Arkansas Reporter
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Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen, also a Baptist pastor, wrote a response on Facebook to Sen. Jason Rapert’s lengthy op-ed in the Sunday Arkansas Democrat-Gazette defending his opposition to marriage equality and criticism of Judge Chris Piazza for striking down the ban on same-sex marriage. Judge Griffen begins, “In his essay, Mr. Rapert made several claims that deserve comment because they are inaccurate, false, and glaring evidence of his bigotry. “Rapert’s appeal to sectarianism is both disingenuous and pernicious. Like any demagogue, he knows how to appeal to base fears, superstition, and falsehoods about homosexuality. He enlisted the company of like-minded black Christian clergy to create a visual image intended to make his major premise acceptable across racial lines. Of course, a false premise is false no matter who accepts it, but that’s of no concern to Rapert or the editorial staff of the Democrat-Gazette.” There’s lots more, including a sharp challenge of Rapert’s core assertion that the majority will is just. “Racial segregation in public education was lawful by popular vote in Arkansas, across the South, and practiced elsewhere with the force of law. The U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional 60 years ago last month in Brown v. Board of Education. Racial gerrymandering of electoral districts was lawful by popular vote. The U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional almost a half century ago in Gomillion v. Lightfoot and Baker v. Carr. Judge Piazza’s recent rulings are correctly understood in the light of these and similar decisions.” The judge has some instruction for Rapert, too, on the role of an independent judiciary. Bro. Rapert’s judicial recall list may’ve grown by one.
Ghost office employee finds new gig
One of the four employees on the lieutenant governor’s $300,000 payroll who’ve had little or nothing to do since Mark Darr resigned Feb. 1 has found another job — just down the hallway at the state House of Representatives. Amber Pool, who was paid $57,564 as Darr’s director of communications, has been hired in an assistant execuCONTINUED ON PAGE 11 10
JUNE 5, 2014
ARKANSAS TIMES
Making the law work for ordinary people Vincent Morris and Arkansas Legal Services work to fill ‘justice gap.’ BY DAVID RAMSEY
I
magine you have a civil legal matter. It could be a divorce, an issue with child support, debts, identity theft, a small claims dispute, a problem with a landlord. What do you do? If you have the resources, the first step is obvious: Hire a lawyer.
But what if you can’t afford an attorney? That could mean you’re stuck trying to navigate the legal system on your own, a process likely to prove impossibly confusing for most non-lawyers, and one in which a simple mistake could lead to adverse consequences. The result often amounts to a troubling split: a justice system for those who can afford an attorney and one for those who can’t. Trying to figure out how to provide access to justice and legal services for low-income Arkansans has been a focus for Arkansas Legal Services Partnership Director Vincent Morris for the last 10 years. Morris was recently honored with the 2014 Innovations in Equal Justice Award by the National Legal Aid and Defender Association for his role in developing technological solutions to provide legal resources to poor Arkansans. In a criminal matter, defendants are legally entitled to a public defender if they can’t afford an attorney. No such guarantee exists for low-income people in civil matters, including potentially lifealtering problems, such as legal issues related to domestic violence, child custody, or housing foreclosures. In civil matters, two legal aid organizations, which combined cover the entire state — the Center for Arkansas Legal Services and Legal Aid of Arkansas — provide legal services for Arkansans who make less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level (that’s around $15,000 for an individual or $30,000 for a family of four). These legal aid organizations serviced around 15,000 clients last year. But because of limited capacity, they had to turn away another
BRIAN CHILSON
Griffen respons to Rapert
MORRIS
15,000 people. These were people who qualified by income and had a legal problem, but legal aid simply didn’t have the resources to help them. On top of that are thousands more of the working poor who
fall in what legal access advocates call the “justice gap” — people who make a little too much to qualify for legal aid but not enough to realistically afford to hire an attorney. “About half of all Arkansans make less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level,” said Amy Johnson, executive director of Arkansas Access to Justice. “They would have to choose between paying for an attorney and paying for basic necessities.” Morris began as an eight-week intern at the Center for Arkansas Legal Services in 2003, while he was still a law student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Bowen School of Law. A former carpenter, Morris taught himself computer programming. “I came from a builder perspective,” he said. “I thought, I could build a house, I can build anything — I can teach myself programming.” He got a grant to develop technological solutions to legal access issues and began the work of revamping of the state website for legal aid services. At the time, the site amounted to little more than a business card. Morris built it into a hub of legal resources — for pro bono attorneys, legal aid attorneys and for the general public. Morris convinced court
clerks and judges to refer people who were looking for basic legal resources, and used search-engine optimization techniques to make sure that folks looking for legal information in Arkansas on Google found it. The site, which can be found at arlegalservices.org, now gets almost one million page views per year. “The first thing we had to do was get a really good, viable, highly trafficked website up,” Morris said. “It’s all about content — providing legal information, as well as actual legal resources, to folks for free.” Morris writes all of the content at a fifthto-eighth-grade reading level, no easy task when it comes to complicated legal jargon. “It’s pretty challenging,” Morris said. “Lawyers use a lot of Latin. Like most people don’t know what pro se [representing oneself in a legal matter] means.”
One of Morris’ most successful projects has been the development of an “automated documents” program, which generates packets of needed forms for particular legal situations. The program walks users through a series of questions in the style of a program like TurboTax. There’s even a cartoon of a person walking down a path, step by step, until reaching the courthouse. At the end of the process, the user gets all of the forms he needs, in order, along with instructions about exactly what to do — where to take them, how many copies he needs, and so forth. CONTINUED ON PAGE 34