after losing their small business after 9/11. Her family experienced homelessness for almost 2 and a half years after losing their business. Amy gave us a great perspective in terms of the services she received while homeless and where she saw room for improvement.

Here’s a hodgepodge of my notes/thoughts/questions from the briefing:

• More than 34% of the homeless population are children (and this statistic is likely a low estimate because of under-reporting).
• For the 2009-2010 school year, there were 1 MILLION homeless youth (and again this number is probably low because some states do not report this data).
• The Opening Doors Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness has a goal to end youth and family homelessness by 2020 by focusing on the following services: access to affordable housing, jobs, mainstream services, and collaboration between agencies.
• The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty takes a human rights perspective to housing, meaning that housing is a basic right.
• There was a 20% increase in family homelessness between 2007 and 2010.
• Oftentimes, it costs less to offer families housing vouchers (so that families can live closer to schools) than provide transportation to school.
• The Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act can allow tenants to remain in their homes longer and more needs to be done to publicize this law.
• While housing is the foundation for a stable community and life, housing alone is not sufficient to end homelessness. Wraparound services are needed to be effective in preventing and ending family homelessness.
• Homeless children are at a higher risk for: physical and mental health issues, hunger and poor educational outcomes.
• One-third of homeless children have been forced to skip a meal.
• 85% of brain’s core structure is developed from birth to age 5, and because of this, it’s important to intervene early and provide mental health services, transitional services and early education childcare.
• There’s room for improvement in these areas: affordable, adequate & accessible housing; transportation services; childcare services; accessible, affordable, adequate healthcare; livable wages; education; and case management services.

On another note, if you’re in DC and a new law grad — you should check these kinds of events out. I learned about it from Twitter — of all places! @HUDnews tweeted about the program yesterday. It was a great networking opportunity — Keep your eyes and ears open!

by Kristen Pavón

The National Law Journal summarized some of the Commission’s findings in an article today.

The last time the Commission took a hard look at mandatory minimums was in 1991. This time around the Commission reviewed over 73,000 cases from 2010 and previous years.

. . . [T]he Commission unanimously believes that certain mandatory minimum penalties apply too broadly, are excessively severe, and are applied inconsistently across the country,” said the Commission Chairwoman Judge Patti Saris in a statement.

Here are a few of the key findings:

• More than 75 percent of offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty were convicted of a drug trafficking offense.
• Hispanic, followed by black offenders accounted for the largest groups of offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty.
• Black convicted offenders are the racial group least likely to earn relief from mandatory minimum sentences for assisting the government.

And a few of the Commission’s recommendations:

• Congress should reassess some statutory recidivist provisions for drug offenses.
• Congress should tailor the “safety valve” relief mechanism (allows sentencing below the mandatory minimum) to include other low-level, nonviolent offenders convicted of other offenses carrying mandatory minimums.
• Re-evaluate and examine “stacking” of mandatory minimum penalties for some federal firearm offenses.

I’m sure there’s more to come from this report… Initial thoughts?

by Kristen Pavón

So, you may know that PSLawNet lists articling opportunities for Canadian law students. Articling is akin to an apprenticeship for law graduates, and it’s a prerequisite for practicing law in Canada.

In Ontario, an articling task force was created in response to a shortage of articling positions, especially those more oriented to social justice.

. . . 12.1 per cent of those [law graduates] seeking articles in the 2010-11 licensing year went unplaced, a big jump from a rate of 5.8 per cent three years ago.

The access-to-justice issue in Canada is twofold: First, sole practitioners, small firms and legal clinics do most of the legal work for low- and middle-income people and they do not have the resources to provide articling opportunities. Second, most articling opportunities are with medium and large firms that do not address social justice issues.

The task force’s final report should be out in June 2012. Read more here.

How would having an apprenticeship system in the U.S. affect our access-to-justice gap? Let me know your thoughts!

by Kristen Pavón

So, there’s a debate brewing about whether the legal profession should be as heavily regulated as it is. In case you haven’t read the NY Times op-ed and the Atlantic piece, I’ll get you up to speed.

The crux of the argument in the New York Times op-ed is that

the barriers to entry [to law practice] exist simply to protect lawyers from competition with non-lawyers and firms that are not lawyer-owned — competition that could reduce legal costs and give the public greater access to legal assistance.

In the Atlantic’s piece, Jordan Weissmann disagrees with most of Clifford Winston’s arguments for deregulating the legal profession — except that he agrees that non-JDs should be able to own law firms for the sake of technological advances. He argues that

[l]etting more people become lawyers won’t drive down costs in high-flying corporate law. And although it could help control legal fees for the rest of us, we could wind up allowing under-educated people to represent important cases for families who can’t afford the high-flying treatment.

I haven’t formulated a complete opinion on this issue, but I have some questions — how would deregulation affect the access to justice gap? Would there really be a positive change, like Winston envisions, for effectively representing clients who would otherwise a) go pro se to settle their legal issues or b) not do anything to settle their legal issues? How low would legal costs go? Low enough for the poor? Would the public interest law arena remain unchanged?

Thoughts?