Whenever I see one of those USA-1 tags on a muscle car, I wonder how many other countries the owner has visited. In puffing out our chests at events like CPAC and bragging about American greatness it is best not to look too closely at it without the beer glasses. Up close the blemishes appear.
National Public Radio ran a series in 2014 on America’s new debtors’ prisons. “Guilty And Charged” examined “an explosion in the use of fees charged to criminal defendants across the country, which has created a system of justice that targets the poor.” This is the land of opportunity where anyone can get ahead. Unless you start out behind.
The Washington Post’s Editorial Board last week looked at another blemish in an American legal system that treats the better-off one way and the poor another. It is true that in criminal cases a litigant is guaranteed legal representation. At public cost, if necessary. But in civil cases, the system is less uniform across the country, and “poverty-stricken litigants in noncriminal cases routinely face life-shattering outcomes, including jail time, without ever seeing a lawyer or receiving basic legal advice,” the Post explains:
Most European countries have long-standing rules granting a right to counsel to litigants in property and monetary cases, as well as ones in which life and liberty hang in the balance. In England, Parliament acted more than 500 years ago to ensure that paupers would be provided lawyers when suing in King Henry VII’s courts; that right found its way into laws in some of the original 13 colonies.
In today’s United States, lawmakers and judges have carved out a hodgepodge, varying wildly from state to state and even by locality, under which certain at-risk individuals may qualify for court-appointed counsel in some types of civil matters. In most states, for instance, that’s the case when authorities seek to remove children permanently from their parents and send them to foster care, owing to alleged neglect or abuse. In a handful of big cities, other laws enacted in recent years grant a right to counsel to tenants facing eviction, an event that often triggers a cascade of other problems, such as homelessness.
Far more often, however, poor people unversed in the law are on their own when states have not specified a right to counsel and judges cannot or will not provide one. That produces appalling results across a range of legal disputes.
It is “a profound injustice” that when facing the U.S. legal system millions of Americans find the odds stacked against them. They stand alone against a convoluted, Dickensian system of rules and procedures that to the unrepresented might as well be The Star Chamber or a court of Oyer and Terminer.
In about half the states someone might be “stripped of their right to rear or even see their own children” or fail to win court protection from domestic violence or end up in prison over failure to make child support payments. Renters face eviction and the elderly face exploitation often without legal counsel to defend their interests. It should not take a public scandal to focus enough attention to remedy these inequities, but often it does, the Post observes.
A “backwoods Southern lawyer” complained to me last week it is easier to get to the moon than to get a driver’s license reinstated after a DUI or failure to pay court fees. In rural America where there is no public transportation, denial of a driver’s license is denial of a job.
Despite a state constitutional amendment, graduates of Florida’s penal system still find their voting rights denied over failure to pay fees the state itself often cannot enumerate.
As the country struggles to beat back the coronavirus pandemic, existing disparities come into sharper relief (The Guardian):
Latino and Black Americans continue to be vaccinated against Covid at the lowest rate despite political promises to redress inequalities, new analysis reveals.
Only 4.6% of Latinos and 5.7% of Black Americans have so far received a vaccine dose, compared with 11.3% of white Americans and 10.5% of Asian Americans, according to analysis by APM Research Lab shared exclusively with the Guardian.
Pacific Islanders have the highest inoculation rate, according to the limited data available, with 16.3% (about one in six) already having received at least one dose. Maryland has vaccinated 43.4% of this population – the highest reported proportion of any community in any state.
The second-highest rate is among Indigenous Americans, with 12.8% (one in eight) already having received at least one jab.
Despite some progress, the available state health data clearly suggests that access to the Covid vaccines – just like testing and economic aid – is disproportionately low for Latino and Black Americans, the two largest minority communities in the US.
And often poorer than their whiter neighbors.
Don’t look too closely or you might see it.