Wednesday February 6, 2019

Vote! ChangeLawyers nominated for Best Nonprofit Video of the Year 

do-gooder has selected The Power of ChangeLawyers as a finalist for NonProfit Video of the Year!

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Border Update Immigrant rights lawyers denied entry into Mexico

Al Otro Lado received a ChangeLawyer Grant for their cross-border legal work.

Two U.S. immigrant rights attorneys and two journalists who have worked closely with members of a migrant caravan in Tijuana said they had been denied entry into Mexico in recent days after their passports were flagged with alerts by an unknown government.

It is unclear which government or governments, if any, might have issued the alerts.

The U.S. State Department declined to comment Friday. The Homeland Security Department and Customs and Border Protection declined to provide comment attributable to an official. The Justice Department directed The Times to Mexican officials. Representatives for the Mexican government did not respond to requests for comment.

The two attorneys who were denied entry into Mexico, Nora Phillips and Erika Pinheiro, are leaders of Al Otro Lado, a nonprofit group based in Los Angeles and Tijuana that has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

In 2017, the group filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency of unlawfully depriving asylum seekers access to the U.S. asylum process.

In recent months, Al Otro Lado has sent lawyers to Tijuana to advise members of a Central American migrant caravan that arrived late last year at the Mexican border city. Some of the caravan’s members are seeking asylum in the U.S. Al Otro Lado recently partnered with two members of Congress to escort a group of asylum seekers to the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, where the group waited overnight until Customs and Border Protection officials agreed to accept the migrants for processing.

Phillips, the legal and litigation director for Al Otro Lado, said she was detained Thursday evening after flying to Guadalajara for a planned vacation with her husband and 7-year-old daughter.

Mexican immigration agents scanned her passport and told her it triggered “an alert,” she said.

Phillips said she was separated from her daughter and husband and escorted into a separate room in which Mexican officials peppered her with questions, including about how much money she was carrying, whether she had weapons training, and whether she ever had been arrested or convicted of a crime.

Read the story on LA Times >

More of This Judge blocks discrimination against Puerto Ricans and accuses government of “citizenship apartheid”

Donald Trump’s appalling negligence toward Puerto Rico is one of the most deadly, disturbing, and overlooked tragedies of his presidency. After Hurricane Maria ravaged the U.S. territory in 2017, the Trump administration botched disaster relief, contributing to a humanitarian crisis that, according to researchers from George Washington University, cost nearly 3,000 lives. (Trump rejected this death toll as Democratic propaganda.) Residents had to beg for food, water, and medical care while emergency relief goods sat undistributed at ports. Five months after the storm, half a million Puerto Ricans still lacked electricity. Trump initially tried to deny the island any federal aid, then attempted to cut off funding by claiming, falsely, that officials were misusing the money. He insisted that the hurricane was not a “real catastrophe like Katrina.” Today, the White House is still working to block supplemental funds for the territory’s recovery.

Trump’s approach to the Puerto Rico catastrophe was unprecedented in its malice. But it is only the latest chapter in the federal government’s long-standing discrimination against the island, abuse that enabled the White House to ignore its suffering without fear of political consequence. Because Puerto Rico is a territory rather than a state, federal law treats its residents as second-class citizens, depriving them of full voting rights and representation in Washington, as well as equal access to health care and disability benefits. This arrangement is enabled by century-old precedents that permitted mistreatment of territories like Puerto Rico because they are “inhabited by alien races.”

On Monday, however, U.S. District Judge Gustavo Gelpí—a George W. Bush appointee—issued a shot across the bow that throws the legality of this federal abuse into question. In a fiery ruling, Gelpí accused the federal government of unconstitutionally discriminating against Puerto Ricans, violating their equal protection rights by withholding disability benefits owed to mainland residents who are from the island. Gelpí concluded that the Supreme Court’s recent marriage equality decision eroded the old, racist precedents, guaranteeing Puerto Ricans the full privileges of citizenship. His decision could mark the beginning of an earthquake in federal law—one that could finally limit the federal government’s ability to abuse the territories.

Although residents of Puerto Rico are American citizens, Congress has refused to extend the full social safety net to the island. Medicaid reimbursement, for instance, has long been capped at about $300 million a year. In the states, funds are distributed based on average per capita income. So the federal government pays a much smaller percentage of Puerto Rico’s Medicaid costs than it would if it were a state. This disparity has contributed to the island’s financial crisis, as have statutes restricting its ability to restructure debt. There are no health care exchanges in the territory, and thus no subsidies for individuals who buy insurance. And residents of the island are ineligible for Supplemental Security Income, which provides cash to indigent people who are elderly or disabled.

Read the story on Slate >

Less of This Thanks to SCOTUS, the Trump Administration will let adoption agencies turn away Jewish and Queer couples

In 2014, the Supreme Court dramatically expanded the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to let for-profit corporations deny contraceptive coverage to employees on the basis of their owners’ Christian beliefs. The 5–4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby prompted a now-famous dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who condemned the court’s decision to use RFRA, a law originally intended to protect religious minorities, to legalize discrimination. “No tradition,” Ginsburg noted, “and no prior decision under RFRA, allows a religion-based exemption when the accommodation would be harmful to others.” Through Hobby Lobby, the court had transformed RFRA from a shield into a sword, creating a license to discriminate with no clear limitations.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration proved Ginsburg right. In a decision of startling breadth, the Department of Health and Human Services declared that, under RFRA, a federally funded foster care agency in South Carolina has a right to discriminate against non-Christians, closing its doors to would-be parents of different faiths. As Ginsburg predicted, the administration’s interpretation of the law has no limiting principle: It all but announced that taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies may now engage in flagrant discrimination without consequence, so long as they state a religious rationale for their actions. The grim future that Ginsburg foresaw in Hobby Lobby has arrived.

The path of Wednesday’s decision began when Miracle Hill Ministries, a Christian foster care agency, refused to work with multiple applicants who did not share its beliefs. Miracle Hill turned away a Jewish woman eager to mentor children in foster care because she was not Christian. It also rejected same-sex couples because their sexual orientation did not align with its religious values. In response, the South Carolina Department of Social Services warned Miracle Hill that it could lose its license if it “intends to refuse to provide its services … to families who are not specifically Christians from a Protestant denomination.”

At that point, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster intervened, issuing an executive order granting adoption and foster care agencies the right to discriminate on the basis of religion. But a problem remained: A federal rule also prohibits HHS-funded agencies like Miracle Hill from engaging in discrimination on the basis of, among other things, religion and sexual orientation. So McMaster petitioned Steven Wagner, principal deputy assistant secretary at HHS’s Administration for Children and Families, to grant Miracle Hill an exemption. Wagner, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration’s “faith-based initiatives” program, promised McMaster’s staff that he was “pushing this hard” at HHS. And on Wednesday, Wagner granted the request in a four-page letter that amounts to an earthquake in federal civil rights law.

Read the story on Slate

Less of This Too “Talking Black” in courtrooms can have striking consequences 

“He don’t be in that neighborhood.”

When one court reporter in Philadelphia transcribed that phrase, it turned into this: “We going to be in this neighborhood.” In other words, the opposite of what the phrase actually meant — that someone is not usually in a neighborhood.

That was just one transcription error captured in a soon-to-be published study that found court reporters in Philadelphia regularly made errors in transcribing sentences that were spoken in a dialect that linguists term African-American English.

Researchers played audio recordings of a series of sentences spoken in African-American English and asked 27 stenographers who work in courthouses in Philadelphia to transcribe them. On average, the reporters made errors in two out of every five sentences, according to the study.

The findings could have far-reaching consequences, as errors or misinterpretations in courtroom transcripts can influence the official court record in ways that are harmful to defendants, researchers and lawyers said.

“The larger implication is that people are not being afforded a sense of fairness and justice because the system is not responding to their language,” said Anthony L. Ricco, a New York-based criminal defense lawyer, when told of the study’s findings.

Decades of research has shown that the way some black people talk could play a role in their ability to secure things like employment or housing. The new study, scheduled for publication in June in the linguistic journal Language, provides insight on how using black dialect could also impact African-Americans in courtrooms.

“People who speak African-American English are stigmatized for so doing,” said Taylor Jones, a doctoral student in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors.

Mr. Jones added that there was nothing improper or broken about the dialect that some African-Americans inherited over generations, but negative stereotypes have influenced the way people hear or perceive it.

“If you’re taught that these people speak incorrectly, then it’s very easy to say, ‘Well, they don’t make any sense; what they’re saying is wrong,’” Mr. Jones said.

Read the story on NY Times >

Speaking Of… One lawyer, 194 felony cases, and no time​

On April 27, 2017, Jack Talaska, a lawyer for the poor in Lafayette, La., had 194 felony cases.

113 clients had been formally charged. The rest are not pictured.

High-level felonies carry sentences of 10 years or more and should each get 70 hours of legal attention, according to a workload study.

For Mr. Talaska, that’s more than two years of full-time work.

Mid-level felonies require 41 hours each.

A few of Mr. Talaska’s clients faced life without parole. Such cases, on average, require 201 hours apiece.

In total, Mr. Talaska needed to do the work of five full-time lawyers to serve all of his clients.

Mr. Talaska was not outside the norm. Of the public defenders in Louisiana handling felony caseloads at that time, there were two dozen with even more clients. One had 413.

The numbers alone might seem to violate the Constitution. Poor defendants in the United States have the right to a competent lawyer, and hundreds of thousands of defendants rest their hopes on someone like Mr. Talaska.

But there has never been any guarantee that those lawyers would have enough time to handle their cases. That’s why the study cited above, which looked at the workloads of public defenders, is significant.

Right now, courts allow an individual to claim, after they lose, that they received an ineffective defense. But the bar is high. Some judges have ruled that taking illegal drugs, driving to court drunk or briefly falling asleep at the defense table — even during critical testimony — did not make a lawyer inadequate.

It is even harder to make the argument that the sheer size of lawyers’ caseloads makes it impossible for them to provide what the Constitution requires: a reasonably effective defense. That is partly because there has never been a reliable standard for how much time is enough.

Now, reformers are using data in a novel attempt to create such a standard. The studies they have produced so far, in four states, say that public defenders have two to almost five times as many cases as they should.

The bottom line: Mr. Talaska would have needed almost 10,000 hours, or five work-years, to handle the 194 active felony cases he had as of that April day, not to mention the dozens more he would be assigned that year. (The analysis did not include one death-penalty case on his roster, the most time-consuming type of case.)

Now, reformers are using data in a novel attempt to create such a standard. The studies they have produced so far, in four states, say that public defenders have two to almost five times as many cases as they should.

The bottom line: Mr. Talaska would have needed almost 10,000 hours, or five work-years, to handle the 194 active felony cases he had as of that April day, not to mention the dozens more he would be assigned that year. (The analysis did not include one death-penalty case on his roster, the most time-consuming type of case.)

Read the story on NY Times

Law School Admissions Conference at UCLA

La Raza Law Students Association & For People of Color, Inc.

This event will provide attendees with a comprehensive overview of the law school application process.  Current law students and administrators will provide advice on how best to navigate the law school application process.  Continental breakfast and lunch will be provided.

Registration is required.  This event is free and open to the public. 

When:  Saturday, March 2, 2019, from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Register here >

Work for Legal Services for Children​

LSC seeks an attorney to represent children in immigration proceedings. Clients will be living in the community in the Bay Area or in the Federal Foster Care program in Solano county. Clients are primarily monolingual Spanish speakers. We welcome applicants at all levels and provide opportunities for training and leadership.

Apply here >

Work for California State Government

Governor Gavin Newsom has expressed a commitment to having his administration reflect the diversity of the great state of California. He has requested our help to ensure that the incoming administration has a broad, inclusive, and reflective pool of talent from which to draw.

The goal of this portal is to increase the number of people from underrepresented backgrounds applying for positions in the administration, and to increase their visibility during the application process.
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Apply here >