Tag: Shelby County Public Defender

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News News Feature

Clean Slate

America loves a comeback story, except when it’s ex-offenders seeking redemption after they’ve served their time. For these men and women, a criminal record often stands between them and a job, an apartment, or a loan. Although they’re no longer behind bars, they’re not free.

But last week, a new nonprofit organization committed to criminal justice reform brought emancipation to a few people.

In one of its first official actions, Just City wrote six $450 checks to cover the expungement fee for six people who’d completed the process to have their records wiped clean.

The Clean Slate Fund covered the cost through a grant from the Mid-South Peace & Justice Center and the Memphis Bar Association.

“One of Just City’s core values is that you should not be defined by the worst thing you’ve done,” Kerry Hayes, one of the organization’s co-founders, said.

Of the six Clean Slate Fund recipients, three were first-time offenders convicted of theft of property under $500, said Josh Spickler, director of the Defender’s Resource Network for the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office.

After they served jail time and paid monthly probation fees and court costs that may have totaled more than $1,000, another hurdle awaited: an expungement fee that rivals the amount of property that they’d taken.

“These are shoplifting cases, and then they’re stuck, because $450 is rent,” Spickler said.

Helping ex-offenders reintegrate into society isn’t a conservative solution or a liberal solution, Hayes said. It’s just common sense.

“This is an investment we’re making in the lives of people who want to work, who do want to contribute to society, but for $450, they would probably be unable to do that,” Hayes said.

I wasn’t able to talk to any of the people who had their records cleared. It defeats the purpose of getting a fresh start if your name or identifying characteristics show up in the paper, Hayes said.

The motivations of some who want their records expunged were sometimes more psychological than practical, Spickler said. “I was just really surprised about how many people have wanted it for peace of mind,” he said. “They feel like they’re marked. And what we see and know about people who have been in contact with the criminal justice system is they are marked.”

In 2012, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) issued a report denouncing the “vast, half-hidden network” of collateral consequences that create a second-class status for the 65 million Americans who have a criminal record.

In Tennessee, a felony conviction means you can’t vote. You can’t work as a home inspector or reflexologist. You can’t be a security guard at the mall. You can’t even sell fireworks.

In 2012, the state legislature amended the expungement law, but it’s still so narrowly tailored that few ex-offenders qualify. Of the 10 recommendations issued by NACDL, number nine is exactly what Just City and the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office has done.

“Defense lawyers,” the NACDL wrote, “should consider avoiding, mitigating, and relieving collateral consequences to be an integral part of their representation of a client.”

The city of Memphis adopted a “ban the box” ordinance in 2010, but Shelby County and most private employers still ask job applicants about their criminal record.

“Some of these people are 20 years out of this mistake, and we still force them to answer this question this way,” Spickler said.

In late July, Just City held its inaugural event to introduce the organization to Memphis — and to ask the question: What is a just city?

“We titled it that so we would not give you an answer,” Hayes told the audience at Hattiloo Theatre. “What we want is for you to start asking the question with us … because when you start to ask the question, everything around you will change.

“If we believe that expectations create reality, which we do, it starts with having a different set of expectations for ourselves and our city. If justice is going to mean anything to any one of us, it’s got to mean absolutely everything to every one of us.”

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Opinion Viewpoint

The 75 Percent Rule

Remember that time when state representative and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) board member Curry Todd submitted a bill to aid farmers and school children by creating an extra hour of sunlight? How about that time when he was living rent free in a lobbyist’s home? Or when he killed the Influence Disclosure Act, a measure that would have required lawmakers to acknowledge the influence of outside groups on public policy?

Let’s face it, this West Tennessee representative isn’t the sharpest nor is he the most ethical knife in the drawer. Even if his most recent proposal doesn’t overturn any natural laws, like inertia or gravity, HB241 displays Todd’s usual lack of seriousness. If passed, Todd’s bill will kill good legislation that helps fund our public defender system and has served Tennesseans well for 23 years. The proposed legislation, in the long run, benefits nobody but Todd’s fellow ALEC member, the Corrections Corporation of America, a private company that operates three of Tennessee’s 14 prisons.

I’m not suggesting that ALEC was involved in crafting this bill, but it wasn’t Todd. And no matter who’s responsible for drafting the language, who do you think wins when the state decides to abandon even the pretense of parity and stacks the deck in favor of the prosecution? Here’s a hint: not the citizens of Tennessee.

If passed, HB241 would undo T.C.A. 16-2-518, a regulatory measure that controls disparity in the funding of prosecutors and public defenders. Sometimes called the “75 percent rule,” T.C.A. 16-2-518 ensures that whatever money is budgeted for prosecutors must be matched at a 75 percent level for public defenders. In simple terms, if the county gives District Attorney Amy Weirich’s office $100, they must give the public defender’s office $75.

Thirty years ago, a mere decade before the creation of T.C.A. 16-2-518, fewer than 350,000 Americans were in prison. By the turn of the 21st century, that number ballooned to more than 2.3 million. That breaks down to about one of every 100 Americans being in jail. If you extend the figure to include people on probation or parole, the number drops to a shocking one in 31 Americans. More than 80 percent of the people accused of committing a crime qualify for court-appointed defense. Study after study has documented how excessive caseloads have compromised the constitutional right to counsel and clogged the judicial system. To quote former FBI Director William Sessions, America’s public defense systems “should be a source of great embarrassment for all of us.”

Mass-incarceration is expensive and that condition will only be exacerbated by eliminating the 75 percent rule. Tennessee spends more than $1 million a day to house the state’s prisoners. A recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU shows that, in addition to being expensive, the United States has now imprisoned so many people that we’ve entered into a period of diminishing returns. Can there be any doubt that a deliberate weakening of Tennessee’s public defender systems will result in more convictions and longer sentences?

Eliminating the 75 percent rule will also disproportionately impact the state’s larger, urban defender systems, such as the one in Shelby County, which is among the nation’s oldest. The local defender’s office has a reputation for developing services that are more effective and less expensive than incarceration, such as the award-winning Jericho program, a model prison-diversion program that targets inmates with severe and persistent mental illness. The mentally ill are likely to be incarcerated two to five times longer than the average inmate, and have an average recidivism rate of 80 percent. The Jericho program has cut the repeat offender rate for the mentally ill in half.

Tennessee could reduce its incarceration and recidivism rate even further if, instead of embracing only the most retrograde policies, it looked to effective and cost-saving reforms enacted by neighboring states like Kentucky and Georgia. But that doesn’t seem likely.

The legislature already sent a powerful — and pointless — message to poor people in Tennessee when it passed a law requiring citizens who need public assistance to undergo drug testing, a program that has now been proven to be a major waste of time and resources. Over the past six months, 16,000 Tennesseans have been drug-tested. The total number of those testing positive: 37.

And speaking of pointless, expensive legislation: Todd’s bill revoking the 75 percent rule may well result in increased taxes, as financial responsibilities are shifted to meet needs that will not go away. This measure will end up costing Tennesseans more money without the perceived benefit of making anybody more secure.

Remember that time when Todd championed a good piece of legislation that helps to move Tennessee forward? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

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News News Blog

Attorneys and Advocates Aim to Reform Public Defense System

CREDIT: Law Offices of the Shelby County Public Defender Facebook page

Jonathan Rapping speaks to the crowd.

  • Law Offices of the Shelby County Public Defender Facebook page
  • Jonathan Rapping speaks to the crowd at Local.

Over sliders and beer, advocates and attorneys met together upstairs at the Local Gastropub in Overton Square to talk about how to improve public defense.

Gideon’s Promise, the group behind the event, is an organization for public defense reform, and they are working with attorneys to create a “community of public defenders,” according to organizers.

At the free “Burgers and Brews” event Thursday evening, attendees gathered to hear Jonathan Rapping, president and founder of the organization, speak, as well as those from the Shelby County Public Defender’s Office.

Gideon’s Promise aims to fix the system from the ground up by training new public defenders and offering a three-year program for public defenders who have worked three years or less.

According to Rapping, there are three challenges that public defenders face.

“The most obvious one is funding,” Rapping said. “There aren’t enough lawyers. There aren’t enough resources. There’s a structural problem, where in many public defender systems, the judges appoint the chief public defender and the judge [wants to] move cases as opposed to necessarily making sure poor people get justice. They have pressures to move cases. You might have funders who have something to do with the appointments of the public defenders, and they want to make sure it’s done cheaply.”

Rapping got his start as a public defender in well-resourced Washington, D.C., where he said defendants who could not afford a lawyer were still provided the same justice as others who could. That story changed when he moved from D.C. to Georgia and then throughout the South.

“I really started to see these systems where really passionate, young public defenders would go in for the right reasons and have that passion beaten out of them,” Rapping said. “They would either quit or resign to the status quo. This organization really developed to be a program that not only provides training but provides support and inspiration to these lawyers so they don’t lose their idealism.”

The issue of whether or not public defense is actually working does not only affect those who commit crimes, he said.

“There are people in the criminal justice system who didn’t commit a crime and we don’t know until the end of a fair process whether or not the person [did],” Rapping said. “We know more than 300 people have been exonerated using DNA. We have no idea how many [innocent] people are in the criminal justice system when they have no forensic evidence.”

In 2007, 964 public defender offices received six million cases where the defendant could not afford to pay, according to the Department of Justice’s most recent available data. According to Gideon’s Promise, this means the quality of the defense goes down.

“We have to help people understand that this goes against our fundamental values,” Rapping said. “Citizens certainly need to become educated about what’s happening in the criminal justice system. I think, once aware of it, people are just moved to act.”

Rapping also believes this is a nonpartisan issue.

“If your concern is economics, whether you’re conservative or liberal, you should like [Gideon’s Promise]. If you’re a patriot, if you believe in our Constitution and ideals, if you believe that individuals should be protected against a government, which is not checked can become tyrannical,” he said. “If you believe that, this is an issue for you. Whether you’re liberal or conservative, we all understand justice is an important value.”