Mississippi Project Invites Applications for the James M. Ragen Memorial Summer Fellowship

Created to further advance civil and human rights in the South, the fellowship awards $4,500 to one student to work in Mississippi or Louisiana in the tradition of “law in the service of human needs.” The fellowship is awarded to a student who exhibits a commitment to empowering the disenfranchised and advancing civil and human rights in Mississippi and/or Louisiana. In a written essay of no more than 1000 words, students should identify an issue they plan to focus on and its connection to advancing civil and human rights in the South, potential organizations or public interest lawyers they intend to work with, and how this experience will enhance their own development as public interest lawyers in training. Preference will be given to students who demonstrate a sustained commitment to advancing civil and human rights in the South. If awarded the fellowship, it is the student’s responsibility to secure public interest employment that meets the eligibility requirements of the award and submit an acceptance letter detailing the position by April 15, 2008. The fellowship funds a legal internship of 35 hours per week for at least 10 weeks during the summer when no other compensation or academic credit is received. No person receiving compensation from the internship employer or summer funding from another source will be eligible for this fellowship.

Fellowship Application Deadline: February 19, 2008 To Apply: Please email your essay to scholarships@mail.law.cuny.edu

A is for Advocate

Either the delta is busting out the box with its kaleideskopic chaos, or we shave it down so it fits obediently inside. These are two modes to rationalize the unfamiliar when you're far from home. We arrive to a land whose history creates the expectations for the work we will do. At the airport with some time to kill, I checked out an exhibit on the Jackson Movement . I was reminded that I tread on hallowed land, where the most important human rights battles were fought and won not 50 years ago. Coming from Queens college, we embark on the 16th year of this trip. Going back further, we remember Mr. Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered by the KKK in Mississippi during the freedom summer of 1964. Andrew Goodman was a student at Queens College.

Indeed our trip invokes a history that deserves more than synopsis. There is the history of slavery, the movement, and the apartheid that continues to fester on the periphery.
School test scores in MS are dreadfully low. Blues music is great. Next comes hospitality, and catfish. Some housing is in dreadful condition, and some clubs can be excessively violent. But is this all we can say about the delta? A plus and minus tally of the south is fatal to its autonomy. This land must speak for itself! As we enframe mississippi, we risk depriving a movement of its beauty.

From all of this, a question emerges about what we are doing in our role as advocates. Are lawyers speaking for the voiceless? This is problematic. On the other hand, it's unacceptable for a milquetoast advocate to stand alongside a movement while the system eats it for breakfast. There have been examples of both realities on this trip.

The short answer is that big old ears are the most valuable tool. For community workers, legal listening begins by remembering that courts provide relief, but not liberation. returning a plaintiff to the status quo ante through compensation (the state prior to damage) is not necessarily a delivery of justice. So as we learn to apply the law, how, when, and where to apply the law are vital considerations. Will we push a struggle through the system, or inject legal issues into the struggle? The latter means organizing. (This is not what we are taught at CUNY per se. ) It is the life affirming and therapeutic dialouge that brings people together in community, builds power, and breaks down hierarchies. For each of us, this process will look different. No doubt each struggle is unique and individual as each person. But seriously open your ears.

Within New Orleans the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina is still visible. Imagine the city as a bowl, with the areas of higher elevation (the rim of the bowl) closer to the Mississippi and the middle of the city actually a few feet below see level. In some neighborhoods like the French Quarter, if you are not looking for signs of Katrina, you might miss them. The French Quarter, home to the infamous Bourbon Street, was barely touched by flood waters because of its higher elevation. However, if you look closely you will see vacant, boarded-up businesses.

We took a self-guided driving tour designed for visitors to New Orleans who want to witness the effects of the Katrina as well as the rebuilding efforts. The tour contained narrative information explaining levees and why they failed, New Orleans history, stories behind the differing neighborhoods, the science underlying coastal erosion and restoration, and tales of heroism and help. The narrators, all civic leaders of New Orleans, included New Orleans musician Charmaine Neville, Women of the Storm founder Anne Milling, and King Milling, chairman of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Restoration.

While I found the tour and stories heartbreaking, I feel that the stories are ones that need to be heard. I came to New Orleans six months after Katrina as part of an alternative spring break for college students who volunteered gutting houses and working with grassroots organizations engaged in community organizing. Retracing my steps through neighborhoods like the lower 9th ward, I found that progress has been slow. Piles of debris have been removed and open fields of grass with cement patches where houses’ foundations once stood are the only reminders that this was once a neighborhood. There are occasional houses that residents are starting to rebuild with FEMA trailers parked outside and signs saying “roots run deep here” meaning the residents are planning to take charge of their neighborhood and rebuilding efforts. In another part of the lower 9th, there were multiple pink tents set up to represent the homes which were devastated, serving as symbols for the construction of new "green" eco-friendly homes that are supposed to go up in March. Organizations like Common Ground and the Make It Right Foundation are working in the 9th ward, supporting the community that was distinguished by the fact that more residents in the area owned their homes than in any other part of the city.

Photos to come this evening!

Our trip to Jackson, MS to track down trial transcripts was for the most part successful. We spent more time at the archives than we had expected because of the complicated filing system that made it difficult to locate files. It actually took most of us a day with several trips from the archives to the state Supreme Court clerk’s office before we were able to locate the transcripts. Even then, the oldest case file from 1987 was no where to be found with no explanation as to why it was gone. In that case, we are hoping the defense attorney still has a file with the transcript.

We read the transcripts to gather information about key witnesses and evidence that could give us a better idea as to what could prove or disprove a prisoner’s innocence claim. In reading through the transcripts it became evident that some of the prisoners were convicted on very little evidence and/or weak testimony. Also, most of the cases took place in smaller communities where the jurors knew a majority of the trial participants, leaving me to wonder how the defendant was guaranteed a fair trial.

The information we gathered from the transcripts and the research we will be engaged in in the coming days will determine if IPNO deems our cases appropriate for increased review at which time full-fledged investigations will be conducted. This means that with the 3 days left of our trip, most of that time will be spent on the road traveling across southern Mississippi to speak with the prisoners themselves, the defense attorneys, and key witnesses.

We started tracking down witnesses Friday but soon discovered a major challenge with this task. Due to Hurricane Katrina, many people not only evacuated their homes but have also relocated multiple times since their evacuation, assuming they have returned to their home states in the first place. There are still thousands of people from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama spread through out the rest of the country. There are still families searching for missing relatives, unsure if they are even alive. As far as we know, there is no directory of persons living in FEMA trailers either.

Courtney and I drove to Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis along the Gulf Coast. It was immediately evident that smaller communities past the New Orleans' city limits, if not completely wiped off the map, are still rebuilding. Even along the highway we could see empty shopping centers, houses, and apartment complexes. We were told that before Katrina, there were beautiful towns all along the Gulf but that the hurricane destroyed most of these. Indeed driving through Gulfport to locate one house, Erin and Reka entered a cul-de-sac where the house should have been only to find nothing.

The Processing of Criminal Cases in Louisiana

On Friday, the Innocence Project team observed arraignments in Jefferson Parish. http://www.jpclerkofcourt.us/24thJDC/Judges.asp. While it is true that there are a number of differences between New York’s criminal justice system and Louisiana’s, I was struck by the number of similarities between our systems. We watched as defendants consented to waive their right to a speedy trial, similar to the practice in Criminal Court, Queens and Suffolk County. The majority of clients were indigent (qualified for public defender services) and people of color. Most of the cases were drug related. It appeared as though the defense attorneys met their clients for the first time just moments before arraignment. The clients played a passive role in the arraignment, standing to the side of the podium where the prosecutor and defense attorney stood. The defense attorney explained the plea to the client on the spot, while the prosecutors bantered with the judge and court officers an arm’s length away.

Battle at the Shipyard

Movement is sometimes slow as molasses, barely perceptible and sticky. Nine years had passed since the fifty or so employees (there are about 75 clients in all!) gathered at a community center in Biloxi by the Gulf on Sunday first took their struggle against a shipbuilding giant to court. They sued the company for creating a work environment that not only condoned but encouraged racism. Workers were forced to put up with graffiti of racial slurs, hanging nooses, threats and terrorizing pranks. Some of the workers told us they had worked at that site for ten, fifteen, to beyond thirty years. Jena 6. Columbia University.
Nooses are still a commonplace occurrence here. See Jaribu's article. The Mississippi state flag which has the Confederate flag embossed within it hangs all over the place, including outside the State Capitol. It’s shocking that nooses and Confederate flags are not just isolated outbreaks of a disease that had been all but eradicated.

Yesterday, Mike, Stephan, Shirley and I were fortunate enough to witness a meeting for a settlement that could signal the end of this stage of the struggle. The workers faced a tough decision – whether to accept the settlement proposal or to go further with trial. We contemplated what we would do in their shoes, and found ourselves weighing the practical realities that play a role i.e. what is the climate in Mississippi for racial justice, the strength of the movement, what would a jury decide, what is the politics of the judge, and the cost of trial to name a few.
I have been thinking about Professor Loffredo’s admission at his panel discussion with Frances Fox Piven that it is a bleak time for fighting for economic justice. In Mississippi it is a bleak time for fighting for racial justice, for workers’ rights, and I have come to realize, human rights. Jaribu has brought it home that our domestic struggles often labeled “civil rights” are no different than those being waged in Mexico, India, China or wherever else as “human rights.” The right to live and work decently without fear of losing life and limb is a human right. Shirley and I talked about how you fight these seemingly hopeless struggles anyway when you have a stake in the community, when it is your workplace, when it is your people, whatever you identify with that makes the fight for justice personal and real. It has taken some reminding that we are not in a foreign place. Mississippi is America. New York has its struggles. Movement may be slow, change may seem impossible, but the alternative seems to be standing still.

Verbs, Nouns, Punctuation and Everything In Between

I always wondered how it is the ACLU determined which cases to pursue and which ones to dismiss and I finally found out how today when I was invited to join in on the intake process. The intake process is when the attorneys review complaint forms and then ask the big question: is this a constitutional issue? However, in order for the attorneys to start the intake process, there must be complaint forms, which are forms that people fill out describing an incident which they believe is unjust.

The complaints reviewed during today's intake touched on almost every topic from a driver being pulled over by the police during a traffic stop to prisoners writing the organization about their prison treatment. You would think that the biggest hurdle would be determining if an incident raised constitutional concerns, but in actuality, the biggest struggle was trying to understand the complaint forms.

In 2003, Mississippi education scores (reading and math) were ranked 48th in the nation and those scores were reflected in the forms. One complaint was filed by a high school student who felt he was being treated unequally in his school. I am very sure that to the student, his form made perfect sense, but it took three careful readings of the complaint by about six people to even understand that it had something to do with his high school. Luckily a staff member remembered talking to the student over the phone and could clarify the situation for everyone.

After the attorneys began to debate over whether or not the issue was something worth looking into, I could not help but question how effective a legal organization can be when people are not even educated enough to articulate what is happening to them.

Earlier in the day I was working with Shawna, the awesome Reproductive Freedom Project Director, on Teen Chat. (Teen Chat is the peer sexual health education program spearheaded by the MS ACLU to supplement the lack of sexual health education in the schools). In order to assess what the students already know about sexual health, I designed a pre-test which asked questions such as “True or False: A girl can't get pregnant if she has sex underwater” and “The birth control pill protects a person from getting: a) sexually transmitted diseases, b) pregnant or c) HIV.”

Shawna had warned me that the students from this one particular county did not have superb reading skills and to take this into account when I designed the survey. I took this to heart and tried my best to to not use big words or phrase questions in such a way that would be confusing. Shawna reviewed the surveys I had made and reassured me that they were very good but needed to be simpler. For instance, Shawna wanted me to not use the word “designed” because she noticed that during the program last year any word that had “gn” was confusing to the students; they didn't know how to pronounce those kind of words.

Now knowing how far behind Mississippi is in education, I have yet another item added to my list of things that need to change. After all, how possible will it be have sexual health education in schools if students can't pronounce “diagnosed”?