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VOLUME 19 NUMBER 21 ■
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OCTOBER 11, 2021 ■ $8.50
First-of-its-kind study highlights gaps in access to justice in S.C. ■ BY HEATH HAMACHER hhamacher@sclawyersweekly.com
a trial court ruling terminating the biological mother’s parental rights. “Whether a parent consistently pursues—or often chooses not to pursue—FaceTime or telephone contact can be important evidence on the difficult question of whether the failure to make court-ordered visitation was understandable, or willful,” Justice John Cannon Few wrote for the court. “However, FaceTime or telephone contact is not visitation. As the family court judge aptly stated in the November 2018 order, ‘A parent cannot hug a child
“And justice for all” is perhaps one of the most known phrases in American civics, but in practice it remains very much a work in progress. The recently released inaugural report of the South Carolina Access to Justice Commission—a collection of private attorneys, legal services providers, court personnel, and legislators dedicated to effecting systemic change and increasing equal access to justice by identifying and addressing impediments—is now helping to put some hard data in service to show where the promise of equal justice is in particular need of such work. “This report is our first attempt to peel back the layers of these complex issues,” SCJAC executive director Hannah Honeycutt said during an online event announcing the report. With data drawn from South Carolina Legal Services, the South Carolina Bar, and state and federal courts, the report found that 70 percent of low-income households will experience at least one civil legal problem every year. Ninety-two percent of defendants in cases of basic human need (eviction, foreclosure, and debt collection) navigate the system alone. In all adverse civil matters in state circuit courts, 98 percent of the firstnamed plaintiffs have legal representation, while just 28 percent of the first-named defendants do. According to the report, released on Sept. 16, only a fraction of the more than 20 percent of South Carolinians who are potentially eligible for subsidized legal services receive them. In some cases, language and disability
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NO CREDIT FOR FACETIME
VISITS IN PARENTAL RIGHTS CASE ■ BY DAVID DONOVAN david.donovan@sclawyersweekly.com The pandemic has taught us how amazing technologies like FaceTime and Zoom can be in connecting us to the loved ones we can’t be with physically. But it’s also been a lesson in all the ways that those substitutes for in-person interactions still fall well short of the genuine article. The South Carolina Supreme Court has cited many of these same shortcomings in a Sept. 22 decision in which it declined to give a biological mother credit for her (pre-pandemic) electronic visitations with
her daughter. In its ruling, the court unanimously reversed an unpublished 2019 decision by the state’s Court of Appeals which had reversed
S.C.’s Confederate monument protection law upheld Associated Press A state law preventing anyone from moving a Confederate monument or changing the historical name of a street or building without the Legislature’s permission is legal, the South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled. But in the same ruling handed down on Sept. 22, the justices struck down a requirement that two-thirds of the General Assembly must approve a move or name change. The unanimous decision keeps intact South Carolina’s Heritage Act, which has stopped colleges and
local governments from removing statues honoring Civil War soldiers or segregationists even as other areas of the South took them down after protests sparked by the killing of African American George Floyd last year by white police officers in Minnesota. The law was passed in 2000 as part of a compromise to remove the Confederate flag from atop the South Carolina Statehouse dome. The rebel banner was moved to a pole on the capitol lawn, where it flew until 2015 when lawmakers removed it after nine Black church members were killed in a racist massacre at a Charleston church.
One of the people who sued lawmakers over the Heritage Act is the widow of state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor at Emanuel AME church in Charleston who died in the attack. The law specifically protects monuments from 10 wars—from the Revolutionary War to the Persian Gulf War. It also protects monuments honoring African Americans and Native Americans as well as a catchall phrase of “any historic figure or historic event.” Jennifer Pinkney has pointed out that means she See Protection law Page 5 ►
INSIDE VERDICTS & SETTLEMENTS
VERDICTS & SETTLEMENTS
COURT OF APPEALS
Nightclub’s landlord to pay $1.3M for shootout
Jury awards $350K for misdiagnosis of broken clavicle
4th Circuit: Retaliation suit against Army Sec. survives
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