Poor Mojo's Newswire

BATON ROUGE, La. – State District Court Judge Timothy Kelley has ruled that Louisiana’s Act 2—the School Choice legislation—is constitutional, but using the MFP to fund it is unconstitutional. In delivering his ruling, Judge Kelley said, “This has nothing to do with whether or not public funds can support a voucher program. Instead, it has to do with a particular funding mechanism, and whether it can be used for private enterprise.” In his 39-page written decision, Judge Kelley confirmed that Act 2 and the legislative approval given to use the MFP to fund the multitude of school choice programs—a document known as SCR99—ran afoul of the state constitution by diverting state public school funds away from those public schools. Further, he found that Act 2 and SCR99 divert local tax dollars dedicated to public schools away from the purpose for which voters approved those taxes. Scott Richard, executive director of the Louisiana School Boards Association—a plaintiff in the case—applauded the judge’s ruling. “We agree with the decision,” says Richard. “We didn’t want it to come to this, but if the issue had been properly vetted during the legislative session—instead of railroaded through—we wouldn’t have needed to do this.”

At first, the property company stuck up posters warning of dire consequences for any families who held out. Then, Mr Shen said, when 70 of the 100 households had left, the threats escalated. “This mob of thugs would block the street most days. They would pick on the women, threatening to kill their kids. Then people started tossing bricks through windows and letting off fireworks at night. Some people got beaten on the street.” On October 29, as Mr Shen went to work and his wife popped out for a packet of instant noodles, a mob of “30 to 50 men” materialised at their front door. “My wife tried to close the door, but they pushed it back and she tripped over. That is how the fight started,” said Mr Shen. With a flurry of kicks and punches, he and his 18-year-old son, a fellow kung fu devotee, set about the attackers, rendering seven of them near unconscious in the hallway. “It was self defence. I really cannot remember what kung fu skills I used. It was quite messy. Only seven people were injured because the rest were scared and stayed outside. Some of them ran away,” he said. When the police arrived, however, they were little help, insisting that since the thugs were unarmed, it was Mr Shen and his family who were in the wrong. They urged the family to sign the contract.

Millions of Americans face eviction every year. But legal aid to the poor, steadily starved since the Reagan years, has been decimated during the recession. The result? In many housing courts around the country, 90 percent of landlords are represented by attorneys and 90 percent of tenants are not. This imbalance of power is as unfair as the solution is clear. When tenants have lawyers, their chances of keeping their homes increase dramatically. Establishing publicly funded legal services for low-income families in housing court is a cost-effective social policy that would prevent homelessness and uphold our ideals of fundamental fairness. Poor people cannot afford lawyers, and in nearly all civil cases they don’t have a right to one. In the 1963 landmark case Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court unanimously established the right to counsel for indigent defendants in criminal cases on the grounds that a fair trial was virtually impossible without a lawyer. Eighteen years later, the court heard the case of Abby Gail Lassiter, a poor black woman from North Carolina who appeared without counsel at a civil trial that resulted in her parental rights being erased. This time, a divided Supreme Court ruled that the right to appointed counsel was reserved for indigent litigants only when the loss of physical liberty was at stake. Incarceration is a misery, but the outcomes of civil cases, as Ms. Lassiter learned, can be devastating, with stubbornly resilient consequences. Consider eviction’s fallout. Families forced from their homes often lose their possessions, too: furniture and clothes piled on the sidewalk or auctioned off by moving companies. Evicted families experience long stretches of homelessness, with kids bouncing between shelters or abandoned houses.