By Stephen Anderson

Editor

Aiding and abetting

At this writing, funding allocations for legal aid to the underserved are pending in both Springfield and Washington. Significant increases in both proposals are relative pittances compared to the commitments made by Illinois lawyers.

In Congress, House and Senate appropriations committees have OK’d a $40 million boost, to $390 million in FY 2009, for the Legal Services Corp. A modest portion of this will trickle into the coffers of at least three Illinois agencies.

In Springfield, the $5 million in SB 3028 for the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation is part of the budget baggage trundled to the governor’s office. The same amount was proposed last time around, but kicked down to $3.5 million by the gubernator.

The legal profession owes gratitude to Senators Jeffrey Schoenberg, Kirk Dillard and Donne Trotter, and to Rep. Gary Hanning for fanning this flaming need. Unless doused, the allocation was destined to the care of the attorney general.

Meanwhile, registered attorneys in Illinois contribute more than $17 million in cash annually to legal aid! As tallied in the 2007 ARDC report just issued, legal service donations by individuals totaled $14.7 million.

That’s in addition to about $2.6 million, derived from $42 of the annual fee for every non-exempt registrant, that supplements IOLTA for Lawyers Trust Fund grants.

Plus – a very BIG plus – Illinois lawyers in the past year logged 2,092,339 pro bono hours on behalf of legal service provider programs. Multiply that by what you think is a fair hourly rate.

In short, the profession is bearing far more than a fair share of what essentially is a societal problem, not a legal problem. Be proud of that.

Remembering a few works of Art

It’s a story that, if fictionalized for the stage, would strain the imagination and credulity of patrons and critics.

Son of immigrant peddler of produce from horse-drawn wagon, orphaned at age 8, wraps fish and sells shoes, gets law degree with highest honors at age 19, goes on to serve in the administrations of three U.S. presidents.

If we also mentioned his three years on the U.S. Supreme Court, you’d probably have guessed it is a true story – that of Arthur Goldberg.

His 100th birthday on Aug. 8 does not seem to be inspiring as much celebration in his home town of Chicago as may occur during the Lyndon Johnson centennial 20 days later in Texas.

But it was during his brief tenure on the court that Goldberg wrote and delivered the 5-4 opinion in Escobedo v. Illinois in June 1964, ruling that a crime suspect has a constitutional right to legal assistance from the moment he or she becomes the target of a police investigation.

Escobedo had been preceded by Gideon v. Wainwright, on the right to legal counsel, in 1963 and was followed in 1966 by Miranda v. Arizona, a holding that police could not interrogate a suspect who was not informed of the rights to remain silent and to have a lawyer.

By then, Goldberg had left the court, but his words in Escobedo prefaced a new culture in due process: “If the exercise of constitutional rights will thwart the effectiveness of a system of law enforcement, then there is something very wrong with that system.”

When Danny Escobedo was arrested in January 1960 without a warrant as a suspect in a shooting, he was sprung by young criminal defense lawyer Warren Wolfson. Escobedo was arrested again, when implicated by another suspect, but police refused to allow his lawyer to be present as they elicited a confession of complicity.

In the Supreme Court, Barry Kroll argued for Escobedo, and prevailed. Opposing lawyers for the state included James Thompson, a future governor, and Daniel Ward, who would become a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.

Arthur Goldberg had been nominated by President Kennedy for the Felix Frankfurter vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed him on Sept. 25, 1962. But in July 1965, President Johnson asked him to become ambassador to the United Nations.

Although he would have preferred to stay on the court, Goldberg felt a sense of duty to serve the country and try to persuade the president to end the nation’s involvement in Vietnam.

Goldberg’s replacement on the court was Abe Fortas. When Fortas resigned in May 1995, he was replaced by Harry Blackmun. The irony here is that Blackmun, too, is a former Illinoisan who was born a hundred years ago – on Nov. 12, 1908, in downstate Nashville.

That two such distinguished lawyers, Supreme Court justices and public servants were born a century ago at opposite ends of Illinois surely deserves appropriate commemoration by the legal profession and government of this state.