A SUMMER OF JUSTICE IN ACTION ...
LEGALLY SPEAKING,
ANWOL DELIVERS
by Barbara Osborn, Board Member
How do you reach 1 million Californians with a potentially life-changing opportunity in just three years?
When Prop 47 passed last November, a three-year clock started ticking. Prop 47 allows men and women with certain non-violent felonies to reclassify their convictions as misdemeanors. But the law has a three-year window. Staff and volunteers at A New Way of Life have been rushing to educate the estimated one million Californians who may be eligible for Prop 47 relief to make sure they have the opportunity to apply before time runs out.
Leslie Ivie, an A New Way of Life board member and former public defender now in private practice, has been providing pro bono advice in these “ clean slate” legal clinics for months. They take place every two weeks. One is held in Watts and the other in Long Beach. Without these A New Way of Life clinics, thousands of potentially eligible men and women in Los Angeles might never know about the law or how it could help them rebuild their lives.
One recent Saturday morning in Watts, Leslie was joined by nine other legal volunteers plus four A New Way of Life staff attorneys, helping men and women determine whether their convictions could be expunged or whether they were Prop 47 eligible. Expungements and Prop 47 are important remedies for men and women with convictions. When a private employer does a background check on a job applicant if their felony convictions have been expunged, the convictions appear on the background check, but the document will indicate that the conviction has been “dismissed.”
On this Saturday, Leslie’s client is a woman named Donna, a quiet woman just short of her 55th birthday. In the late 1980s, Donna’s life was consumed by addiction. “I wasn't a bad person,” she says. “I was on drugs at a time when the U.S. was flooded with rock cocaine. I wasn't raised to put a pipe in my mouth. I made bad choices.” Donna ended up with four felony convictions before getting into rehab. Her last conviction was in 2002.
Since then, Donna has “tried really hard to wipe the shame away from my family and myself,” she says. She received a Certificate of Rehabilitation from the county. She attended night school to obtain a janitorial certificate. She cared for her grandson for six years when he was unable to live with his mother.
She keeps a large tote bag at home full of her job efforts. But despite everything she’s done, Donna has found employment nearly impossible to come by. Most of the work she's been able to get has come through temp agencies. The week before coming to the clinic she applied to become a Lyft driver and was turned down after a background check. She's at the clinic today “in the hopes of having a little more hope.”
In addition to her job concerns, she now worries she may have to move from the apartment she’s called home for many years. If she has to move, she worries she will have a hard time getting a new lease because of her prior convictions.
When she sits down at the table with Leslie, she opens two folders with carefully kept records from the court, her conviction record and letters of support. Her conviction document is so old it is printed out on old-fashioned “tractor feed” computer paper.
“You’ve been working hard,” Leslie tells her as she begins to review dozens of pages of documents all of them pertaining to arrests or convictions more than a dozen years old. Leslie makes her way painstakingly through line after line, document after document, asking questions and integrating it all into a single form developed by the A New Way Of Life legal team. During these 5-hour clinics a legal volunteer like Leslie can see one, sometimes two, at the most three clients depending on the complexity of their cases. In the weeks to come, the A New Way Of Life legal team will assess what relief Donna may be eligible for and file documents with the court.
In partnership with UCLA School of Law - Critical Race Studies, and the generous support of The California Endowment, A New Way of Life clinic services are free of charge. Leslie says that if Donna were to hire a private attorney it might cost $2,500 per case or as much as $10,000. After reviewing documents together for four hours, Leslie finally prepares the last one – a request to waive court fees. Without the waiver, just filing court documents would cost Donna several hundred dollars.
As she signs the fee waiver Donna puts her court documents back in the envelopes in which she brought them. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. “I keep these papers,” she says, “but at some point I want to get rid of them.” Thanks to A New Way of Life’s Prop 47 legal clinics, that day may come.
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A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project
PO Box 875288
Los Angeles, CA 90087
www.anewwayoflife.org
"Until we are all free, we are none of us free"
Emma Lazarus
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