Lives That Legal Angels Saved
from
July/August 2005
by Susan Littwin
Abused children, evicted mothers, tortured asylum-seekers, and desperate housewives are among the people pro bono lawyers have helped survive. In doing so, such lawyers fulfill the American Bar Association’s definition of pro bono service—work that has “enhanced the human dignity of others by improving or delivering volunteer legal services to our nation’s poor and disadvantaged.”
On these pages, we honor various attorneys—all but one of whom also do corporate work—who have donated their time and passion to this fight, as well as some of those who have had their dignity restored.
Fighting a Harsh ForEclosure
When Household Finance foreclosed on Helen J. Coleman’s house four years ago, she lost more than a property and the furniture and appliances she couldn’t afford to move. It was a piece of herself that she left behind as she stood on the street with her ailing sister. “It was my home. So much had gone on there,” she says.
Coleman was the neighborhood den mother, the ever-present spirit at the neighborhood block club, the Boy Scouts, the PTA, and the church. Her house in South Central Los Angeles was an unofficial community center, the place for meetings, banquets, and backyard barbecues, and a hangout for her son Erik Paul Simien’s high school football team.
Helen Coleman is a single mother who worked for the Department of Water and Power for more than 30 years. She bought the house on 10th Avenue because “it’s important to have a house to be stable, and I wanted that for Erik.”
When Erik went away to college, the house had the echo of empty rooms. Coleman rented it out and moved in with her sister, Mary D. Coleman, so she could save money and help care for Mary. The plan worked fine for a year. Then everything disintegrated.
Coleman’s tenant stopped paying his rent, and it took a long time to get him to leave. She fell behind in her house payments. “A nice fellow at the bank was working with me to create a plan,” she says. In the process, she discovered that her loan had been part of a block of loans that her bank had sold to Household Finance. This new lender was in no mood for payment plans or refinancing. Coleman’s pleas led nowhere: “I wasn’t a person to them. I was just a number.” Household Finance did not return phone calls asking for comment on this story.
When an earthquake badly damaged her house and her sister’s too, they decided they could salvage only one home, Helen’s. Mary’s house was not habitable or salable or refinanceable. In the end, they walked away from it. They moved back to Helen’s house and, with a small city loan for earthquake relief, began the repairs. But Household was unyielding about the earlier missed payments, Coleman says. In March 2001, after getting a foreclosure notice, she packed what she could and moved out. By then Mary, who had lung cancer, needed a wheelchair and was dragging an oxygen tank. The two women relocated to a tiny ground-floor apartment; the toilet backed up, and the place was ridden with mice. “I was scared to get out of bed,” Coleman remembers. “I found a mouse swimming in the kitchen sink. I slept with the lights on.”
Household Finance immediately sold her house for $147,100 to a purchaser who resold it four months later for $237,000. Coleman got no money from the sale, although she should have received enough to cover what remained of her equity after the mortgage, legal fees, and other expenses were settled. Angry, she told her story to an attorney at the nonprofit legal aid group Public Counsel. The attorney enlisted pro bono help from the Los Angeles office of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, which put Chet Kronenberg, Michelle Mehta, Christopher Sant, and Katherine Seay on the case.
“I had this law firm in Century City on the 29th floor working for me, just like the lawyers who work for Household Finance,” Coleman says, tears in her voice. “They did so much work. There was so much paper. They treated me like I had a million dollars.” Finally, last August, her legal team settled her case out of court for $81,566.18.
Coleman would have liked to go to trial, but her nephew needed a car to attend college and her cousin needed to move out of a house where there was mold. She owed both of them money, and the settlement enabled her to pay off her debts to them as well as her other creditors.
Coleman and her sister now live in a nice rental house. And at age 61, having retired from the Department of Water and Power, Coleman does volunteer work daily for a community-improvement group, fighting for folks who need help in their struggle to keep afloat.
Going to War for a Living Wage
Maria Cornejo remembers the hourly wage she earned at each of the jobs she held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She made $5.15—the minimum wage at the time—cleaning rooms at the elegant Inn of the Anasazi and the same amount serving food at Taco Bell. Later she started at $6.26 as an assistant teacher with Head Start and was getting a dollar more in the fall of 2003, when an organizer from the Santa Fe Living Wage Network came to speak at the preschool.
Earlier in the year, the city had passed a minimum-wage ordinance requiring that workers be paid at least $8.50 an hour, higher than the federal level of $5.15. But because of legal wrangling, the law had not yet gone into effect. The organizer passed around a sign-up sheet for those who wanted to help. Cornejo immediately filled in her name and phone number.
Cornejo was desperate for some assistance. She had two young children, and her husband had left her. She was working a second job as custodian at the post office; she owed money to her parents, her sister, and even her teenage brother. Santa Fe, an upscale tourist mecca, is one of the nation’s most expensive cities. “Milk is over $4 a gallon with tax, so after I bought groceries, there was nothing left,” says Cornejo.
She went to Living Wage meetings, passed out flyers, talked to her neighbors, and translated for the organizers. When the law finally went into effect last year, her more timid neighbors thanked her. The minimum wage rose to $8.50 an hour, and Cornejo got 25 cents above that at Head Start because she was bilingual. “It was $60 a week extra for me,” she says. “Everything wasn’t going to milk and food.”
Then a coalition of business owners challenged the new law. Cornejo attended many of the court sessions, but what she remembers is the restaurant owner who said that his employees were happy with their low wages. “He was invited to a birthday party at the home of a dishwasher. Some families were sharing the house, and he said they liked to live with a lot of people,” recalls Cornejo.
Sidney Rosdeitcher, an attorney in the New York City office of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison, remembers that testimony as well: “He said they had televisions and hi-fis, and they lived six to a room because they liked to. That it was the way they lived in Mexico. I can see why that stuck in her mind.”
Rosdeitcher and a team of Paul Weiss associates defended the ordinance, joined by the Santa Fe city attorney’s office, among others. They prevailed in the weeklong trial. An appeal is pending.
Rosdeitcher had been recruited for the case by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law because he had done earlier work with the center for a minimum-wage ordinance in Missouri. “My principal area of specialization is antitrust, but the newspapers in New Mexico called me a labor lawyer from New York,” he says, adding that it is a title he would be proud to hold.
A key argument his legal team made was based on an economic study it had commissioned. The study showed that small price bumps would not shutter hotels and restaurants. Owners had charged that the wage increases would devastate businesses but make little difference to the workers.
Cornejo, 31, knows this isn’t so. Her wage increase means the following: “I’m not looking in secondhand stores for my son’s school uniforms, and my son has two pairs of shoes now.” She has begun to repay her family’s loans, and she can drive her own car rather than borrow one from whoever in her family has a day off. And she will soon be able to give up food stamps.
Finding Hope for a Frightened Kid
"That was not a home at all. The lady would put me in front of dogs if I did something wrong,” says Jamison of his first foster placement at age 4.
Jamison is not his real name, but it is the name he used as a plaintiff in a class-action suit, Olivia Y. v. Barbour, brought against the state of Mississippi for failing to protect children in its care from harm.
Over 14 years the Mississippi Division of Family and Children Services shuffled Jamison through 28 different placements: foster homes, group homes, mental hospitals, and treatment centers, many of them egregiously inappropriate. Jamison is a handsome, bright, resilient young man of 18 now. He was removed from his mother’s home by the authorities because it had no running water, no electricity, and no bathroom, because his mother drank too much and, in Jamison’s words, “she whupped us.” Someone called the child welfare authorities, and he and his two older sisters were taken away.
Jamison’s first placement—at the home with the snarling dogs—lasted a month. Three placements later, at age 7, he was, for the flimsiest of reasons, in a residential treatment center that medicated him and put misbehavers in a rubber room.
There were five happier years in another foster home. “The husband and wife treated me like family,” Jamison recalls. They wanted to adopt him, but his mother was doing well at this point and Jamison was returned to her on a trial basis. He has fond memories of their summer together: “She played with me and read stories to me. We cooked for each other.” But the record shows that Jamison witnessed his mother being beaten by boyfriends and that another couple living in the house were repeatedly beating a 2-year-old. When that toddler was beaten to death for wetting his bed, the trial reunification ended. Within the year, his mother died of a drug overdose.
Jamison was never given the intense counseling or therapy he needed. Instead, he was sent to another residential treatment center, where he spent seven months and was medicated again. After that came more shelters and more foster homes. He was a teenager by then and sometimes found himself ejected for minor infractions, such as getting in late after a party.
At one point, when there was no other place for him, he was sent to a psychiatric facility in Memphis. Counselors were puzzled when they reviewed his file. It showed a typical teenager—in itself a minor miracle. The state of Mississippi declined to comment for this story.
In 2004 the DFCS sent him to Kansas to live with his father, who had been in prison on and off for 15 years but was now free. His father’s parental rights had been terminated, and he had not laid eyes on Jamison in 15 years. “It’s important to know your daddy,” a DFCS worker told Jamison. But the Kansas agency that reviewed the paperwork ran a check on the father and discovered that he had a long rap sheet and no legal rights to the boy. Jamison was put on a plane back to Jackson, Mississippi, where no one remembered to pick him up at the airport.
His next bed was in a halfway house on the campus of a juvenile reformatory known for harshness. “I was in with a mix of kids,” says Jamison. Some of them destroyed his clothes as a prank. Worse still, he wasn’t permitted to attend high school, though he wanted badly to graduate.
He won’t say who gave him the toll-free phone number for the New York City-based group Children’s Rights, which had been investigating what its founder, Marcia Robinson Lowry, calls “serious problems and gross underfunding” in the Mississippi DFCS. But Jamison told his story to Corene Kendrick, a staff attorney at the organization, and soon became the second of 13 plaintiffs in the Olivia Y. case.
John Lang, a partner in the New York office of Loeb & Loeb, led the pro bono team, working with Children’s Rights attorneys as well as local lawyers. His firm’s pro bono division specializes in child advocacy cases. “We prefer to stay in an area where we have expertise and can make a difference,” Lang says. “There is no one to give these children a voice. They don’t vote; they have no money. And their own parents aren’t gems.” So far, Olivia Y. v. Barbour has survived several early challenges and is scheduled for trial next February.
In the wake of publicity surrounding Olivia, Jamison has been moved to a more suitable group home and is finishing high school. He sings in a church choir and plays on the football team. He has dreams that are happily all over the place. He wants to be a nurse, a lawyer, an architect, a singer. He is sure of one thing, though: He wants to continue his education outside Mississippi.
Caring for a Woman Lost in a Fog
"I tried to leave law school, but everyone reminded me that I had borrowed so much money, I had to stay with it,” Laura Reynolds recalls. “So I just slogged on. No one promised me a happy life.”
The fog of despair that surrounded her was her personal weather. Today her depression, along with panic attacks, has rendered her unable to practice law or to hold any job more taxing than clerical work. And her student loans—which now total about $160,000—hover. Student loans are almost as hard to erase as a Mafia debt, even when you’re mentally ill.
Now 35, Reynolds had an outwardly normal childhood in Denver. She did well in school, but she was quietly suicidal throughout adolescence, she says. She went to Claremont McKenna College in California and tried to do a junior year abroad in Europe. She managed four days before what she calls a severe panic attack in Glasgow prompted her to come home and spend the next four months shut in her parents’ house. Refusing to believe she had a serious problem, she then returned to school.
Partly because she had no other plans, Reynolds went to the University of Michigan Law School. “The first semester was great,” she says. “I did well.” In the second semester, she discovered that some of her classmates were running a kind of bingo game, keeping score by putting down markers each time a fellow student spoke in class. Reynolds was the winner of the frequent-talker game. “I was horrified and embarrassed,” she says. “Things tumbled and tumbled until I couldn’t bear to be alive anymore.”
Reynolds stumbled on and graduated with respectable grades, but she couldn’t get a job. “I sent out 400 applications. Maybe my low self-esteem came across. I started having more panic attacks, free-floating anxiety, and never-ending depression.”
A psychiatrist prescribed Zoloft and recommended that Reynolds move out of her parents’ home. She joined a friend in Boston but still had no luck finding work as a lawyer. Her loans were coming due; she owed $1,300 a month and was earning just $1,200 doing clerical work. “I lived in denial,” she says. “I paid what I could of the loans with my paycheck and put everything else on credit cards.” After two years she followed another friend to St. Paul, Minnesota, and continued doing clerical work.
Psychiatrists tried a pharmacopoeia of drugs in an effort to control the anxiety and panic. But solving one problem just seemed to uncover another. The day’s routines seemed insurmountable: go to work, walk the dog, clean the house. “I would let them slip,” Reynolds says. And she realized she could never be a lawyer: “Letting other people’s problems slip isn’t tolerable for an attorney.”
Throughout, the loan companies were dunning Reynolds. “I was getting 15 to 20 letters a week,” she says. “I had no idea how much I owed to whom, because they kept selling the loans.” Hoping to get a better handle on her debt, she sought help from the pro bono department at Dorsey & Whitney, a Minneapolis-based law firm. When none of the lenders were willing to work with Reynolds, her lawyer suggested a Hail Mary pass and sent her to his Dorsey colleagues Jonathan Strauss—who is now with Flynn Gaskins & Bennett—and Monica Clark.
Strauss and Clark specialized in bankruptcy law, and they believed they could make a case for discharging Reynolds’s student loans. The bankruptcy code governing those loans, Clark explains, has tough language to prevent debtors from declaring bankruptcy and then proceeding to lucrative careers. Forgiveness requires the borrower to demonstrate “undue hardship,” a phrase as difficult to define as “mental illness.”
But the two lawyers made the case for Laura Reynolds in bankruptcy court and then again in the U.S. District Court, winning both times. The federal Department of Education now has the case on appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals, and Reynolds and her attorneys have their fingers crossed.
So far, says Reynolds, “it is an enormous relief. It made so much difference in my level of stress. There was all this guilt I felt. I borrowed in good faith, and it killed me that it worked out this way. But they listened to me—Monica, Jon, and the judge. I’m not a bad person, just a person with problems. I thought there was no hope for me, and they found hope and some justice.”
Seeking Safety for a Tortured Body and Soul
Amadou Diakité drives a yellow cab in New York City and lives in an apartment in Queens. He is often lonely. He misses his wife and three sons, who remained behind when he fled the African nation of Guinea. But he is safe here. He will not be arrested, beaten, or tortured for his political activities. He has legal asylum.
A decade ago Diakité, now 36, was a leader of student protests at the University of Conakry. The protests initially were about the appalling conditions at the university—the food, the dormitories, the teaching—and the discrimination in grades and stipends based on students’ tribes and their politics.
Those grievances ignored, many students fed into the roiled river of opposition political parties. Guinea’s authoritarian president, Lansana Conté, had seized power in 1984. Diakité, a member of the out-of-power Malinke tribe, joined a pro-democracy party associated with his people and became a speechwriter—a dangerous and powerful job, since word of mouth is the most effective recruitment tool in a country where many are illiterate.
Over the next few years, Diakité says, he was arrested and detained three times. He was beaten with fists, rubber hoses, and belt buckles; he was tortured with a two-pronged electrical device and tied by his upper arms and hung from the ceiling. He still has scars from the ropes. After his last arrest in 1998, the guards warned him that the next time he would be killed. He believed them.
He had finished his studies in law in 1995, but he says, “I had not the means or the possibility to work in that field.” Translation: He was a political pariah; no one would give him the internship that future practice required.
In 1997 he got a job as commercial representative for an NGO—a nongovernmental organization associated with the United Nations—that helped people from his region produce traditional indigo-dyed textiles. In 2001 he traveled to the United States to sell the fabrics to stores here. When he returned to Guinea, the authorities were waiting for him. He was searched and interrogated at the airport. Was he working for the political opposition abroad? Had he insulted President Conté during his trip? He had married in 1999, and he began to fear for the safety of his growing family. Each election presaged a ratcheting-up of menacing visits to his home and to the shop where his wife worked as a seamstress.
Despite the danger, Diakité participated in a campaign to boycott a 2001 referendum that in effect extended the president’s term indefinitely. He moved around the country to avoid capture by the authorities, but reliable contacts warned him that he would be arrested on election day. “I decided to flee Guinea,” he says. “I was afraid that if I was arrested again, the security forces would make good on their threat to kill me.”
He planned his escape carefully. The usual crowd of family and well-wishers didn’t accompany him to the airport. He bought a round-trip ticket to New York City, and he left at a time in the morning when the police weren’t closely monitoring international flights.
He flew into JFK on June 29, 2002, and entered the country with a three-month tourist visa. A friend told him about the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). The committee put him in the hands of Jacqueline Klosek, an attorney in the Roseland, New Jersey, office of Boston-based Goodwin Procter. A specialist in intellectual-property and technology law, Klosek had been trained by the committee. “They walked us through cases,” she says.
Still, this was Klosek’s first asylum case, and she says she was even more nervous than Diakité as they and other Goodwin attorneys made their way through the asylum process. She took an affidavit from him testifying to the arrests and the abuse and had him examined by a doctor who certified that he carried scars consistent with his story. “I knew we had a strong case,” she says. But qualifying for political asylum is tough. In fiscal year 2003, for example, 262,102 asylum cases were pending before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Bureau. Only 11,434—or 29% of those decided—were approved.
In Diakité’s case, the immigration hearing officer knew the history of Guinea thoroughly, as well as its politics and players. He questioned Diakité closely, and Diakité, to Klosek’s relief, answered calmly and well. In July 2003 Diakité was granted asylum.
“I’m safe now,” he says. He speaks to his wife every day by telephone, not trusting the privacy of the mail. He knows that authorities in Guinea watch his home to see if he has returned. Klosek is working on bringing his family here. “They are not totally safe,” Diakité says. “No one is bothering them right now, but when it’s time for an election, bad things happen.”
Looking for Justice in Coal Mine Country
Melissa Russell is a coal miner’s daughter from Harlan, Kentucky. She never wrote a hit country song about the heartbreak of betrayal or about the struggle to get out of a town where there was nothing for the men to do except work in the mines, and nothing for the women at all. But she could have provided the lyrics.
Russell followed her parents’ advice and got an education. She went to community college in Harlan, where she dated a coal miner’s son she had known since high school. Both of them went off to Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, a few counties away. They married in 1992 and had their whole lives planned out, even their future children’s names.
Their son was born in 1995, soon after they graduated from Eastern Kentucky. Russell’s husband went to work as a factory technician; she worked in one of the university’s libraries. Their daughter was born in 1999, and Russell stayed home with the children, as the couple had agreed she would. They bought land and a manufactured home in nearby Berea, and Russell thought all was going according to plan.
Then one night in 2001 her husband came home and announced that he didn’t love her and no longer wanted to be married. “Fourteen years together!” Russell blurts out, recalling the shock of that moment. “I couldn’t believe it. What could be wrong?” Two months later, there was a quarrel and things turned ugly. Russell opened the mail one day and discovered that her husband had filed for divorce, demanding the house, custody of the children, and child support. She had no job and no income; she had 20 days to respond and feared that her children would be taken from her and that she’d soon find herself on the street, alone.
She sought help from Appalred (Appalachian Research and Defense Fund of Kentucky), a 30-year-old organization that provides legal services to people who can’t afford them. Appalred is perhaps best known for winning benefits for miners suffering from black lung disease, but now much of its work is with people like Melissa Russell, in workaday areas like family law.
Russell, who’s now 35, qualified for pro bono legal help from a program Appalred sponsors, Volunteer Lawyers for Appalachian Kentucky, and her case was taken by Earl-Ray Neal, a criminal-defense lawyer who served as a director of Appalred from 2002 to 2004. He was not alarmed by the husband’s demands. “The best defense is a good offense,” he says. He promptly filed a response on Russell’s behalf, and reasonable negotiations began.
When the divorce became final, Russell kept the children and her home. And the settlement that Neal worked out gave her some breathing room. She would have to get a job, but her husband would pay child support and cover her bills until their daughter was old enough for preschool.
Russell became a reading tutor with AmeriCorps at Eastern Kentucky. The work paid a stipend and allowed her to acquire training as a teacher. She won awards for her tutoring and volunteer work. This year she was a teacher in her own kindergarten-and-first-grade classroom at the Rock Christian Academy.
Has she gotten over the end of her marriage? “We’ve been through a whole lot,” she says. “He married again and my kids have a half-brother and a stepsister, and I have to explain. Divorce is hard.” She has tried to start dating but feels she isn’t ready yet. “I desire companionship, but when someone shows interest, I feel I’d rather be alone. Maybe in a few months or a few years. But work has built my confidence. So even though I went through what I went through, I knew I would make it.”
