Rushing to Help When Bad News Breaks
from
July/August 2006
by Susan Littwin
Hurricanes. Wars. Sex scandals. Massacres. Behind the headlines that bear news of tragedy or disaster, there are the victims— and their families—in need of relief and justice. Pro bono lawyers have traditionally helped provide it. Reacting to the news, the young legal heroes on the following pages have put aside work in their corporate law offices to offer help and hope to the afflicted. Their early immersion in the altruistic aspect of law is notable—and their dramatic stories noteworthy.
Thinking of Their Own Families as They Answered Katrina's Call
Amelia Joiner thought she could clear her calendar and be ready the following week. “But we need you right away,” said Efrem Grail, a pro bono coordinator in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh offices of Reed Smith. Grail had asked for volunteers after reading a
New York Times
article describing a grim result of Hurricane Katrina: Hundreds of New Orleans jail inmates had been evacuated wholesale to prisons all over the state. Many had been arrested just before the storm on misdemeanor charges, such as traffic warrants, and some were due for release. But now they remained incarcerated, without paperwork, identification, lawyers, or contact with their worried families. Grail, a former criminal prosecutor, immediately offered the firm’s help. “This was a breakdown of civil order,” he says.
Joiner, 35, an associate in the firm’s Pittsburgh office and a mother of four who had worked full time at a bank while attending the Duquesne University School of Law at night, was soon on a plane to Louisiana. She joined a team of the firm’s attorneys and for four days traveled from prison to prison, interviewing the evacuated prisoners and feeding information into a database. What had they been arrested for? Did they have a release date? How could family members be contacted? “I interviewed an 18-year-old boy whose mother was in a nursing home and who was raising his younger sister,” Joiner says. “He was always running back and forth between them. The night before the storm hit, he went out drinking with some friends and got arrested for public drunkenness. He was evacuated from the New Orleans Parish Prison to Claiborne Parish Detention Center. He was still there three weeks later.”
She found other inmates who had been crammed into flooded prison cells. “They were without food, water, power, or ventilation, standing in their own filth.” That made her not mind the seedy motel where the lawyers were billeted, with its sagging mattresses, insects, and soiled sheets.
The Reed Smith team could not practice law in Louisiana, so they handed off their data to the few available local lawyers who could take action. A steady trickle of prisoners was released each day Joiner was there. When she and her fellow team members returned home, Reed Smith set up a phone bank in the Washington, D.C., office to stay in touch with family contacts of inmates who were still imprisoned.
Reflecting on the experience, Joiner decided to spend six months working for Neighborhood Legal Services under another Reed Smith pro bono program. “What I saw reminded me that I have a responsibility to help those who need me,” she says. “I struggled growing up. We were four children of a single mother who worked three jobs. We were very poor. I’ve been there, and I’m very fortunate to be here. So when I see people struggling, I don’t have a choice.”
Mike Abelow, 31, a securities litigator in Heller Ehrman’s Washington, D.C., office, also left the comforts of home and his normal work to spend a week giving legal aid to Katrina victims in Mississippi. He set up a folding table at three FEMA centers and shuttled among them while desperate residents, many with nothing except the clothes they stood up in, waited in chairs, as if they were in an ER, to ask his advice.
Should I cash the check the insurance company gave me? Do I have to pay rent if the house is underwater? Do I have to make mortgage payments if the house is no longer habitable? Should I declare bankruptcy?
The answer to the rent question was usually no, to the mortgage-obligation question, yes. But Abelow advised homeowners to contact their mortgage companies and try to work out an equitable arrangement. He told them to document all their dealings with letters, dated notes, and photos. Because of licensing restrictions, he could not take on their cases himself. “But I tried to teach them to think like a lawyer,” says the Washington and Lee University School of Law grad. “Even when I couldn’t make their problems go away, I tried to be sympathetic and give them some direction. They would ask me where I was from, and when I told them they would ask, ‘Why are you here?’ But they were grateful that an outsider cared enough to come.
“Sometimes I had to try not to cry. The Waveland site had an area for kids to play, a safe space where the parents could leave them while they took care of their business. The center was in a skate park, a huge hall with concrete floors and a partition blocking off the kids’ area. Someone had put up cheerful decorations, and there were some toys and games. It wasn’t clear when their lives would be normal again, but the kids were happy just to have that space. I have children, and I thought of them.” It was a week of work he will never forget.
Seeking Justice for a Murder in the Rain Forest
Emily Chatterjee hadn’t even had time to decorate her Washington, D.C., office at Heller Ehrman last October. She was 26, it was her first week in her first job as a lawyer, and she was asked to assist in representing the family of Sister Dorothy Stang, an American-born nun who had been murdered in the Brazilian rain forest. Two senior attorneys had just returned from a 10-day trip to Brazil with their briefcases full of legal work to be done on this pro bono case.
Chatterjee had worked on human-rights issues as a student attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center in Chicago. That experience made her a natural choice to be plucked from the firm’s associates to help on this case. She was drafted almost as she walked in the door.
Sister Dorothy Stang had spent 30 years in the rain forest. She had organized peasants fighting illegal land seizures by cattle barons and increasingly had been an activist for preservation of the forest, ravaged by ranchers and loggers. On February 12, 2005, her struggles ended in a remote camp in the state of Pará. Reaching for a Bible, she was shot by two hired gunmen.
“A 73-year-old nun who devoted her life to helping the people who were lowest on the totem pole was murdered and left to die on a dirt road, to bleed for hours in the rain,” says Chatterjee.
The so-called
pistoleiros
were paid more than $20,000 for their work, in a region where murder for hire can cost as little as $40 and where a government human-rights agency counts 800 uninvestigated murders. But Sister Dorothy was well known, a nun in the Roman Catholic order of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and a powerful antagonist of the ranchers and loggers who had run the territory as a brutal fiefdom.
Five men were arrested: the two gunmen, a broker, and two landowners. But a Brazilian senate report identified up to 20 co-conspirators. Nevertheless, Pará’s see-no-evil highest court declined to federalize the case.
Seeking justice, Heller Ehrman was representing the murdered nun’s family, as permitted by the Brazilian legal system. Partner Brent Rushforth and special counsel Jeffrey Hsu, accompanied by Sister Dorothy’s brother, David, and Rushforth’s Portuguese-speaking son, Blake, who acted as translator, traveled the country. They spoke to prosecutors, judges, human-rights activists and lawyers, elected officials, and journalists in Belém, the capital of Pará; in Brasília, the national capital; and in Rio de Janeiro. They had three main points to press: a transfer of venue from the corrupt backwater town of Anapu to Belém; a combined trial for all five accused, so the same jury could hear conflicting testimony; and an investigation of the other suspects.
They made these points over and over, and they have prevailed so far in having the trials of the gunmen transferred to Belém, where they were convicted. Most important, perhaps, was their tacit fourth mission. By drawing national media coverage at every step, they delivered a message: The world is watching.
Hsu says that Chatterjee did much of the heavy lifting over the next months. “This isn’t like traditional litigation,” says Chatterjee, who grew up in Columbia, Maryland, and graduated from Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School. “This is a different kind of advocacy. It’s about putting pressure on a legal system to ensure that justice is done.” She attended meetings of the Organization of American States and met with Brazilian human-rights lawyers and groups. She researched the human-rights treaties signed by Brazil. She helped the firm find precedents and procedures on which to base its arguments. “It’s very gratifying to work on something so important, to help effect change in some way,” she says.
The two gunmen have been given long prison sentences, and Chatterjee is hopeful that the other trials will take place soon. Meanwhile, her work on the case continues, spurred by her outrage. “It’s shocking not just that this can happen, but that hundreds of other murders of people involved in land reform haven’t even been investigated,” she says. “This may have been a killing for hire, but it was not about money. It was a political crime, a human-rights violation.” She is determined to stay on the case until justice is served.
Helping the Victims of San Francisco Sex Trafficking
About 50 brothels, residences, and businesses were raided one June night in San Francisco last year, and 27 people were arrested for sex trafficking and other charges. The women they were accused of controlling needed help. With its worldwide offices and 900 attorneys, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld was eager to flex its pro bono muscles on behalf of those victims. The firm went to work helping the women whose plight had been uncovered by the nine-month federal investigation called Operation Gilded Cage.
Clifford Rosky, 32, had just arrived in Akin Gump’s San Francisco office after a stint at Covington & Burling. A graduate of Amherst College and Yale Law, he had a special interest in criminal law and wanted to work on the sex-trafficking case. According to allegations in the case record, the traffickers brought unsuspecting young women from Korea through Canada and into the United States, where, by means of “force, fraud, and coercion,” they were sold to massage parlors and forced to work as prostitutes. According to sources, the women were often moved around like so much cargo from brothel to brothel and state to state. They were transported in taxis operated by the traffickers and with air tickets booked by a travel agency the trafficking ring owned. Their passports had been confiscated, and their earnings were siphoned off by the brothel owners as partial payment of what the women owed for their “transportation” to the U.S.
About a hundred of these women were found during the San Francisco raid and taken to safe houses, where they were questioned as potential prosecution witnesses. Since they had entered the United States illegally, they had no legal status here, no papers, and little knowledge of English. They were frightened.
The women needed lawyers to negotiate every aspect of their lives. Rosky took on six clients, four in San Francisco and two more in a related case in Los Angeles. “These women need advice in criminal and immigration issues; they need social services and medical care,” he says. “It’s not natural to walk into a prosecutor’s office and implicate the most powerful people they have ever known. My job is to help them understand the situation, to help them to decide whether to cooperate with the prosecutor. They are victims, and if they’re truthful and cooperative, they could have the opportunity to stay in the United States and get language and job training, counseling, and refugee benefits—to start a new life. It’s the only alternative to continuing to work at massage parlors. Cooperation can help them create new lives, with benefits that include cash and psychological therapy. We negotiate everything for them—driver’s licenses, Social Security. We work with social-service providers. How can they walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles and explain why they have no photo ID?”
The work has not been easy. Rosky has reached out to Akin Gump specialists all over the country on special issues like immigration. “I’m not left to swing in the breeze,” he says. “But it takes a long time to build trust with my clients. They have such a sense of shame, and it’s difficult for them to talk about what happened.”
Professionally, representing the women has been eye-opening for him. “I realize the role criminal law can play in protecting human rights,” he says. Above all else, his clients are free of their daily physical fear. For now, they are safe.
Giving Our Troops Support at Home
Clint Hermes, a 29-year-old associate in Ropes & Gray’s New York City office, has a second job. He is pro bono house lawyer to the Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Institute of New England (PCFINE), whose services include free mental-health help for troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and their families.
Hermes serves on the project’s advisory board and speaks with the president of PCFINE, Dr. Kenneth Reich, almost every day. The young attorney handles the organization’s legal tasks, including contracts for the website designer and for the consultant who developed fundraising and business plans. “But often Ken asks me about things that have nothing to do with the law, like media interviews or expanding the program,” he says.
PCFINE has traditionally provided specialized training to licensed clinical therapists. But in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Reich, a clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, began thinking about the emotional costs of war. “A third of the homeless are Vietnam vets,” says Hermes. “Ken was worried that we would see that all over again, and it just wasn’t right.”
Reich envisioned an organization of volunteer therapists offering free counseling to troops and their families, and over the next two years he recruited more than 60 Boston-area therapists. But before the group could offer free counseling, Reich knew he needed sophisticated advice about the legal obligations and potential limitations of the therapy. When he learned that one of his Ph.D. students, Susan Hermes, was the wife of an attorney at Ropes & Gray, a firm that had represented Harvard for over a century, Reich asked to meet him.
Susan’s husband, Clint, had dinner with Reich at the therapist’s home in early 2004. By then hundreds of thousands of troops had left their families behind and been deployed in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. “When I heard how passionate he was about the project, I knew I wanted to take it on,” Hermes says. His main practice is health-care regulatory law. He represents hospitals, academic medical centers, and universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. He was a perfect fit for Reich’s project.
Hermes attended a PCFINE board meeting, and the questions flew at him. Was a therapist required to report a suicidal soldier? What if a soldier was a danger to his unit? The answer ultimately was to have each client sign a standard consent form, which informs the client that the therapist may break confidentiality if there is imminent danger to the patient or others.
The therapists understood the psychological issues faced by deployed members of the military and their families. The list began with depression, suicide, and divorce. “You have a family that’s a functioning unit,” Hermes explains. “Then one parent is sent away for a long time. The other, most often the wife, has to deal with the finances and the home repairs and the children on her own. Then the husband comes back, and the baby is a year older and cries when Dad picks him up. Meantime, the husband has been changed by his experience in Iraq; he may be traumatized. The wife has been changed by her independence. They can’t pick up where they left off. How is he to be reintegrated into the family?” The therapists were confident that they could work on solutions to these dilemmas, but to reach the families they needed some arrangement with the military.
After many meetings, they established an informal connection with the Army Reserve, whose Family Readiness Program recognized the need for therapy. Unlike regular Army troops, reservists’ families don’t live on a base with a built-in support community. Their wives are on their own, scattered across the region. Their children attend nonmilitary schools, where other kids sometimes tease them about their absentee parents.
The therapists had to find ways to get past what many of these people considered the stigma of mental-health treatment. Their approach evolved gradually. The therapists had expected to conduct one-on-one sessions, but group sessions called “readiness training for families” proved most popular. Other states are now asking for help in replicating the Massachusetts program, which addresses topics such as stress management, anger management, and general coping skills and tries to prepare the troops and their families for possible problems.
The Massachusetts therapy groups set up informal support networks of wives who can call one another for help while their husbands are away at war and after they return. And the organization has published a pamphlet for pediatricians, teachers, and others working with children whose parents are deployed by the military. Says Captain Jeffrey M. Cox, a clinical social worker who is in a Boston-based Army Reserve unit: “As a member of a unit that will be deployed to Iraq at some point, I am comforted to know that the [program] is there to support my family if they need it.”
Fighting for Redemption in Rwanda
He seemed ordinary, like the guy next door,” Paula Howell remembers. Facing her in a Rwanda prison cell was an inmate accused of killing dozens of people in the 1994 massacres. Howell listened as the man recounted what had happened. “I couldn’t believe he was involved in these atrocities, or even that they could have taken place,” she says. But, of course, they had. And ordinary people had wielded the weapons as those of Hutu origin slaughtered more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. “The magnitude of what happened hit home,” she says. “It’s different from reading it on paper or visiting memorials.”
Howell, 29, an associate in general commercial litigation at Shearman & Sterling’s New York City office, is one of about 30 of the firm’s lawyers who have spent a month each providing pro bono aid to the prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The American attorneys have helped by preparing briefs, doing research, and interviewing witnesses like the man Howell met in the prison cellin 2004.
A graduate of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Harvard Law School, Howell had wanted to be a lawyer since her parents sent her from the family’s Brooklyn home to attend high school in their native Barbados. “We studied the history of civil rights and the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean,” she says, “and I realized that the law is a vehicle for social change.”
The Rwanda trials were held at the Arusha International Conference Center in Tanzania. Howell stayed at a comfortable hotel a short walk away. But for safety, she says, she always took taxis to and from work. As one reason for caution, she notes that a woman, her husband, and their seven children were killed in Rwanda in retribution for the woman’s testimony at the trials against a man ultimately convicted of participating in the massacres.
The work was challenging. “This is new law,” Howell explains. “The basic human-rights treaties set forth and define crimes against humanity. But the nuances and how they’re applied are constantly evolving. When I research here in the U.S., it’s for a particular court. There, we were pulling pieces of law from various jurisdictions: U.S. civil law and common law, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, African states. There was no set body, no binding precedent except for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. So I was looking at all these different interpretations and how the law is influenced by social and political structures, and then I assimilated all of those.”
She cites a case of one Rwandan accused of genocide: “He was a former political figure in his town, a bourgemestre, the equivalent of mayor. He held no title at the time of the genocide, but he still wielded great authority in the district. Based on the allegations of witnesses, he hadn’t done any killing himself, but he had instructed others to kill. We were trying to find a theory of liability in order to hold him responsible for the killings. Because of the nature of the bad acts, we wanted to prosecute him to the full extent of the law, under a theory of joint criminal-enterprise liability. That theory was not previously applied in ICTR, but it was used in the Yugoslavia tribunal. My task was to see if there were comparable theories of liability in other jurisdictions. I had to amalgamate and extrapolate to our situation. It was a fascinating learning experience.” The man’s trial is still pending.
Howell also observed the very different courtroom styles of lawyers from all over the world. “U.S. lawyers were the most aggressive in their questioning. The lawyers from the U.K. and Africa were extremely polite. I have a push-the-envelope style. We Americans tend to put on a show.”
Like other attorneys who had gone to Arusha, she found the trip life-changing. “The stakes were so high,” she says. “It put what I do as a lawyer in perspective. Family members of the victims were sitting in the audience. They had made a long trek to see the perpetrators brought to justice. It was satisfying to help with their healing. We could see the power of the law at work.” As of January, the ICTR had handed down 19 judgments that resulted in 22 convictions, including a life sentence for former prime minister Jean Kambanda.
Howell’s work touched her emotions in other ways too. As an African-American, she says, “I felt that I was in the motherland. I set foot on the soil, and we were all brothers and sisters. Everyone welcomed me with open arms. I made an effort to go out into the community. There is so much poverty there. People have so little, but they can find ways to enjoy life. They’re not bogged down by what they don’t have. I went to a club in Rwanda where they played local music. Then they played an American song, Kevin Lyttle’s ‘Turn Me On,’ and a Rwandan woman knew every word. We danced together, and I felt such a connection. She held me and hugged me. It was a homecoming.”
Howell returned to Rwanda last November as a faculty member for a three-day training seminar for tribunal litigators. She watched defendants testify, confronted by the international community and forced to take responsibility for what they did.
Digging Into the Black Hole of Guantanamo Bay
"Great news,” David Grossman e-mailed his colleague Gary Isaac, congratulating him on his success in the matter of
Rasul v. Bush
. The U.S. Supreme Court had just ruled that detainees in Guantánamo Bay had the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. “If you need any assistance,” Grossman wrote Isaac, “I’d be happy to help.”
This was June 2004, and Grossman was a 28-year-old associate in the Chicago office of Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw. The offer to help was just a polite tag to his note. But a week later Isaac, who with others in his firm had filed an amicus (friend of the court) brief in the Rasul case, took him up on it. The court’s ruling had raised as many questions as it answered, and their work had just begun. Most of the detainees didn’t speak English and were being held incommunicado, without access to lawyers or relatives who could act on their behalf. So how could they seek their day in court?
Grossman, a graduate of Rice University and New York University School of Law, is passionate about everyone’s right to a day in court. “The principles underlying the United States government are the rule of law,” he says. “If any of these detainees had done anything wrong, the government should charge them with a crime, and if they’re convicted, they should be sentenced. But there’s no reason why they should be held without being charged. Many of them serve no intelligence value. They were just picked up by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and sold to the U.S., or caught up in the fog of battle.”
With Isaac and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Grossman helped draft a petition for habeas corpus on behalf of John Does—the still-unidentified Guantánamo detainees. “We recognize that we haven’t spoken to our clients,” says Grossman, “but we have reason to believe they would want this suit. If we could go to Guantánamo, we could ask each of them, and we could eliminate the names of those who didn’t want to be included. But since the government is not allowing us to do that, we are filing this extraordinary lawsuit on behalf of people who have not been heard from.”
The government challenged the
John Does v. Bush
lawsuit on the grounds that the petitioners had no rights to be vindicated, since they were not U.S. citizens or on U.S. sovereign territory, and that the attorneys had no standing to bring the suit. Responses and motions flew back and forth, as did conflicting and complicated opinions in federal district courts on related cases, one of which granted habeas corpus and another of which did not. Both sides expect the issues raised in the Guantánamo litigation to return to the Supreme Court.
Grossman, who in April started a job working on commercial and constitutional litigation for the City of Chicago Department of Law, says that the Guantánamo situation is “a legal black hole. Government memos have disclosed that Guantánamo was established to create a place where the law couldn’t reach. We think of this as something that goes on in other countries, where people are ‘disappeared’ and not heard from again. That’s not the American way. It goes against the grain of what this country stands for.”
