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Who We
Are
Legal Aid: Making Justice Real by Using
Legal Strategies to Increase Access to Justice and to End
Poverty
In 1932 a group of lawyers formed the Legal
Aid Society. They undertook ambitious goals: first, to “provide
legal aid to indigent persons” and, second, “to
encourage measures by which the law may better protect and
serve their needs.” Over the years, Legal Aid has
pursued this mission with vigor. Hundreds of thousands of
the District residents living in poverty have obtained assistance
from Legal Aid lawyers to resolve their disputes.
Our clients are in crisis. More than 110,000
- nearly one in five - District residents live below the
federal poverty line. As a result of rapid changes in the
District’s housing and development patterns, life
has become more difficult for these individuals and families.
The cost of living in the District has increased, and the
shortage of affordable housing is acute. The neighborhoods
in which poor and moderate income families can live have
shrunk, economic integration has declined, and the concentration
of poverty has increased.
The pressures of poverty, the rapid increase
in housing costs and changes in government safety net programs
bring persons in poverty in increasing contact with the
legal system. Unfortunately, however, anti-poverty lawyers
are scarce and 90% of poor persons in the District who need
a lawyer don’t get one.
Lawyers make a dramatic difference in the
outcome of cases. The ability to access a lawyer can:
- prevent an elderly couple from losing their home;
- ensure that a family with children is not evicted because
they complained of dangerous health conditions in rental
housing;
- ensure that a disabled veteran obtains medical benefits
after having been terminated from the program in error;
- assist a woman fleeing violence with her children to
secure a safe place to live.
Legal Aid is the law firm for clients who
cannot afford a lawyer. Our staff and volunteers work each
day in making the justice system work. Each year, with the
support of the legal community, we extend our reach further
and work harder to make justice meaningful for everyone.
With a staff of approximately forty-five, more than thirty-five of whom are lawyers, Legal Aid
provides advice, brief assistance, representation, social
work services and referrals to thousands of clients each
year. In addition to direct client services, Legal Aid staff
advocate for systemic change on matters that grow directly
out of our individual cases. While the demand far outstrips
our capacity, we attempt to take those cases in which an
attorney can make the most difference. Our core priorities
include:
Keeping People Housed:
Hundreds of tenants each year avoid eviction or have serious
housing conditions corrected as a result of Legal Aid's
work. Our housing lawyers defend against improper evictions
in court, assist public housing tenants to preserve their
subsidies, fight illegal rent increases and work to ensure
that tenants are not improperly displaced by development.
Making Justice Real: Fighting
for Decent Housing
A single
mother living with a disability came to Legal Aid
for help in getting her housing voucher back. She
had been homeless for several months, living in
a women’s shelter without her teenage daughter.
During that time she tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully
to navigate the bureaucracy of the housing authority,
hitting one brick wall after another: the agency
refused to reinstate her voucher and, simultaneously,
refused to hold a hearing about whether she should
be terminated from the program. Meanwhile, her time
limit at the shelter was approaching and she continued
to live separately from her daughter, seeing her
only for visits.
Legal Aid
took the case to federal court, filing for a temporary
restraining order and preliminary injunction to
reinstate her to the housing program. The Court
granted her request and ordered the authority to
provide her with a housing voucher the following
day. The Court admonished the housing authority
for its treatment of our client, finding in a later
ruling that “the homeless should not be forced
to sue DCHA to obtain a hearing that is mandated”
by federal law.
Our client
quickly used her voucher to locate a home for herself
and her daughter. They are united as a result of
Legal Aid’s efforts.
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Securing Access to Health Care and
Public Benefits: The District “safety net,”
while tattered, is the last and only hope for many of the
District’s poorest residents. Whether a small cash
payment, medical care, or Food Stamps, participation may
mean the difference between housing and homelessness, medical
care and neglect, or food and hunger. Legal Aid assists
clients who have been wrongfully denied enrollment, improperly
terminated, or unjustly denied services. Through direct
representation in administrative litigation, training of
clients to advocate on their own behalf, and advocacy with
agency officials to achieve reform, Legal Aid works to ensure
that necessary benefits and services are available to all
who qualify.
Making Justice Real: Fighting
for Basic Health Care
An 84-year-old
woman came to Legal Aid seeking help to obtain anti-nausea
medication which was denied by her Medicare prescription
drug plan. She has uterine cancer and was forced
to endure three cycles of chemotherapy without the
medication due to a bureaucratic error. After the
third course, she sought our help.
Her prescription
drug coverage under Medicaid was terminated on December
31, 2005 -- a requirement under the new federal
Medicare law -- she was automatically assigned a
new Medicare prescription drug plan. The plan denied
coverage for the drug. The client never received
written notice of these denials. She could not afford
the drug on her own and her caseworker, pharmacist
and physician tried without success to get the drug
covered.
Legal Aid
intervened and ensured that she received her medications
in time for her fourth chemotherapy treatment. Her
ongoing chemotherapy treatments will be significantly
easier to endure because of the assistance she received
at Legal Aid. As she told us, once Legal Aid got
involved, “something finally got done”
to solve her problems.
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Securing Safety from Domestic Violence
and Finding Family Stability: Poverty has a profound
effect on families. Not surprisingly, most cases handled
by Legal Aid touch on the lives of children in some way,
either because they directly involve issues of family violence,
custody or child support, or because they address conditions
in a child’s home or income for a child’s family.
Legal Aid gives priority to those issues most severely burdening
poor families. Domestic violence, child custody and visitation,
and child support make up the core of our family law practice.
Making Justice Real: Protecting
From Family Violence
Legal Aid
was contacted by a mental health crisis unit. They
had, in their care, a woman who was deaf and had
been referred to them after she had made a call
to the police seeking protection from domestic violence.
She was not, her doctors concluded, mentally ill.
Legal Aid intervened and assisted her to secure
an order of protection and to return to her home.
Legal Aid’s
client is an immigrant. After having been punched
by her partner, she called the police. As a result
of her deafness, the police could not communicate
with her and did not request an interpreter, but
spoke to her abuser and to her parents. Her parents
sided with her partner in the dispute and went along
with her being taken to the crisis center. She remained
there until Legal Aid became involved, despite not
requiring treatment, because she had no place else
to go.
Legal Aid’s
lawyers represented her in the Superior Court. The
abuser was ordered from the home they shared, to
stay away from her school and to have no contact
with her for a year.
At the conclusion
of her case, she wrote the attorney who assisted
her: “Thank you so much for helping me out
- I cannot seem to thank you enough! For helping
me to get back to my life.”
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Protecting Limited Income and Assets: For
those living in poverty or just barely keeping themselves above the
poverty line, consumer debt collection and foreclosure actions can be
financially devastating. Improper collection cases can lead to the
loss of already scarce income and limited savings, resulting in the
inability to pay rent, utilities, medical expenses and grocery
bills. Foreclosure actions can lead to the loss of housing
and the stability that comes along with it, particularly in cases where
large families would be displaced by a single foreclosure. Our
consumer lawyers provide low income residents with the legal advocacy
necessary to help keep them in their homes whenever possible and to
protect against improper and abusive debt collection activities.
Making Justice Real: Defending Consumer Rights
A
District of Columbia resident was shocked when her employer started
taking $300 out of her paycheck every two weeks to pay a $3,000 court
judgment she never knew existed. She immediately went to the court
clerk’s office to investigate, where she learned for the first time
that seven years earlier, a debt collector had sued her on an alleged
unpaid credit card debt and received a default judgment when she did not
appear in court. The debt collector was now garnishing her wages
to collect on the amount of the judgment.
She
had never heard of the lawsuit. She had not been served, and the
person described in the plaintiff’s affidavit of service did not match
her description or that of anyone who would have been able to accept
service on her behalf. She never received any notice of a court
date or entry of the judgment. Perhaps most unsettling was that
she did not recognize the underlying credit card debt – the debt was not
hers.She asked the court to vacate the judgment and stop the
garnishment, but the request was denied. Legal Aid asked the court
to reconsider, but this request was also denied. While this was
ongoing, she continued to watch money being taken out of her paycheck –
money that she normally relied on to pay for her housing, food, and
other necessary expenses.Not giving up, Legal Aid requested yet an
additional level of review and ultimately prevailed, this time with the
judge issuing an order vacating the underlying judgment and remanding
the case for a new trial. According to the judge’s order, the
plaintiff debt collector had failed to provide sufficient proof of the
underlying debt when it offered no documentation other than a
self-serving affidavit of one of its own employees stating that she owed
the collection company the amount of money stated in the
complaint. Therefore, the judgment that the court had previously
entered against her -- and that formed the basis of the wage garnishment
-- was invalid.
Her
case was resolved prior to trial, when the plaintiff refunded the full
amount garnished from her pay and dismissed all claims against her with
prejudice. She now receives her full paycheck every two weeks, and
the debt collector is prohibited from bringing a new action against her
based on the same debt.
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In addition to direct representation in
the trial courts and administrative tribunals,
there is
a vital need for specialized legal services
focusing on
appellate litigation. A precedent-setting
appellate decision
not only assists legal services lawyers in
representing
their clients but also guides trial courts in
adjudicating
the rights of litigants in poverty who remain
unrepresented. In a typical year, Legal Aid’s Appellate Advocacy Project
handled more than 20 matters as counsel for a
party or as
amicus curiae. The Project won important
victories from
the D.C. Court of Appeals that, among other
things
- Clarified the Fair Housing Act rights of tenants with
mental disabilities to seek accommodations from their
landlord so that they can that can avoid eviction for
lease violations;
- Ruled that an abuser cannot invoke his property interest
in a joint residence to resist entry of a civil protection
order that requires him to relocate a safe distance away
from his victim; and
- Held that tenants cannot be evicted under the local
“drug haven” law based on an isolated incident
of drug activity involving a guest.
Legal Aid also engages in important policy
advocacy. By working with government agencies to change
regulation, pursuing budget recommendations or legislative
imitative, Legal Aid staff addresses broad problems that
impact significant segments of our client community. Recent
initiatives include efforts to improve how much child support
families on TANF receive, increases in the TANF payment,
language access in the health care safety net, and many
others.
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