Each month, NLPC reports on the activities of grantees of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which receives $329.3 million in federal funds. These examples are drawn from cases filed in court since January 2000.
Leftist Web Site Urges Bush Tax Rebates be Donated to Legal Services to Fight the Bush Agenda
TaxRebatePledge.org is a web site set up to urge people to “Fund the Fight Against Bush” by donating their Bush tax cut refund to groups fighting the Bush agenda. Among their recommended groups for donations is Texas Rural Legal Aid, a group funded with federal tax dollars through the Legal Services Corporation. Federal law prohibits legal services lawyers from political activism but the Texas group raised an outcry in 1997 when it attempted to overturn the election of two Republicans to local office by challenging absentee ballots of 800 military personnel.
Legal Services Tries to Stop Deportation of Violent Pedophile
In a case decided June 1, 2000, the taxpayer-funded Legal Assistance
Foundation of Chicago tried to stop the deportation of Kevin Wedderburn,
a Jamaican living in the U.S. who had been sentenced to 6 years in prison
for the aggravated sexual assault of a boy under 9 years of age. The case
went before a federal appeals court which ruled against legal services,
holding that their client was not a citizen under the law and as a violent
criminal, he should be deported.
See: Wedderburn v. Immigration and Naturalization
Service, 215 F.3d 795 (7th Cir. 2000)
Benefits Demanded for Worker Fired for Misconduct
Juan Hernandez was fired as a Greyhound Lines ticket agent after he
made hundreds of long-distance personal phone calls while on duty. He denied
making the calls but confessed when confronted with the evidence.
Texas Rural Legal Aid fought the denial of unemployment up to the Court
of Appeals of Texas, Fourth Circuit. The court ruled against Hernandez,
holding that he was not entitled to unemployment benefits because he was
discharged for misconduct.
See: Hernandez v. Texas Workforce Commission
and Greyhound Lines, 18 S.W.3d 678 (Tex. App. 2000)
Legal Services Sub-Grantee Defends “Right” of Family to Live on Property They Don’t Own
In a case decided in January 2001, Bronx Legal Services, a sub-grantee
of the Legal Services Corporation, lost its defense of a couple attempting
to remain on a piece of property they never acquired nor received permission
from the owner to occupy. The saga began in 1982 when Mark Whitcombe
and his wife left their New York home, after having “difficulty with a
landlord.” They moved into a vacant house close by that “appeared
to be empty” and was “believed to be abandoned.” Even after learning
that the house was owned by a Mrs. Mulford and had been sold, they chose
to “just sit there.” Finally, after living for close to 20 years
in a house that didn’t belong to them, the new owners took action to have
them ejected. With Bronx Legal Services at their side, the Whitcombes
went to court, admitting they had no “claim of right” when they initially
moved in, but argued that the “work we have put into both the house and
the property” evolved into a rightful claim of ownership. Incredibly,
their taxpayer-funded case prevailed at the Bronx County court level, but
was dealt a crushing blow by the New York Supreme Court, which ruled that
the defendants’ “expectations [of ownership] had no objective basis in
fact.”
See: Joseph v. Whitcombe, 719 N.Y.S.2d 44
(N.Y. App. Div. 2001)