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Washington D.C., May 12, 2016 / 04:21 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- It's not a social justice issue that tops most Catholic's priorities, but it needs to be, legal experts are saying. The problem? How much money you have – or don't – makes every difference in how you're represented in court.

In January, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Louisiana's Orleans Parish public defender’s office for putting clients, some of who were in jail, on a waiting list for legal counsel.

The office had to stop adding new clients because the public defenders were overworked and budget cuts to the parish prevented new hires.

Lauren Anderson, an attorney with the office who’s worked in Orleans since 2013, was quite candid about the dire situation in her affidavit.

“I do not believe I am providing effective representation to the majority of my clients,” she said. “Instead, I feel like a case processor, not an attorney.”

“I spend my days pleading people guilty in the blind, not challenging the state’s evidence in court or investigating the claims made by the police.”

Between Jan. 1 and Nov. 20 of 2015, Anderson said she “handled 671 misdemeanor, 157 felonies, and 182 revocations.” In that time she also “received 431 new misdemeanors, 155 new felonies, and 171 new revocation cases.”

Her “current caseload” at that time she submitted her report was over 120 felony cases, 78 misdemeanors, and 21 revocations.

Simply put, she was overbooked and had little to no time to properly treat her clients and argue their cases in court.

Anderson is not alone. Her colleagues made the same claims – they were handling hundreds of cases, some of their defendants were in jail and speaking to them was a time-consuming process, some were mentally ill and difficult to communicate with, and they didn’t have the time or resources to properly investigate the cases.

In short, the system was broken.

Three other Louisiana parishes had “waiting lists” of defendants who need legal counsel, according to the ACLU. And it’s a national problem, with similar cases happening across the country, thus proving disastrous for people, many of who are poor, who stand accused of a crime and need legal counsel.

“It’s the insurmountable caseloads,” Colette Tvedt, director of public defense training and reform at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told CNA. “There’s just been budget cuts to public defense nationwide.”

In 1963 the Supreme Court ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that, under the Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel, in serious criminal cases the state must provide attorneys for defendants who cannot afford one.

The Court stated that “From the very beginning, our state and national constitutions and laws have laid great emphasis on procedural and substantive safeguards designed to assure fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law. This noble ideal cannot be realized if the poor man charged with crime has to face his accusers without a lawyer to assist him.”

Yet that promise of legal counsel for everyone is still largely unfulfilled today, legal experts say. In a 2013 speech on the 50th anniversary of the Gideon decision, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that “America’s indigent defense systems exist in a state of crisis.”

“It’s really more of a scenario where states have never honored the Sixth Amendment right to counsel in a way that the Supreme Court envisioned,” Cara Drinan, a law professor at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law, told CNA in an interview.

When poor people are accused of a crime and are unable to secure adequate legal assistance, it is absolutely a social justice issue that Catholics should be concerned about, Mary Leary, another law professor at Catholic University, said.

“This speaks to the Catholic social justice issues of dignity and the common good,” she told CNA. “And neither of those are advanced when we have ill-funded public defenders, or public defenders working under impossible conditions.”

The number of criminals in the last 40 years has multiplied. In 1963 there were around 217,000 incarcerated in the U.S., and that number skyrocketed to around 2.3 million in 2013.

With more criminal cases, many of them involving poor defendants, came increased workloads for public defenders and other attorneys appointed by states for public defense. Attorneys are so busy they often have just a few minutes to meet with their client before trial, and usually counsel them to accept a plea deal offered by the state.

The American Bar Association, in its 2011 report “Securing Reasonable Caseloads: Ethics and Law in Public Defense,” stated that “there is abundant evidence that those who furnish public defense services across the country have far too many cases, and this reality impacts the quality of their representation, often severely eroding the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of the right to counsel.”

The ACLU has sued various districts around the country for failing to provide adequate public defense. In each case, the caseloads of attorneys were extremely high.

For instance, the ACLU sued the city of Mount Vernon in Washington state and won in district court in 2013; there, “each closed approximately 1,000 public defense cases per year in 2009, 2010, and 2011 and often spent less than an hour on each case,” according to the court’s ruling. Investigations, legal analysis, and confidential conversations with clients were practically non-existent, as well as any “adversarial testing of the government’s case.”

One of the attorneys “essentially said that trials were unnecessary because ‘we all knew where we were going,’” the decision said.

And many of these criminal cases that end in guilty pleas may not just be “petty” charges.

Anderson, in her affidavit, stated that she is a “Level 3” attorney, “meaning the majority of my new clients are charged with burglary, gun possession, aggravated battery, or drug distribution.” The gravity of their cases, and the fact that some are alleged repeat offenders, means “the vast majority of my clients are facing decades in prison if found guilty at trial,” she said.

Also, states as a whole spend far more on prosecution than on public defenders. States spent a total of $5.8 billion on prosecutors’ office budgets in 2007 compared to just $2.3 billion on public defenders’ budgets, according to a survey of 49 states by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

There is “enormous disparity in terms of resources,” Professor Drinan said, noting that “across the board, prosecutors tend to have more resources than defenders.”

A major federal grant program by the Department of Justice – the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program – allocated over 60 percent of the grant to law enforcement in 2012, the Brennan Center reported. In the portion of the remaining funds that went to prosecutors and public defenders, prosecutors got over seven times the amount that public defenders received in 2010.  

Leary acknowledged there may be an overall disparity in funding but cautioned against the notion that all prosecutorial offices have access to the resources they need. There have been rape cases where a prosecutors’ office in a big city couldn’t perform vital DNA testing because the state wouldn’t pay for it, she noted. “Those are real pressures that, to this day, exist,” she said.

Public defender offices may face funding shortfalls because some states have transferred the budgets to individual counties who are unable to generate the revenue.

Derwyn Bunton, chief district defender for Orleans Public Defenders, reported over $300,000 in projected revenue shortfall for the office in FY 2016. Additionally, the state was cutting over $700,000 of funds for the office, and over half the office’s revenue relied on “traffic tickets and fees imposed on defendants.” The office’s projected costs outpaced their projected budget in FY 2016 by almost a million dollars, he claimed.

In some states and localities, prosecutors already have law enforcement and state crime laboratories at their disposal in cases, although this is not the case everywhere Leary noted. Only nine percent of employees in state prosecutors’ offices are investigators, according to 2007 numbers by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Prosecutors do have excessive caseloads too, Drinan said. “One of the key differences, though, is that the prosecutors have the power to make those cases go away,” she added.

Public defender offices may not afford or have time for investigations, expert witnesses and the help of social workers to determine the mental state of their clients – basic necessities of forming a sound defense.

Anderson, in her affidavit, said she counsels most of her clients to plead guilty “without any investigation being done in the case.” In a case going to trial, she most likely does not start working on it until the weekend before, doesn’t see the police report until the trial, and doesn’t visit the crime scene.

And the public defenders themselves are arguably not well compensated for their work. Compensation limits per case are set by the state with a maximum amount for each case, meaning that if an attorney reaches that amount of compensation his or her hourly salary begins decreasing each extra hour they spend on a case.

In the 30 states that have set a compensation limit, the maximum is 65 dollars an hour with some states paying four dollars an hour, noted a 2013 report “Gideon at 50” by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Some states have not increased their hourly maximums since the early 1990s, or 1986 in Alaska’s case.

And overhead costs like for malpractice insurance mean that in some cases, public attorneys are actually losing money on a certain case.

“The dramatic underfunding and lack of oversight for our public defender services has placed people in a very, very precarious position when they find themselves charged with a crime,” Tvedt stated to CNA.

When a defendant doesn’t have legal counsel, he or she can accept a plea deal that seems amenable on the surface but carries hidden consequences. Jail time, even just a few days, can impact major things like one’s employment and housing.

For a poor person without a lawyer or with an overworked public defender, pleading guilty to even a “minor infraction” can have serious “collateral consequences,” Tvedt said. For example, if they plead guilty to driving with a suspended license and then drive to work or take their kids to school and are caught, the second offence can carry much higher fines. If they can’t pay those fines, they could serve jail time.

“I have spent the last two years in court rooms all over the country doing court watching, and I have seen so many peoples’ lives destroyed in 30 seconds by pleading guilty without a lawyer next to them,” Tvedt said, or with a lawyer that’s “too busy” to properly handle their client’s case.

That was the exact case in Ferguson, Mo., where poor defendants without lawyers pleaded guilty to minor infractions that were issued at a very high rate in the local courts, she said.

“Waivers” of right to legal counsel can also be abused by judges who don’t properly inform defendants of that right, or of the risks of forgoing counsel. Defendants can be poorly educated and completely ignorant of the justice system, yet a judge may simply ask them if they want to waive counsel without warning them of the significant risks that poses to their case, one report on misdemeanor courts by the NACJL said.

In one instance in Maricopa County, Ariz., a judge told defendants who were being charged with reckless driving that “I want you to waive your right to an attorney. You have a right to have an attorney, but I’m not going to give you the public defender. You would have to go and hire one and I don’t think you’re going to do that. I think you and I are going to talk about this right here, right now, right?”

In other circumstances, courts will first hear cases of those who have hired lawyers before they hear the cases of those with public defendants, Leary said. That means that when the court’s day is done there may be people who waited all day for their case to be heard but have to return the next day, or the day after that. For someone working multiple jobs with no vacation days, they might not be able to take extra days off or pay for child care to keep coming to court.

“In terms of the common good, then you might have a situation where the offender is, in fact, guilty, but is not held accountable, not because he was found innocent…but because the system was able to be worked by a defendant with money,” Leary said. “It’s a real problem from a public safety standpoint.”

“The problem with our system is that it hurts the poor,” she continued.

Ultimately, the whole legal system needs to be funded, not just public defense, she insisted, “so that everybody has their dignity – criminal defendants, witnesses, and victims. That everybody has their dignity.”

“And only through that can we really get at a system that achieves justice.”

Photo credit: www.shutterstock.com.

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Erbil, Iraq, May 12, 2016 / 05:02 pm (CNA).- Terrorist attacks don’t phase Sherzad Omar Mamsani, even when an attack claimed one of his arms and left shrapnel throughout his legs. There’s a reason he was a target: he is a Kurdish Jew.

“This is my calling. How can I run away from it? This is my history. This is my faith. This is not something I do just for a living. It is my life,” Mamsani told CNA .

Last year, Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government appointed Mamsani as the Jewish representative to the Ministry of Endowment and Religious Affairs.

“This position sends a message to the world. In a time of war between barbarism and humanity, all creeds and ethnicities are free and protected in Kurdistan,” he said.

“After more than 70 long years of suffering, hatred and exile, we now have the freedom to choose and declare our faith and to live it openly,” Mamsani added. “I am so happy and thankful to God and to the government.”

Mamsani has survived three terrorist attacks. He is still hunted for being unabashed about his heritage. Born in 1976 in Iraqi Kurdistan to a Jewish mother and Kurdish Muslim father, he believes his birthright is something of which to be proud.

In 1997, Mamsani was inspired to write a book that explored Kurdish-Jewish relations. Its publication spurred death threats and subsequent attacks. He eventually wrote another book on the rise of Islamic extremism in Iraq.

“I am a Kurd and a Jew. This is who I am,” he exclaimed. “I should not be forced to hide who I am or feel ashamed for my beliefs. I proudly stand with my fellow community members.”

In the 1940s, Iraqi Jews began experiencing high levels of discrimination and violence. This persecution prompted the exodus of approximately 130,000 Iraqi Jews, who fled to Israel between 1950 and 1952. The following year, Jewish emigration was banned.

Although some claim there are no longer any Jews in the region, Mamsani is proof to the contrary.

“Many people claim that there aren’t any Jews in Kurdistan. These people don’t live in Kurdistan. They left a long time ago and don’t know the current situation,” he said. “My family and I are here and there are 40 to 50 other Jewish families with us who are committed to practicing their faith.”

“But I believe there are hundreds more. Many are in hiding and afraid to come out,” Mamsani added. “I am confident that in the future, they will feel safe enough to join our group.”

Religious freedom advocate Tina Ramirez said Masmani is an inspiration to religious minorities.

“Sherzad gives a lot of people hope,” she told CNA. “If a Jewish person can have this kind of position in the Middle East and is willing to risk his life against terrorists and stand for the freedom of people of his faith, then there is nothing anyone can’t do.”

Ramirez is CEO of Hardwired Global, an NGO that trains local leaders around the world to defend religious freedom for themselves and others.

“It has been so hopeless for so many minorities for so long that I think Sherzad’s courage and work gives them hope that they have a future,” she added.

Since assuming his position, Mamsani has already made headway in advancing his cause.

“In the last year or so, we have made great progress,” he said. “We are already seeing that the preconceived negative image Muslims and other religious minorities have of Jewish Kurds is changing. They are seeing that the hatred they were told to have towards us is unjustified and we are beginning to see a whole new mindset towards us.”

“Also, for the first time, Jewish Kurds are now living freely with other religious minorities,” he said with pride. “This is a great accomplishment.”

In April 2015, the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government passed the Law of Minorities, which gives every religious community in the region the right to establish a representation office in the government and to practice their religion freely.

The Iraqi Kurdistan government now officially represents eight religious communities: Jews, Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Yarsanis, Baha’is, and Mandaeans

Mariwan Naqshbandi, official spokesperson of the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs in Iraqi Kurdistan, spearheaded the religious freedom law.

“I have seen countries with people of diverse and numerous faiths and they live in harmony,” Naqshbandi told CNA. “This is what inspired me to write the law and help get it passed.”

“As a Muslim working in religious affairs, I know the history of our people and our rich culture which has many other religions. The right to worship is a freedom everyone should have,” Naqshbandi emphasized.

Ramirez encouraged the American people to not give up on their efforts in Iraq.

“The U.S. has invested a lot of blood, sweat and tears in Iraq. At this point in time, we have a real opportunity to encourage the government to make religious freedom a priority,” Ramirez said. “We often forget that the history of Jews is intertwined with Christianity. We need to value this history and defend all communities struggling to survive.”

Mamsani said there is still a lot of work left to be done, but is undeterred.

“We need your help to support our government and the Ministry of Endowment and Religious Affairs. Help us to stand for our human rights,” he pleaded. “I have my faith and I will continue to fight for my beliefs. Religious freedom is worth fighting for.”

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IMAGE: EPA

By Junno Arocho Esteves

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The latest "VatiLeaks" trial seemed to have all the makings of a classic courtroom thriller: financial scandal, secrets leaked by an insider and journalists defending their right to blow the whistle on allegations of corruption within a state that is the seat of the Roman Catholic Church.

But the Vatican courtroom, located several feet from St. Peter's Basilica, is not at all like a typical courtroom, much less like ones depicted on TV shows such as "Law and Order" and "Judge Judy" or classic dramas like "A Few Good Men."

Unlike Italy, where it can take years before a final verdict is reached in a trial, Vatican City State is governed by its own laws and procedures, which on a few occasions have led to a relatively quick verdict.

Such was the case with the first "VatiLeaks" trial. The trial of Paolo Gabriele, the personal assistant to Pope Benedict XVI charged with leaking private documents, began Oct. 2, 2012, and concluded with a guilty verdict after just four days.

However, due to the complexities of the "VatLeaks II" case, any hopes for a quick trial were dashed early on.

"I wanted the trial to conclude before December 8 for the Year of Mercy, but I don't think this can be done since I want all the defendants' lawyers to have time to prepare their defenses," Pope Francis said on his return flight from Africa in November.

Allowing for more defense preparation isn't the only factor contributing to a more lengthy trial this time around.

First, there are five defendants. The prosecutors and defense attorneys make their cases not in front of a jury, but before three judges led by Giuseppe Della Torre, head of the tribunal of the Vatican City State.

All statements from the tribunal judges, lawyers and witnesses are transcribed and read back to the court after each session by the court reporter, a necessary function carried out in a somewhat archaic manner.

A typical courtroom stenographer in the United States must pass dictation speed tests of up to 225 words a minute, something generally lacking in the Vatican courtroom.

Instead, a young, two-finger typist seated next to the defendants furiously types away on a laptop, perspiration dripping from his brow as another courtroom official dressed in a black robe looks over his shoulder to ensure the accuracy of his transcription, often pointing to the screen and instructing him to change mistakes.

The clerk will at times raise his hand, motioning whoever is speaking -- even the lead judge -- to hold off while his colleague catches up transcribing the last statement.

At the end of the session, which can sometimes last several hours, the clerk reads the entire transcription over. Occasionally, the clerk will be interrupted by a lawyer, the judge or a witness who will clarify a statement.

During the May 7 session, Judge Della Torre took to repeating each question and the heart of the answer spoken in court to ensure that the recorded answers were objective and pertinent to the question.

Della Torre also made sure people in the courtroom understood a Vatican trial would not include the kind of dramatic outbursts often seen on American TV. For example, Rita Claudia Baffioni -- an attorney for Nicola Maio, who is accused of aiding in leaking the documents -- objected to several questions she said were misleading the witness.

Francesca Chaouqui, another defendant and a member of the former Pontifical Commission for Reference on the Organization of the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See, also interrupted the proceedings shortly after Baffioni, complaining that the line of questioning made it seem she had something to hide.

"This isn't an American trial," Della Torre quipped, adding that each of the defendants' lawyers must wait their turn to question the witness after the prosecution.

Chaouqui drew the attention of the judge when she interrupted once again, telling the court she was almost nine months pregnant and that the length of the trial was too discomforting.

Della Torre quickly reminded her that as long as her lawyer is present, she was never obliged to be present at the proceedings due to her physical state.

"No, I want to stay," she replied.

Even though the trial -- which was to have its 13th session May 14 -- has all the ingredients for drama and intrigue, Della Torre often finds himself playing the role of both judge and director, reminding people that there will be order, even in a place as unique as a Vatican courtroom.

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Follow Arocho on Twitter: @arochoju.

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