Shortage of rural attorneys leaves judges and citizens to wade through proceedings together

Judge Lori Bolton Fleming, top, helps some citizens complete
legal paperwork. (Photo by Dominick Williams, WSJ)

With a dwindling number of rural attorneys, many judges have lawyerless courtrooms and need to help some citizens navigate the civil court proceedings and paperwork, reports Shannon Najmabadi of The Wall Street Journal. Kansas is among the states facing a shortage. "Eighteen of the 105 counties in Kansas have two active attorneys or fewer, according to recent data from a Kansas Supreme Court committee addressing rural lawyer shortages. Two of those counties have no active attorneys. . . . Organizations such as Kansas Legal Services receive federal funding to represent low-income people in civil matters but say they are overstretched."

In civil matters, people can opt to self-represent, but only some citizens can navigate complex legal processes and paperwork, which leads to delays and judges spending time they don't have to assist. "Some litigants reference documents they have, such as pay stubs, but fail to admit them as evidence. Others leave out key facts," Najmabadi writes. "Recent studies estimate that in civil and family law cases, more than 70% that go to court have at least one party self-represented, according to the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System."

Not all civil cases require attorney know-how; many districts have online forms and instructions. Kansas courts have set up self-help centers and made legal records accessible online. Bolton Fleming, who is chief judge of Kansas's 11th Judicial District, "has begun helping pro-se litigants fill out divorce decrees in court in the last five years, even though they are supposed to bring completed copies to hearings," Najmabadi reports. "Others want to encourage lawyers to move to less-served areas by reducing higher education costs so law-school graduates don't feel pressure to take high-paying corporate positions. Courts have also experimented with allowing non-lawyers to practice, similar to how some areas let physician assistants and nurses provide medical care typically provided by doctors."

Forty years ago, there were enough "attorneys to take on cases, said Glenn Braun, chief judge of Kansas' largely rural 23rd Judicial District, but the lack of attorneys in rural areas has long been a problem without a realistic solution," Najmabadi writes, "The Kansas Supreme Court recently convened a committee focused on finding ways to address a rural attorney shortage."

Religion mixes with politics as hundreds of rural churches pledge to 'vote with values' and Patriot Churches pop up

Pastor Ken Peters prays with attendees at a Patriot Church in Lenoir City, Tenn.

(Photo by Stacy Kranitz for the Washington Post)

Churches are barred from endorsing political candidates if they want to keep their non-profit status, but as usual the presidential election has nonetheless prompted commentary and advocacy from many faith leaders and spurred the creation of a new evangelical group. 

President Trump enjoys broad support from white evangelicals, whom he promised more political power; 81 percent voted for him in 2016, and the latest Pew Research Center polling shows that 78% support him now. But some evangelicals and other Christians oppose him on moral grounds.

Earlier this month, a group called Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden launched, saying the Democratic challenger's overall agenda is more biblically sound though they disagree with the Democratic Party's stance on abortion rights, Sarah Pulliam Bailey reports for The Washington Post.

More than 100 faith leaders from rural and small-town churches from various denominations across the U.S. recently signed a pledge to "vote with values of compassion, love, mercy and love for their neighbors. The pledge endorses no candidate or party, but some tenets seem to signal or greenlight Democratic support, including a commitment to help victims of racial injustice and an emphasis on "the importance of family unity and reunification." The signatories are part of Church World Service, a non-profit organization that aims to help communities worldwide through "just and sustainable responses to hunger, poverty, displacement and disaster." The Rev. John McCullough, president and CEO of CWS, is affiliated with Vote Common Good, an organization urging people of faith to oppose Trump on moral grounds. McCullough, and 1,600 other faith leaders endorsed Biden earlier this month.

Some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are reluctant to vote for Trump, citing his moral failings. In Arizona, the only toss-up state with a significant Mormon population, that could help swing its 11 electoral votes to Biden, Hank Stephenson reports for The New York Times.

However, some people of faith are embracing Trump more firmly, as new congregations affiliated with the Christian nationalist "Patriot Church" movement are starting to pop up, Bailey reports for the Post. The movement is nondenominational but decidedly straightforward about its conservative politics. For many at one Patriot Church in Tennessee, "The political boldness in worship is a breath of fresh air. They complain that social media restricts their free speech, and they fear government-mandated vaccines," Bailey reports. "Whether Trump wins or loses, religion experts believe these Americans are building powerful networks that are expected to endure long after Trump has left the White House."

Trump presidency highlights the 'complete fusion of evangelical Christianity and conservative politics'

President Trump rose to power partly because he promised evangelical Christians more political power, and such voters could be his best shot at re-election, Elizabeth Dias reports for The New York Times.

"The Trump era has revealed the complete fusion of evangelical Christianity and conservative politics, even as white evangelical Christianity continues to decline as a share of the national population," Dias reports. "There are some signs of fraying at the edges of the coalition, among some women and young people. If even a small fraction turns away from Mr. Trump, it could make the difference to his re-election. But even if he loses in November, mainstream evangelical Christianity has made plain its deepest impulses and exposed where the majority of its believers pledge allegiance."

One January 2016 speech at Dordt University, a Christian college in Sioux Center, Iowa, was widely covered because Trump said he "could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" without losing any voters, Dias reports. But some locals in the town of 7,500 keyed into another part of the speech: "Christianity will have power," Trump said. "If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that."

Though only 11 percent of Republicans in Sioux County caucused for Trump nine days later, 81% did in November, matching the 81% of nationwide white evangelicals who voted for Trump nationwide.

White evangelicals could be "Trump's best chance at re-election," Dias reports, since he has trailed presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by double digits in nationwide polls for a month. Though Trump's approval rating has gone down slightly among white evangelicals, 82% said they intend to vote for him in November, according to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in late June.

Plenty of pundits, researchers and journalists have speculated, investigated, or gathered data on why evangelicals support Trump, with theories ranging from the "purely transactional" promise of appointing more conservative judges and ending legal abortion to hatred of Hillary Clinton.

"But beneath all this, there is another explanation. One that is more raw and fundamental. Evangelicals did not support Trump in spite of who he is," Dias writes. "They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along."

White evangelicals Dias interviewed expressed fears that Christianity—which they often equated with rural values—was under attack, and said they felt that city dwellers looked down on rural residents, and didn't understand their way of life. Trump, they said, recognized that fear and would fight for them.

"The one group of people that people felt like they could dis and mock and put down had become the Christian. Just the middle-class, middle-American Christians," said Lisa Burg of Orange City, Iowa. "That was the one group left that you could just totally put down and call deplorable. And he recognized that, You know what? Yeah, it’s OK that we have our set of values, too. I think people finally said, 'Yes, we finally have somebody that’s willing to say we’re not bad, we need to have a voice too.'"

FactCheck: Sens. Collins and Heitkamp distort facts

Here's another installment of a series we will run weekly until Election Day, in which we list some of the most relevant items from FactCheck.org and other nonpartisan fact checkers. We encourage you to subscribe to their alerts, which you can do here, and republish their findings, which FactCheck lets anyone do for free with credit to them.

Sen. Susan Collins

In a speech announcing her decision to vote for Judge Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Kavanaugh and Merrick Garland "voted the same way in 93 percent of cases they heard together" on the District of Columbia federal appeals court. In comparing Kavanaugh's votes with Garland, whom President Obama nominated to the Supreme Court, Collins attempted to show that Kavanaugh was "more of a centrist" than critics say.

But her statement is misleading: "A high rate of unanimity is not unusual among appellate court judges or indicative of how one might rule if elevated to the Supreme Court, as the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service wrote in a recent report on Kavanaugh and his potential impact on the high court," Eugene Kiely reports for FactCheck.

FactCheck notes that such statistics are "frequently misused" and that it dealt with a similar claim in 2017, when Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the court. The nonpartisan CRS explained then and now that there is a high rate of unanimity on appeals courts because appellate judges are "bound by Supreme Court and circuit precedent," and "not normally in a position to espouse freely their views on particular legal issues in the context of their judicial opinions." Also, the reports said, though the Supreme Court has almost complete discretion over the cases it hears, federal appeals courts are required to hear many cases, including routine cases in which judges are likely to agree.

The CRS notes that, although Kavanaugh has agreed with Garland in most cases, "Kavanaugh had the highest rate of issuing separate opinions, either concurring or dissenting, (15.53 percent) and the highest rate of issuing dissenting opinions (8.58 percent) than any of the six judges on the D.C. Circuit Court from May 31, 2006, to July 9, 2018. Garland was at the bottom of that list with a separate opinion rate of 1.8 percent and a dissenting opinion rate of less than 1 percent."

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., claims in a new campaign ad that her Republican opponent, Rep. Kevin Cramer, gave himself a $23,000 raise as an official on the Public Service Commission, raising his salary to over $93,650. But Politifact rated that claim False: "Cramer did get raises totalling that amount. But the ad completely distorts Cramer’s hand in securing the pay increase," Manuela Tobias reports. 

The three commissioners are elected to six-year terms. Cramer was ne in 2003-12. Their salaries are determined by the governor and the state Office of Management and Budget, then approved by the legislature. Tobias reports, "The OMB proposed and received across-the-board salary hikes for elected officials every year between 2005 and 2012. . . .Staff at the Public Service Commission and at the OMB said they could not recall an instance in which they had requested salary bumps for commissioners."

Politifact has marshaled a group of state-by-state correspondents to feed it ads and statements that deserve checking, and is open to contributions from others, in case you see an ad that is difficult for you to check out.

Report shows how one judge's practices contribute to chronic jail overcrowding in two Kentucky counties

Mercer (top) and Boyle counties (Wikipedia map)

Rural jails all over the country face constant overcrowding, and though the problem is usually blamed on jail construction delays or outdated jails, judges share some of the blame. A recent study of the criminal justice system in Kentucky's Boyle and Mercer counties found that one circuit judge was largely responsible for overcrowding at the Boyle County Detention Center because of "'discriminatory' bond practices and lethargic case-processing times," Ben Kleppinger reports for The Advocate-Messenger in Danville, Ky. "The jail is stuffed with pretrial felony defendants who can’t afford their bonds and must wait months to resolve their cases, according to the blunt assessments of consultant Dr. Allen Beck in chapter two of the 106-page 'Jail and Justice System Assessment.'"

Kleppinger is a fellow of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, which held a conference on rural jails in July and publishes The Crime Report, which is currently featuring Kleppinger's story as an example of good local reporting on the issue.

The consultant's report, which the counties commissioned, found that Circuit Judge Darren Peckler is a major contributor to overcrowding by requiring cash bonds, setting limits on the number of pleas he will hear, having only one arraignment date per month, revoking bonds when defendants are indicted, and not offering bonds to participants in a new "rocket docket" program intended to quickly dispose of cases, Kleppinger reports.

Requiring defendants to pay a cash bond is the biggest cause of overcrowding; the report found that only 3 percent of defendants in the two counties are able to leave jail without a cash bond, compared to 18 to 55 percent in neighboring counties. The report notes that research shows that non-financial bonds are as effective as financial bonds. Requiring cash bonds also can cause poor defendants to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit in order to speed up the process, Kleppinger reports.

Peckler refused to participate in the study, and forbade District Court Judge Jeff Dotson from participating as well. The consultants combed through tens of thousands of documents and interviewed people at every stage of the local criminal justice system before writing their report.

"The report does note a 'major decline in the jail population in the last several months,' which it attributes to the public defender’s office and defense attorneys 'advocating for the pretrial release and use of non-financial bonds during circuit court arraignment,'" Kleppinger reports. The report also notes that it's common for such a decline to happen during a criminal justice system study because the sudden attention often prompts members of the system to reconsider habits.

Still, the report found that there is still a strong "local legal culture" in which participants reinforce each other's incorrect belief that financial bonds improve appearance rates in court. The consultant recommended that someone from the Pretrial Justice Institute hold a presentation for local criminal justice officials.

Kennedy's retirement could shift environmental law

Justice Anthony Kennedy's imminent retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court--and his all but certain replacement with a staunch conservative--predicts a substantial swing to the right for future federal court decisions and the policies and laws they inform. One of those areas is federal environmental policies. "As with so many other issues, Kennedy served as a swing vote in key cases on water pollution and climate change during his three-decade tenure," Dino Grandoni writes for The Washington Post.

The most significant of those cases was in Massachusetts v. the Environmental Protection Agency, in which Kennedy's swing vote paved the way for an EPA study affirming that coal-fired power plant emissions contributed to climate change. "Without the 2007 ruling, the EPA would have no statutory power to tell companies to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere," Grandoni writes.


Though the Supreme Court usually stands by its previous decisions, it has shown more willingness to overturn prior rulings as of late, as with its recent ruling that public unions may not force nonmembers to pay collective-bargaining fees; Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent that the decision overturned a 1977 ruling. That willingness to tread on previous decisions could put the Mass. v. EPA decision on rocky ground.

But David Bookbinder, an environmental lawyer who was deeply involved in Mass. v. EPA told Ben Geman with Axios that he doubted the high court would revisit the decision: "Mass. v EPA was a pure statutory interpretation case limited to: Does the definition of 'pollutant' in the Clean Air Act include CO2? Once they decide something like that, they don't want to go back and change it, especially many years later."

But Harvard University's Jody Freeman told Geman that a "Supreme Court without Justice Kennedy will be even more likely to look skeptically at [greenhouse gas] regulation, and be more open to efforts to cabin it, if another administration ever returns to it." That matters, since EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt wants to replace Obama's Clean Power Plan with something much more limited.

Judge rules pipeline protesters' actions necessary to prevent climate change; could be precedent for other cases

Karenna Gore protests the West Roxbury pipeline.
(Associated Press photo by Kori Feener)

A Boston judge dismissed charges against 13 gas-pipeline protesters on grounds that they believed climate change made their protest a necessary act of civil disobedience. The ruling could create legal precedent for others protesting controversial pipelines. The pipeline in this case is the West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline, an Enbridge Inc. project.

"The protesters, including Karenna Gore, the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, were facing charges of trespassing and disturbing the peace after climbing into a construction trench," Jordan Graham reports for the Boston Herald. "On Tuesday, prosecutors asked a judge to convert the criminal charges into civil infractions, saying in the event of a conviction they were unlikely to ask for any further punishment. After allowing the motion, Judge Mary Ann Driscoll found the defendants not responsible, saying she agreed with their argument that their actions were necessary to combat climate change."

This isn't the first time environmental protesters have used the "necessity defense" strategy, in which defendants admit that they did something illegal, but had no legal alternative in order to prevent imminent danger. But the Climate Disobedience Center, which helped represent the West Roxbury protesters, said it may be the first time that defense has proven successful for environmental protesters, Alex Lubben reports for Vice News. 

Writer says Grassley could throw a big wrench into Trump's plans if biofuels demands are not met

We reported yesterday that Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa threatened to hold up President Trump's nominees for the Environmental Protection Agency if biofuel mandates are reduced in the Renewable Fuels Standard. But that's not the only card in Grassley's hand, and he could become a thorn in Trump's side if push comes to shove. As Philip Wegmann's opinion column in The Washington Examiner says, "When properly motivated, Chuck Grassley can crush skulls. Right now, the Iowan octogenarian is just playing around."

That's because, as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Grassley has far-reaching power over Trump's judicial nominees: he controls when nominees get hearings and which nominees get voted on in the Senate floor. Trump has been frustrated by the Republican-controlled Senate's failure to pass significant legislation that he can claim as an administration win, so he's focused heavily on judicial appointments as a means for asserting his legacy. "Any slowdown in confirmations would deal a major blow to the administration," Wegmann writes. "Without judges, Trump looks even more impotent." There are about 60 judicial nominees awaiting confirmation right now.

The administration has been walking the fence thus far on the biofuels issue, promising lawmakers from corn-producing states that ethanol is important, but without firm assurances to support increased biodiesel requirements in the fuel mix under the RFS. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds spoke on the phone separately to both President Trump and EPA chief Scott Pruitt yesterday. "Both of them personally committed to me their continued commitment to the renewable fuel standard,” Reynolds told Reuters, and said the call with Trump was "positive."