The courts are open -- but only if you can afford it
It's only one of the bad ideas that came out of this year's Legislature, but this one is right in the wheelhouse of a poverty lawyer.
A
bill that would make it much harder for poor people to assert their rights in court has passed the Legislature and is awaiting the governor's signature.
It would require anyone who files a
counter-claim or a third-party complaint to pay a filing fee of up to $295! (Until now, there has been no charge for responding to a lawsuit.)
So your
landlord pays $85 to file an eviction complaint and if you want to respond that the lanlord didn't keep the place properly maintained (or did other things wrong), you would have to pay $295 to raise a counter-claim.
*It's somewhat difficult to track the amendments to a bill, but it seems that these fees were added at the very end of session.
Was the Legislature just looking for money? The counter-claim fees go to the state's general revenue fund; they won't even be used to fund the court system.
And, as usual, the bill leaves unanswered questions. A colleague who has worked on indigency issues for years says it is not yet clear if the payment plan process -- which allows poor people to pay fees for initiating a new lawsuit in monthly payments -- will work for the counterclaim fee.
Florida's Constitution guarantees: "The courts shall be open to every person for redress of any injury, and justice shall be administered without sale, denial or delay."
But this bill seems to say that the courts are open if you can afford it.
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* Sometimes you have to file a counter-claim or lose it forever. (That's called a compulsory counter-claim.)
Sweeps of homeless camps ruled unconstitutional
Sending out city workers to raid homeless camps and destroy whatever personal property they found there violates the U.S. Constitution, a federal judge has ruled.
Fresno's "clean up" policy in homeless tent cities violates the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures. Read U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger's ruling
here.
Fresno faces a class-action lawsuit brought by homeless people who claim police and sanitation workers violated their constitutional rights in at least 20 different sweeps from 2004 to 2006.
A trial set to begin next month will determine how much money the city owes the plaintiffs.
Read the
Fresno Bee report
here.
Not guilty! (again)
Five men -- arrested for drumming "too loudly" during a
protest against the city of Orlando's policies on homelessness -- have been acquitted of charges they violated a noise ordinance.
Ryan Hutchinson, Bryan Jones, Brett Mason, Eric Montanez and Will Vertlieb, all members of
Orlando Food Not Bombs, were arrested in June 2007 during a protest outside a restaurant where Mayor Buddy Dyer was holding a campaign fund-raising event.
After their acquittals, the defendants were able to reclaim their drums, which had confiscated as "evidence" by Orlando police.
This is the
second acquittal for Montanez. In October 2007, a jury found him not guilty of violating the city's food-sharing ordinance. In both cases the FNB defendants were represented by Jacqueline Dowd of Legal Advocacy at Work, an Orlando law firm which provides free legal services for homeless and low-income clients.
A federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the
food-sharing ordinance is scheduled to go to trial in June.
Mildred Loving followed her heart and made history
Mildred Loving and her husband, Richard, refused to accept Virginia's ban on interracial marriage. They took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1967 struck down similar laws across the country.Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a
landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died.
Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.
They had married in Washington in 1958, when she was 18. Returning to their Virginia hometown, they were arrested within weeks and convicted on charges of "cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth," according to their indictments. The couple avoided a year in jail by agreeing to a sentence mandating that they immediately leave Virginia.
Read
The New York Times article
here. And check out Bark Bark Woof Woof's
post.
Florida is No. 1 (again)
in violence against the homeless
Florida led the nation in the number of attacks on the homeless for the third year in a row, according to a report released Tuesday by the National Coalition for the Homeless.
With 31 attacks in 2007, Florida had more than any other state in the country. West Palm Beach had nine incidents, more than any other Florida city, and St. Petersburg had seven. Gibsonton and Ocala also had homeless people who died as the result of attacks; Dania Beach, Tampa, Bradenton, Deltona, Daytona Beach and Lakeland had non-lethal attacks.
Nationwide, 160 homeless people were attacked in 2007 and 28 of them were killed -- a 40% increase from 2006 when 20 people were killed.
The report, issued by the
National Coalition for the Homeless and
National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, takes issue with the type of restrictive measures which many cities have enacted.
"While some cities and states have taken positive steps to address hate crime and violence against homeless persons, many cities around the country continue to dehumanize homeless persons by enacting and enforcing laws that criminalize their homeless status," the report says.
St. Petersburg police spokesman Bill Proffitt took issue with the report because it doesn't use official crime data to draw its conclusions. Instead, it used press clippings and information from homeless advocates, he noted after reading the report. "The data they use is incomplete and unreliable and therefore their conclusions are flawed," Proffitt said.
Read the report, entitled "Hate, Violence, And Death on Main Street USA, 2007,"
here.
With no direction home
The deadline has been extended since this notice was posted.Homeless people have lived in woods on the west side of Orlando for as long as anyone can remember, surviving on disability checks, military pensions or odd jobs.
Now at least 60 homeless people will have to find another place. They are being offered services like housing assistance and health care, but many of them will chose to find another spot in another wooded area.
Orlando police officers say the crackdown stems from a nearby neighborhood group that "bombarded" police with complaints about registered sex offenders living in the woods.
Owners of the land -- a local investment group and an Ohio-based bank -- say their hands are tied. Orlando's code-enforcement office sent them notice about three weeks ago that they need to clean up the property or face stiff fines.
Read the
Orlando Sentinel article
here.
St. Pete shelter for homeless to stay open
A temporary shelter and assistance center for homeless people in St. Petersburg that was scheduled to close at the end of the month will remain open through the summer, but on a smaller scale.
With $200,000 from private donors,
Pinellas Hope will stay open through Sept. 30. Staff will be reduced to accommodate about 75 residents at a time instead of the 250 who have lived there in the past five months. Since Pinellas Hope opened in December, more than 450 homeless people have found temporary shelter in tents, a safe place to keep their belongings, hot showers and laundry services. They have also been offered help toward more permanent solutions to their situations, including social services, job training, access to substance abuse programs and housing assistance.
Read the
Florida Catholic report
here. And see previous post
here.
