ACSBlog

By Vanita Gupta, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU, and Steve Hanlon, Partner, Holland & Knight

Earlier this year, the Orleans Parish Defenders Office (OPD), which represents more than 80 percent of criminal defendants in Orleans Parish and handled 30,000 cases in 2011, faced a particularly severe fiscal crisis. The office fired a third of its staff and effectively slashed pay for those who remained. Private contract lawyers handling death penalty and conflict cases stopped getting paid. Entire divisions of the office were cut. Hundreds of criminal defendants were left with no lawyer to represent them, though their lives and liberty were on the line. Funding for indigent defense in New Orleans relies, in part, on collection of traffic fines, as well as court fees paid by indigent defendants who plead guilty or are convicted at trial. In recent months, the office has been able to rehire a handful of lawyers after lawmakers supplemented the indigent defense budget by increasing the indigent defender fee by $10 and seatbelt violations by $20. And two weeks ago, OPD filed a lawsuit alleging that New Orleans Traffic Court has shortchanged indigent defense between $2.4 million to $6.7 million since 2007. 

The persistent underfunding of indigent defense systems in the United States for the last 50 years has occurred on the watch of our state courts and our profession. As we prepare to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright on March 18, 2013, all of us must know that when this chapter in the history of the American justice system is written, it will not be a pretty picture.

After first recognizing a right to prospective injunctive relief for grossly underfunded public defender systems in 1989, the federal courts abdicated their responsibility to enforce the Sixth Amendment, citing abstention concerns. As a result, since 1992, almost all significant systemic challenges to underfunded public defender systems have occurred in state courts. The principal goal of this first generation of state court litigation was to increase funding for indigent defense systems around the country. In better economic times, this goal was difficult, to say the least, since legislatures and occasionally the executive branch, rather than the courts, appropriate funds for state agencies. The task is Herculean during the current budget crisis, when state courts are turning to desperate measures to generate revenue, such as aggressively collecting fines and fees off the backs of the poor.   

by Jeremy Leaming

Whether it’s outrageous and wholly unwarranted new restrictions on voting or new voting districts concocted to keep minorities from participating in democracy, rightwing lawmakers and their corporate backers, over the past two years, have stridently pushed an ignoble and tawdry campaign of voter suppression.

But federal courts this week dealt the anti-democracy campaign some setbacks. First, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s in State of Texas v. U.S. swept aside the state’s redistricting plans as discriminatory. The new Texas voting districts, the federal court found violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because they discriminated against Latino voters.

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle said he would sign a permanent injunction against a provision of Florida’s voting overhaul law that made it much more difficult for groups like the League of Women Voters to conduct voter registrations.

Deidre Macnab, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida told The Associated Press that the state’s “anti-voter law created impassable roadblocks for our volunteers, who have been bringing Floridians into our democratic process for over 72 years.”

Florida, along with Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, has sought to implement some of the more onerous restrictions on voting. Not only did Florida seek to shut down voter registration drives, it also enacted rigid voter ID requirements and sought to greatly limit early voting opportunities.

Earlier this month the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia held that Florida’s curtailment of early voting opportunities ran afoul of the Voting Rights Act, which applies to states and localities that have a history of voter discrimination. The court held that curtailing early voting opportunities in Hillsborough, Monroe, Collier, Hardee and Hendry counties would have a discriminatory impact on African American voters. The state, the court held, “failed to satisfy its burden of proving that those changes will not have a retrogressive effect on minority voters,” and that the restrictions on early voting was “analogous to closing polling places in disproportionately African-American precincts.”

Today the efforts of Texas to manipulate the vote were dealt yet another blow. The state’s onerous voter ID law also violates the Voting Rights Act, the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia ruled in State of Texas v. Holder.