access to justice

A.G. Holder Exiting Amid ‘Unfinished’ Work With Immigration Courts

September 26, 2014 By CCM Staff

While praising his actions to bring the first Justice Department action against states over immigration laws, a leading immigration activist says U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder – or his replacement – has work to do on the nation’s immigration courts. The civil immigration system is operated by Holder’s Justice Department, and the judges are Justice Department employees.

The ongoing immigration court crisis, with its 400,000-case backlog and fast-tracking of suddenly high-profile Central American children seeking entry to the United States, is not gaining widespread coverage as news organizations ponder the Holder legacy. But Marielena Hincapié, director of the National Immigration Law Center, noted the issue after first praising the A.G. for “helping to establish immigration as an important area of civil rights.”

She told The Washington Post that “… we really saw an attorney general and a department of justice that was willing to lead on these issues and to take risky moves.” But, the Post added, “… yet she added that Holder (or his successor) still has some important unfinished business with regard to the country’s immigration courts, which are overseen by the Justice Department and are overwhelmed with cases.”

Read the WaPo’s story here: Here’s a look at the most important moments in Eric Holder’s tenure

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: access to justice, court backlog, court budget, court cutbacks, DOJ, Eric Holder, immigration, immigration reform, Justice Department

Award-Winning Courthouse Closes After Just 4 Years

September 22, 2014 By CCM Staff

Just four years after its opened amid much fanfare, one of California’s most scenic courthouses has become another victim of the state’s justice rationing, slated to close Nov. 3. A Plumas County News report quotes Plumas Superior Court Executive Officer Deborah Norrie saying that “… the trial courts have lost a billion dollars (in funding) in the last few years. The Plumas court has taken its fair share of hits.”

Known for its award winning design, Portola Courthouse is facing closure.

Plumas County, a Sierra Nevada community located near the Nevada border in northwestern California, has now lost three of its four court facilities, the newspaper noted, with the Greenville court closing in 2012 and Chester’s court closing last year. All cases in Plumas County will now be processed and heard at the Quincy courthouse, but with reduced court hours. The paper reported that, beginning Nov. 3, the court will be open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Phones will be answered from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The Portola courthouse won design awards and looks more like a ski area entrance than a traditional court building. It is owned by the state judicial system and it remains unclear what, if anything, will be done with the 6,500 square foot building. Local judges say they hope it reopens as a courthouse when funding is restored.

Budget cuts force closure of Portola courthouse

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: access to justice, California, California Budget, california court cuts, california courts, California State Budget, California Superior Court, Chief Justice, civil court, Civil Courts, court rationing, Plumas County, Sierra Nevada

Immigration Court Rationing Retains Attention

September 19, 2014 By CCM Staff

The “Border Kid” refugee/immigration crisis continues to gain attention, with media coverage moving away from the sheer numbers (nearly 400,000 cases pending, for example) into the human interest stories. A good case in point is a Daily Beast online report from the New York immigration court. New York City, like San Francisco, is providing some legal representation assistance for the kids, which assists an array of non-profit and religious groups offering some assistance. But the DB points out that New York is second only to Texas in how many cases it must accept in the new “rocket docket” policy for the children.

The DB also notes that “… the U.S. government is not legally required to provide a lawyer for people going through immigration proceedings—even for young kids. So New York-based advocacy groups like the Safe Passage Project, The Door, the Legal Aid Society, Catholic Charities and the American Immigration Lawyers Association have sprung into action, rallying volunteers, interpreters and pro bono attorneys in a joint effort to help guide the Border Kids through the complex and confusing world of immigration court.”

The volume is staggering, with lawyers being given weeks to prepare cases they feel should take months. Read the report from the courthouse here: The Border Kid Crisis Hits the Courts

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: access to justice, American Immigration Lawyers Association, Border Kids, Catholic Charities, immigration, immigration crisis, immigration reform, justice denied, Justice Rationing, Legal Aid Society, refugee children, Safe Passage Project

Report: Immigration Wait For Non-Detained Average 900 Days

September 17, 2014 By CCM Staff

Hearst News is reporting that “… non-detained immigrants now face an average 900-day wait for their cases to be resolved in the country’s immigration courts, according to an official in the Executive Office for Immigration Review.” That is even higher than the previous average time of 520 days, which was based on data gathered by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse [TRAC] at Syracuse University and included some cases where people were detained in federal custody.

“Detained cases, they try to move more quickly,” TRAC Research Center director Susan Long told Hearst. “Secondly, most of those don’t have attorneys, and therefore they get deported. Removal decisions move much more quickly than any one that has an application for relief.

The story also noted that “… nationally, as of Sept. 30, 2013, EOIR had 350,330 pending cases. That’s up 56 percent from the 223,707 cases pending on Sept. 30, 2009. Between 2009 and the start of the influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America at the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this year, the number of new cases received in immigration courts actually was in decline, EOIR’s statistics show.”

Read the story here.

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, National Tagged With: access to justice, Courts, detainee, Hearst, immigration, immigration law, immigration reform, legal advocacy, non-detainee

Asbestos Litigation Summit Tackles Issues of Trust

September 11, 2014 By CCM Staff

CCM Publisher Sara Warner lights up the Huffington Post again with her latest blog.

The insular and well-heeled world of American asbestos litigation is gathering atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill this week for what amounts to an annual current-events snapshot, and this year things may get a bit testy in the industry triangle of plaintiff attorneys, defense firms and insurance companies. Read More.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: access to justice, Aetna, asbestos, asbestos litigation, bankrputcy, civil court, civil litigation, garlock, Insurance Claims, Insurance Companies, litigation, Meso, mesothelioma, NPR, trust litigation

Courts Funding Gets Buzzy

September 4, 2014 By CCM Staff

Call it official: the once obscure civil courts funding issue surrounding immigration enforcement has gone mainstream. We know this because the click-fest known as BuzzFeed has actually developed one of their video-centric reports: “Top 10 Reasons Why Immigration Courts Need More Funding.”

The reasons are solid, like “… with a backlog of more than 360,000 cases, the average wait for a case to be resolved in immigration court is 578 days.” They also note the lack of legal representation for minors, budget cuts and common sense.

It’s posted in the “community” section with a disclaimer that it was produced by a BuzzFeed non-staffer, but it certainly has the BF DNA. Take a look here.

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: access to justice, budget cuts, Buzzfeed, court budget cuts, court funding

Writer Calls Out U.S. Policy On Border-Children Crisis

August 29, 2014 By CCM Staff

The writer Ruben Navarrette is citing MLK and Democratic governors in a new CNN piece that also says the Obama Administration is misleading the public about what is actually happening to unaccompanied Central American children seeking refuge in the United States.

Navarette, who is also a Daily Beast online columnist and syndicated nationally via the Washington Post Writers Group, begins by citing the civil rights icon: “In his epic ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail,’ the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’ But now that the Obama administration is fast-tracking the deportation of thousands of undocumented minors, perhaps hoping to get rid of them before the November elections, it’s clear that expedited justice is just as bad.”

The writer adds that, “… despite the President’s claim that there is no rush in returning the children and due process would be preserved, the reality is much different. Kids are given court dates they can’t possibly be expected to make — often in another state. Many don’t have lawyers. Deportation cases are being rushed through the pipeline.”

He also suggests that the crisis might become a 2016 presidential election issue, noting that “… Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a possible contender for the Democratic nomination in 2016, warned that the administration was giving the migrant children death sentences. O’Malley told a gathering of the National Governors Association in Nashville, Tennessee: ‘We are not a country that should turn children away and send them back to certain death.'”

It is one of the strongest indictments yet of how the U.S. is handling the crisis, and you can read it at CNN here: Fast-tracking children to possible death

Filed Under: Border Kids, Community, Courts Budget, Refugee Children Tagged With: 2014 election, access to justice, Civil Courts, CNN, court rationing, election, immigration, immigration reform, midterm elections, Obama, refugee children, refugee kids

Immigration Court Scrutiny Brings Cries For Chance

August 28, 2014 By CCM Staff

Those tens of thousands of border children seeking asylum in the United States have shed light on the nation’s immigration courts, and it’s hard to like what we’re seeing. Now, the leaders of the National Association of Immigration Judges are calling on Congress to crate what many of us though we had all along – an independent immigration court system. It turns out that the “court” is actually part of law enforcement, in effect a division of the Department of Justice.

That means, for example, that immigration judges cannot hold federal prosecutors from the Department of Homeland Security in contempt of court because judges are considered to be lawyers working for the Justice Department. Erin Kelly, of the Gannett Washington Bureau, writing in USA Today, has a great report that quotes Judge Dana Leigh Marks, a San Francisco-based immigration judge and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges: “We need an independent immigration court system which stands on its own. Enforcement should not be allowed to control courts.”

See the story here: Immigration judges call for reform

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: access to justice, Civil Courts, court cuts, court rationing, immigration, immigration reform, justice denied, Justice Rationing, refugee children, refugee kids

A lawyer makes the case for Civil Gideon

August 22, 2014 By CCM Staff

A big part of the border crisis involving unaccompanied minors from Central America is legal representation. If the refugees have legal representation, they tend to remain in the United States. Without legal representation, most are sent back. But if they should have representation in what remains a civil action, who else should?

A lawyer makes the case for a “civil Gideon” on page 3 in our print edition. Read it here!

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: access to justice, access to legal counsel, Civil Courts, Civil gideon, indigent legal services, legal representation

Rich Sue, Poor Don’t In Downsized Courts

August 19, 2014 By CCM Staff

Under the downsized and more expensive California court systems, officials are reporting that some types of cases like probate, mental health, dependency, personal injury, property damage, and wrongful death claims continue increasing. But public-access civil cases like small claims, where there’s no attorney involved, are decreasing.

In a solid story from The Reporter newspaper in Vacaville, a Sacramento-area community in Solano County, we learn that “… in a statement issued along with a summary of the report, Justice Douglas Miller, chair of the Judicial Council’s Executive and Planning Committee, called the trend in court filings worrisome [saying] “… it coincides with two other trends that have occurred as result of budget cuts to the judicial branch: the increase in court filing fees to offset General Fund budget cuts and closure of courthouses and/or the reduction of hours at our courthouses. It’s something that we in the judicial branch are very concerned about,” Miller said in a statement.

One concern is that, with diminished hours, increased costs and the challenge of traveling to farther-away court houses, that people who would have normally turned to courts would simply give up. The report can certainly be read to support that claim.

See the story here: Decrease in court filings, rise in costs a concern to court officials

Filed Under: Community, Courts Budget Tagged With: access to justice, California, California Budget, california court cuts, california courts, California State Budget, civil court, Civil Courts, court rationing, justice denied, Justice Rationing