Access to Justice

Tunisia will be holding its historic, first-ever democratic vote to elect representatives to their new National Constituent Assembly, which will form a new government. This is the first election produced by the Arab Spring. As such, the major issue is whether or not the country will establish an Islamic state (and how extreme the Islamic law will be) or something more democratic.

For this reason the California Progress Report would like to provide polling place information to Tunisians living in North America – which include Los Angeles and San Francisco. The polling places will open from Thursday, October 20th through Saturday October 22nd, from 7AM to 7PM local time. The locations of the polling places are available at http://irie-are.info and listed below.

By Assemblymember Mike Davis

California’s current pool of superior court judges does not reflect our state’s rich diversity.  It is for this reason I introduced Assembly Bill AB 126 to make our judicial selection process more fair and diverse.  

Currently, whites make up 73.6% of the state’s judiciary, compared to 5.2% for African Americans and 7.5% for Latinos. These numbers are significantly out of step with population statistics released by the 2010 Census.

According to the US Census, whites make up 40.1% of California’s population, blacks 6.2%, Asians 13%, and Latinos 37.6%. As a result, minorities are under-represented in the judiciary, one of three equal branches of California’s government.

By Shannon Minter, Esq.
National Center for Lesbian Rights

On Tuesday, the California Supreme Court will hear arguments on an important question of California law that has arisen in Perry v. Brown, the ongoing federal challenge to Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure that stripped the ability to marry from same-sex couples in California.

The Court must decide whether California law allows the sponsors of Prop 8 to force an appeal in Perry v. Brown—even though the California Attorney General agrees that Prop 8 is unconstitutional. To understand why Tuesday’s hearing is significant, it is helpful to look back on the history of marriage equality in California.

• May 2008—The California Supreme Court ruled that California’s laws barring same-sex couples from marriage violated California’s Constitution. In the following months, more than 18,000 same-sex couples married in California.

By Brian Leubitz

On several occasions I've bemoaned cuts to the state court system.  But the recent cuts will devastate the justice system in California.  Take what is about to happen in San Francisco as an example:

Forty-one percent of San Francisco Superior Court staff will be laid off, and 40 percent of courtrooms will be closed in September due to California's latest $150 million in cuts to the statewide judiciary. Those cuts are in addition to the $200 million already slashed earlier this year. (SF Examiner)

Under Constitutional requirements, criminal cases must be held in a "speedy" manner.  That's important for a number of reasons, and I don't think the priority for criminal cases would change even if not Constitutionally required.  However, that also means that civil cases are going to be almost at a standstill.

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
New America Media

Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Haley Barbour was adamant. He told reporters, civil rights leaders and protesters not to hold their breath waiting for him to pardon Jamie and Gladys Scott, who served 16 years in prison for a 1993 armed robbery that they insist they did not commit.

The two sisters—sentenced to life in prison for a crime that netted $11—were freed on medical grounds in December after a national campaign for their release. As a condition of his suspension, Barbour said Gladys must donate a kidney to her sister, who is seriously ill, but the transplant has been put on hold because doctors say the women's weight makes surgery risky.

Civil rights leaders say the women were the victims of a racially tinged, unfair prosecution. The Scotts have refused to admit their guilt—Barbour's demand in return for a full pardon.

By Nina Martin
New America Media

EDITOR’S NOTE: The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments March 29 in the biggest sex-discrimination case in history: Dukes v. Wal-Mart. Many pro-worker advocates are worried that the court—which has made a number of extremely conservative rulings in recent years—will decimate the ability of ordinary people to join together in class actions to sue large, well-financed companies that engage in wrongdoing and discriminate against women and minorities. To understand more about the case, reporter Nina Martin spoke with New America Media’s contributor Irma Herrera, a civil rights attorney who spent almost 15 years as executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, one of the main law firms in the case.

What is this case about?

This is a sex-discrimination case brought by six California women on behalf of female employees at Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores across the country. The lead plaintiff, Betty Dukes, started working at the company in 1994 and still works at a Wal-Mart store in the town of Pittsburg, outside San Francisco.

By J.G. Preston
Protect Consumer Justice

The fight against “frivolous” medical malpractice suits is back in the news. President Obama said in his State of the Union speech he is open to “medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits.” That brought cheers from Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), one of the authors of a bill (H.R. 5) that would limit the amount of damages that could be awarded to victims of malpractice. (It’s a subject Gingrey knows something about, since, as Barry Meier reported in the New York Times, he has faced malpractice charges himself in his previous career as an obstetrician.  A jury found against him once, and in two other cases he paid settlements.)

By Brian Leubitz
Calitics

I've written a bit about MICRA in the past, but here it is in short form. It puts a cap of $250,000 on non-economic damages for victims of medical malpractice. While that may sound like a lot, in fact it has killed medical malpractice in the state. Cases with the slightest bit of complication, or those that go to trial can cost over $100,000 to bring, and the limited recoveries mean that attorneys can't afford to bring the cases. It just doesn't make economic sense. So for cases where the victim does not have a high expectation of future income (i.e. full-time parents, children and the elderly), they just never get the opportunity to hold the perpetrators accountable.

By Aaron Glantz
New America Media

Is BART the most racist transit agency in the nation?

That’s a question Bay Area residents should be asking after the U.S. Justice Department announced Friday that it was opening an investigation into the transit agency’s handling of BART police officer Johannes Mehserle’s fatal shooting of Oscar Grant. The investigation, which the Justice Department confirms is being launched together with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco. But it is not the first effort by the Obama administration to rein in BART over civil rights.

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The involuntary manslaughter conviction of Johannes Mehserle in the shooting death of Oscar Grant is a near legal and political textbook example of a conviction that satisfies almost no one.

Grant’s family members and supporters were outraged at the verdict. To them, it was yet another in the long train of cases where a police officer wantonly guns down an African-American, gets a half-hearted prosecution before a jury with few or no blacks, and in the rare instances when the cop is convicted, gets a hand slap of a sentence.