Defense Articles

 Prosecutors on Tuesday rested their case against a father on trial on arson and firstdegree murder charges after playing tapes of phone calls he made from jail.

On cross examination, Bain characterized Lentini as a hired gun for the defense who rarely testifies as a prosecution expert and that his conclusions failed to take into account Nicholls’ version of how the fire started and spread.

WEST JORDAN — The son of polygamist Tom Green is close to resolving his own criminal case.

The attorney for 18-year-old William Green told 3rd District Judge Royal Hansen Monday that amended charges were about to be filed against his client and that his client would plead guilty to them.

Hansen said Monday he wanted time to look over the amended charges as well as a psychosexual report conducted on Green before giving the final OK on the deal. He scheduled Green’s next court appearance for May 3, at which time the deal is expected to be finalized.

In August, Green was charged with two counts of rape of a child. Green met an underage girl through his MySpace Web site and developed a relationship with her.
But defense attorney David Leavitt said this was not an Internet predator case. Green’s psychosexual evaluation, conducted voluntarily to make absolutely sure there was nothing in his personality attorneys were missing, came back “clean,” Leavitt said.

“He is not in any respect a predator. He is not in any respect a pedophile,” Leavitt said.

The case also had nothing to do with polygamy, he said.

Under the proposed plea deal, Green would plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of sexual battery. Leavitt said those charges are more appropriate for his client’s conduct. He noted the victim in the case was “completely in support of the deal.”

Leavitt was appreciative of the state for agreeing to the deal and allowing Green to get a “fair opportunity to get on with his life.”
Green is the son of polygamist Tom Green, who had five wives and was convicted in 2001 of child rape for “marrying” and having sex with his first wife when she was 13 years old. He was also sentenced to zero-to-five-year terms on four counts of bigamy for having four other wives.

There are two sides to every story, even for a person accused of a crime. It doesn’t matter if the accused is on trial for raping a woman or murdering his stepson.

“I’m the only person that can help them at this moment in their life,” said Thomas Jacquinot, Kansas City public defender. “You have to look at it from their perspective.”

Jacquinot said he’d done this for 20 years, and being perceived as the “bad guy” or defending the “bad guy” was just part of the job. It doesn’t bother him. The attorney defended Lorenzo Gilyard, 56, a serial killer who was convicted last month of strangling and sexually assaulting six women.
The majority of defense attorneys in Kansas City deal with robbery, murder and sex offenders more than terrorists but face many of the same attitudes and problems the attorneys around the nation discuss.

When criminal defense attorney John Picerno is introduced at parties and guests learn what he does, some people ask “How can you do this?” He tells them everyone has a right to an attorney and a trial.

“I’ve done a dozen murder trials and several assaults and robberies, Picerno said.

He represented a 14-year-old, tried as an adult in 1994, which was a tough case, the former public defender said. The 14-year-old and the victim got into a fight over CDs, and the victim brought a gun to the 14-year-old’s grandmother’s house. Picerno’s client then got a gun and defended himself.
“I figured that it wasn’t a legitimate or rational type of anger, that it was just an emotional response to the facts of the case because they were personally involved somehow,” Weber said.

Picerno said it was ironic because he’d gained some clients he had cross-examined during trial.

“I remember one guy that got so mad at me during cross- examination that he just about came out of the chair. After the trial, he called me to represent a family member,” Picerno said.

Jacquinot said he hadn’t had much attitude or problems from the public. He hasn’t encountered being viewed as a “monster.”

Picerno said he regarded defending an innocent person as more difficult. It’s easier for him to defend a guilty person.

“You don’t lose any sleep. You’ve done everything you can to defend them. It’s more difficult to defend the innocent ones because there’s a chance they could go to jail,” he said.

Jacquinot agreed the stress was higher when defending someone innocent.

“When you anticipate a guilty verdict, you focus on the sentencing,” he said. “That’s the most stressful.”

In the Gilyard case the trial centered on DNA evidence. Gilyard’s DNA was found on the six women who were murdered from March 1986 to December of 1987. He received a life sentence without a chance of parole.

Jacquinot said he expected it would be difficult because of the DNA evidence and because after 20 years many of the witnesses had gone missing or were dead.

Another difficult client to defend is a sex offender, Picerno said.

“(Sex offenders) are tough cases because you know they are mentally ill. It’s different from the others,” Picerno said.

But the bottom line remains the same, Picerno said. Someone has to speak up for the accused, and he says it’s his job.

The 14-year-old boy with a big Afro came to Massachusetts on his first trip away from home alone. He had a scholarship to go to prep school and a chance to get away from gangs. This was in 1970, long before the Bloods and the Crips. The gangs in his poor neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago near me Robert Taylor Homes, a massive housing project, called tiiemselves the Blackstone Rangers and the Disciples. Deval Patrick wanted nothing to do with them.

Milton Academy, however, was interested in him. The elite school, located in me Boston suburb where the first President Bush was born, was bringing in its biggest class of Black students. Patrick was one of that pioneering dozen from around the country, each carefully screened for high academic ability. The scholarship came from a well-meaning nonprofit that still goes by the hopeful name, A Better Chance.
“It was my first time away by myself. Woo, I was scared,” Patrick recalls. He was entering a foreign world, so foreign that after the school informed his mother he would need a jacket, she and his grandmother bought a ski jacket to keep him warm during the cold New England winters. Milton Academy meant a blazer to wear to chapel.

But Patrick, with the bravado of a teenage boy, swallowed his fears. He studied hard and delivered newspapers early in the morning to make spending money. “I realized at times like this, you must keep your head about you. That is a lesson I have learned over and over again,” he says. “Now, I’m pretty cool under fire.”
Racial tensions simmered at some New England prep schools as they integrated, because affluent White students and Black newcomers of lesser means were unfamiliar with each other, and often wary. Patrick joined the Black student group at Milton, “Truth and Soul.” Around campus, he made friends, Black and White.

“Even then, he was a person who saw ways to build connections across differences,” says Anna Waring, a Black classmate originally from Boston who now is president of Josephinum Academy, a Catholic girls school in Chicago.

From Milton Academy, Patrick went across the Charles River to Harvard and then on to Harvard Law, where he won an award in the school’s moot court competition. He launched a varied career in the law, as a civil rights lawyer, partner in prestigious Boston firms and counsel for major corporations. Patrick traveled in Africa before law school, and afterward to serve as a clerk to a federal judge in Los Angeles, on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) in New York and in Washington at the Justice Department where he served as assistant attorney general for civil rights. But he kept returning to his adopted state.

Not many would have predicted that Patrick would make history in politics as the second African American elected governor. Starting as an underdog, he applied lessons he had learned at prep school. First he built a grassroots following in communities across Massachusetts and then, once he spurted ahead in late summer, slougrung off attacks from his rivals with grace. “Together We Can” was the slogan of his campaign, which did not focus on race.

In the Democratic primary, Patrick defeated two opponents, including the state attorney general anointed by the party establishment, with 50 percent of the vote. Even more impressive was the first-time candidate’s victory in November, a landslide wim 56 percent of the vote over me Republican lieutenant governor and two other candidates. As Patrick prevailed in a state where 7 percent of die population is Black, four African Americans running for governor or senator in states with Black populations ranging from 10 percent to 29 percent were going down to defeat.

One other African American has won statewide in Massachusetts, a Republican. Edward W. Brooke became the nation’s first African American elected a state attorney general in 1962, the first elected by popular vote to the Senate in 1966 and then in 1972 the only one re-elected to the Senate. Brooke, 87, lives in Florida now. From across party, generational and state lines, he admires the accomplishment of Patrick, who is 50.

“He certainly demonstrated excellence in his qualifications, his ability to campaign and his ability to communicate,” Brooke says. “I think he ran an excellent campaign and think he was rewarded with the size of his majority.”

Instead of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick might have settled in California, but for love. He was planning to join a law firm in San Francisco after his one- year clerkship for a liberal U.S. appeals court judge in Los Angeles. Then he met Diane Bemus, a lawyer with a local firm. They left California and moved to New York City, where she opened a new office for her firm, and they married.

Having backed away from the San Francisco offer, Patrick was without a job. A mentor at Harvard Law School, knowing of his protégé’s passion for civil rights law, told him about a rare opening at the LDF in New York. Jack Greenberg, Thurgood Marshall’s successor as the defense fund’s director, hired the young lawyer in 1983 to handle death penalty cases. Colleagues included Lani Guinier, now a Harvard Law professor, and Theodore M. Shaw, currently the fund’s director-counsel and president.

Judge Dickson, an associate justice on the Indiana Supreme Court, cites three areas most affected by death-penalty cases: decisional workload, administrative functions, and public perception of the judiciary. Although the number of death-penalty cases in Indiana are few (0.92 percent of total cases decided from 1995 to 2004), and the number of persons awaiting executions are even fewer (eighteen currently), capital cases make up approximately 7 percent of the appellate courts’ opinions for the same time period. More important, it takes considerably longer to write opinions in deathpenalty cases than it does in other types of cases. The state provides for a number of procedural safeguards and allowances, such as mitigation evidence, expert-witness testimony, two appointed attorneys for indigent clients, and exceptions to rules regarding the length of appellant briefs.
In addition, the process of reviewing all of the trial court proceedings can be extremely time-consuming, as Justice Dickson notes, given that trial court records may be as long as 5,000 pages. The fiscal impact on the courts for a death-penalty case is also greater than in cases where the prosecution seeks life without parole rather than capital punishment. With respect to public perceptions of the judiciary, judges are concerned about public attitudes when writing opinions, but they also view their opinions in these cases as opportunities to act as republican schoolmasters; their opinions are often written in a way not only to explain their rulings but also to educate the public about the process.

* Michael Hintze, “Tinkering with the Machinery of the Death: Capital Punishment’s Toll on the American Judiciary,” 254-57.

Hintze argues that when all of its aspects are examined, capital punishment places an excessive burden on the judiciary. This burden is so excessive, he asserts, that it far outweighs any utility derived from death-penalty cases. Based on this analysis, the author concludes that legislators and judges should take action to eliminate capital punishment.

* Henry Leyte-Vidal and Scott J. Silverman, “Living with the Death Penalty,” 270-73.

Surveying seven death-penalty-qualified judges from the state of Florida, the authors, who have served on both trial and appellate court benches, examine the effects of death sentences on the judges who pronounce them. The accounts from the judges include a range of responses. All note the “difference” in death sentences from other types of sentencing, yet some judges experienced more of an emotional response during the sentencing and post-sentencing proceeding more than did others. The differences in judicial response may be attributed to the perception of a judge’s role in the criminal-justice process. However, there was a consensus among the judges that it is important to keep their emotional responses to a death sentence out of the sentencing proceedings as much as possible. In addition, the state of Florida now requires that judges, like juries and defense counsel, be specially trained in death-penalty trials.

* Dane R. Gillette, “Defending Death Penalty Judgments,” 262-64.

This article poses a counter to the common wisdom that the state has better and greater resources than the criminally accused in capital cases. By expanding the lens to examine the burden on the California Attorney General’s Office, which is required by state law to handle all post-conviction filings, hearings, and appeals across state and federal courts, Gillette illustrates how even one high-profile death-penalty case, for example, that of Robert Alton Harris, can easily “flip” the prevailing notion regarding the states’ power and resources in criminal-justice cases. The author notes that once a death sentence is made, the state attorney general’s office is required to “defend death penalty judgments.” This is often a very time-consuming and costly process. According to Gillette, the average period of time from death sentence to execution in California is fifteen years.

* Bill Hawkins, “Capital Punishment and the Administration of Justice: A Trial Prosecutor’s Perspective,” 258-61.

This article, written from a prosecutor’s perspective, compares the cost of deathpenalty cases with non-death-penalty cases. Hawkins argues that, on average, deathpenalty trials may cost more than non-death-penalty trials, but the differences are not as great as perceived-for example, only approximately $57,000 more for a deathpenalty trial (p. 261). He also provides a cost comparison for various types of criminal cases and punishments. Most relevant is the comparison of the cost of housing death-row inmates with the cost of housing individuals sentenced to life without parole, where he concludes that the importance of an execution to the criminal-justice system outweighs any differences in costs of other incarceration alternatives.

When Angry Shadows are Heard is a thrilling novel about the seamy side of urban life, the brutal power plays between a crooked defense attorney and a notorious gangster, and betrayed prostitute caught in the center of it all. The beautiful but hapless Charlene, deceived into a life of prostitution by the man she loved, is falsely accused of stealing from a ruthless crime lord. In her desperate struggle to finger the true thief and protect herself from the machinations of a criminal empire, she meets Colt, a retired street hustler with the latest information on everybody and everything. A thrilling debut novel and the first of a two-part series set in the seamy urban heart of South Dallas, When Angry Shadows are Heard is a gritty, street-soaked tale of desperation, shattered dreams, impossible to put down.

Prosecutors on Tuesday filed a new criminal charge against Milwaukee Ald. Michael McGee, but kept it secret pending a likely legal fight over whether recordings of wiretapped conversations can be used in court.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said he was barred from discussing the new charge under state law dealing with wiretaps. Chisholm agreed to turn over copies of the wiretapped conversations to attorneys for McGee and two co-defendants.

The FBI tapped three phone lines under a court order issued May 26 by federal Judge Lynn Adelman, FBI Special Agent Daniel Hargreaves testified Tuesday in state court.
Defense lawyers are expected to seek to have the wiretap recordings kept out of the case. A hearing that likely will include requests for suppression of the wiretap evidence will be June 22, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Dennis Moroney ruled.

McGee was charged last week with conspiring with two other men to assault a family friend they suspected of burglarizing the home of Little Al Stewart, described as McGee’s godfather. Stewart, 52, and Dimitrius L. Jackson, 38, were also charged in connection with that case.

For now, details of that case remain under seal, as does the charge filed Tuesday, Moroney ruled.

Review period

Defense lawyers for McGee, Stewart and Jackson will have 10 days to review the tapes and decide whether to seek to have them suppressed.

Chisholm has previously said he’ll push to have the tapes admitted into evidence in the case.
Moroney said he would rule on a defense motion to suppress the tapes within about three days of receiving it, but he warned that a hearing on suppression would be closed to the press and public. The unusual step is allowed under a state Supreme Court decision regarding use of wiretapped conversations in criminal cases.

Lawyers for McGee, Jackson and Stewart received copies of the new criminal complaint, but the judge warned that they were bound by his order not to reveal any details. The new charge applies only to McGee.

McGee and his two co-defendants did not speak during Tuesday’s hearing. About three dozen supporters of McGee stood and many returned a clenched fist salute to McGee when he entered the courtroom.

McGee and Jackson are being held in the Milwaukee County Jail. Stewart is free on $20,000 bail. Chisholm has said McGee, Stewart and Jackson first talked of killing Pierre Crawley, 19, and later agreed on a “beat down.”

‘Family altercation’

During a phone call from jail to radio station WNOV-AM (860) last week, McGee described the matter as a “family altercation” and denied there was any intent to hurt Crawley.

Glenn Givens, McGee’s lawyer, has said Crawley was “almost a foster child” to Stewart.

McGee, 37, also faces federal bribery charges that accuse him of extorting $500 to $2,500 in bribes each from several liquor store and gas station owners in his district over the past year. McGee traded his backing for city licenses to the businesses in exchange for cash, a federal complaint says.

The FBI is continuing its investigation.

As the result of a secret John Doe probe, two McGee election workers have been charged with vote fraud in the past week. Criminal complaints say Garrett L. Huff and Khadijah Anwar paid undercover police officers $5 to vote in the McGee recall election in April, which McGee won.

Meanwhile Tuesday, a Common Council committee responded to charges that McGee was shaking down business owners seeking city licenses by delaying action on two liquor licenses in his district. The owners of the two businesses seeking licenses have not been linked to the bribery allegations against McGee.

Common Council President Willie Hines Jr. has called for a probe of all pending city business, including liquor license applications, in McGee’s 6th Aldermanic District.

The delay affected two taverns: the Downtowner, 432 E. Center St., owned by Stephen Johnson; and the Cottage Club, 400 E. Locust St., owned by Demaine Thompson and Rivera Allen. Both new businesses are on the site of closed bars. McGee supported the Downtowner but opposed the Cottage Club, said his aide, Mary Fitzgerald.

Larry Sandler of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.

RALEIGH, N.C. — His law license lost and reputation in tatters, Mike Nifong seemingly can fall no further. But the disgraced prosecutor who committed “intentional prosecutorial misconduct” in pursuing the Duke lacrosse rape case faces an uncertain — and likely troubled — future.

The falsely accused players and their families, having racked up millions in legal bills, appear likely to file civil lawsuits against the disbarred prosecutor. Their lawyers want a judge to consider holding Nifong in criminal contempt for lying to the court.
“Some people will take that as being mean-spirited and kicking somebody when they’re down,” defense attorney Joseph Cheshire said Sunday. “But we believe that this issue is enormously important and it carries significant precedent and [the judge] ought to be the one to make that decision because it happened in his court.”

Nifong was disbarred Saturday, a ruling that came one day after he stunned his staff and own lawyers by announcing he planned to resign as Durham County’s district attorney. A disciplinary committee called Nifong’s prosecution of Dave Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann a politically motivated “fiasco.”

Lawyer-bashing is always a good way to get laughs. Now, one candidate seems to think it’s a good way to get votes, as well.

“Wayne Gilchrest is in a primary election against a trial lawyer who openly advertises that he defends sexual predators and drug dealers,” one radio ad for the 1st District congressman states. “It will do us no good to replace a man like Wayne Gilchrest with a lawyer who makes his living getting child molesters off the hook.”

The ad refers to one of Gilchrest’s challengers in the Republican primary, Baltimore County lawyer David Fischer.
Thanks to redistricting, the Eastern Shore constituents Gilchrest has represented for more than a decade — 400,000 of them — are joined by 260,000 residents of Anne Arundel, Harford and Baltimore counties.

Those are voters who don’t really know Gilchrest and, according to Fischer, would find him far too liberal if they did.

In fact, until late August, it was the moderate Gilchrest complaining about unfair ads, saying Fischer had distorted his position on such issues as the environment, abortion, gay adoption, gun control and private property rights.

Now, the “lawyer” ads stop just short of branding Fischer a liar.

A second radio spot on the theme hones in on what is purported to be Fischer’s telephone-directory advertisement.

“He has a two-page ad in the Baltimore Yellow Pages. Pages 650 and 651,” a male actor tells a female actor.

“It says he specializes in representing drug peddlers, murderers, handgun crimes,” the man continues. “And look at this, David Fischer is advertising for sexual molesters to represent in court.”

“David Fischer who runs around telling everybody how much he hates child molesters, makes his money defending them in court?” the woman asks.

“… David Fischer is sure not the person that he wants us to believe he is,” the man says later, according to an unofficial transcript obtained from Fischer’s campaign.

Not surprisingly, the ads have sparked a protest from a group that represents criminal defense attorneys.

Larry A. Nathans, president of the Maryland Criminal Defense Attorneys’ Association, wrote to Gilchrest’s Annapolis campaign headquarters on Aug. 29, to protest the ads that are running on Baltimore-area and Eastern Shore radio stations.

“Criminal defense lawyers serve an important function in ensuring due process and the fair administration of criminal justice,” Nathans wrote. “After all, it is the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right to defense counsel.”

Nathans should know: He made news last December when he helped win freedom for Michael Austin, who served 27 years in prison for a murder that even his prosecutor now believes he didn’t commit.

In an interview the day after he wrote to the Gilchrest campaign, Nathans emphasized that he and his organization do not favor any particular candidate in the congressional race. Instead, they objected to the attack on lawyers.

They aren’t alone.

James P. Nolan, president of the Maryland State Bar Association, said that negative ads that criticize the legal profession are “extremely unfortunate.”

Attorneys frequently are called on to represent “unpopular causes,” Nolan said.

“The Constitution guarantees that all rights for all citizens are protected,” Nolan said. “That’s what make this country different from a lot of countries.”

Part of the job

One of Gilchrest’s ads refers to — but provides no details about - - two cases in 1997 in which Fischer represented sexual offenders, and a 1999 case where he represented a teacher accused of distributing pornography.

Tommy Hopper, a campaign spokesman for Fischer, said the Gilchrest ads distort the picture of Fischer’s work as a criminal defense attorney

“Dave has handled about six cases, out of about 3,000, that involved child molesters,” Hopper said. “And three of those were [court-appointed], and a fourth was acquitted with a very quick decision by the jury and an apology [from the jury or the court to the defendant] because the child made the story up.”

In fact, in late July Fischer found himself on the other side, representing the parents of young girls who allegedly were abused by a Kent Island karate instructor.

Fischer’s call for a change in the laws that keep the court records of juvenile sex offenders secret, even if they are later charged with sex crimes as adults, earned him coverage by The Washington Times, CNN.com’s “Law Center” and cable television.

That flurry of free publicity was followed by the Gilchrest ads that portray Fischer’s tough-on-crime position as hypocritical.

The negative ads are a departure for Gilchrest. He has represented the 1st District since 1990, when he unseated an incumbent by “running a positive campaign with strong grassroots support,” according to his congressional Web site. Even in one of the controversial radio spots, Gilchrest spends most of the airtime on issues — the interests of small businesses, family farmers and watermen, and protecting the Chesapeake Bay — before closing with the dig at Fischer’s chosen profession.

On March 24, 1982, a group of religious leaders and social activists in Tucson, Ariz., declared the Rev. John Fife’s Southside Presbyterian Church the first public sanctuary for Central American refugees in the United States. Soon, at least 330 churches across the country joined the Sanctuary movement, providing safe havens for Central Americans fleeing death squads and oppression.

The movement also pressed for reform of U.S. government policy that supported right-wing Central American governments and that blocked refugees’ efforts to enter this country legally to seek formal asylum. Some Sanctuary workers helped refugees cross the border illegally and transported them through the country in defiance of U.S. law.
Twenty years and two felony convictions later, John Fife is spoiling for another fight.

According to Fife, political refugees, particularly from Colombia, are still being turned away at American ports of entry by “ignorant, unprepared immigration officials following the immoral and illegal policies of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.”

Furthermore, said Fife, the Border Patrol’s effort to seal the line at major border towns hasn’t reduced illegal immigration of either refugees or economic migrants. “That strategy has deliberately shifted the crossing points to the most dangerous areas of the desert,” he said.
As a result, dozens of illegal border crossers succumb to 115-degree temperatures each summer. In Southern Arizona alone, the death toll last fiscal year was 102; of those deaths, 78 occurred in the Border Patrol’s 271-mile-wide Tucson Sector. Since October, 12 people have died in the Tucson Sector. That’s an improvement since this time last year, when the figure held briefly at 23. Crossings came to a near halt immediately after Sept. 11, and have now resumed.

The most recent Arizona fatality was Arturo Heras Espinoza, 34, a Mexican economic migrant who died from dehydration March 22 — the first day of a weekend-long Sanctuary celebration in Tucson. There, Fife and others called for the borderland faith community to renew its active commitment to refugees.

“There may be a need for another civil initiative to protect these people again,” he said.

By legal standards, the Sanctuary movement failed. In 1985, 11 Sanctuary workers — including Fife, two Catholic priests and three nuns — were indicted on federal charges of smuggling aliens. After a six-month trial, eight of the defendants were convicted on various felony and misdemeanor counts. None went to prison; most were sentenced to probation, with one receiving a suspended sentence.

Yet during the highly publicized trial, the number of Sanctuary churches more than doubled. By 1990, the movement was credited for the government’s decision to stop deporting and begin issuing work permits to Guatemalans and Salvadorans whose asylum applications were under review.

In 1992, following the signing of peace accords in Central America, Fife threw a party at his church and formally declared the Sanctuary movement to be over. But last weekend’s reunion became a revival of sorts, as Sanctuary veterans and new recruits agreed on the need for a fresh, faith-based commitment to refugee work.

Guenet Guebre-Christos, representing the U.S. and Caribbean interests of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told the group that war and political persecution no longer exclusively determine refugee patterns. She said economic, social, cultural and gender-based discrimination are increasing causes of displacement.

Guebre-Christos criticized the United States’ restrictive immigration law of 1996, which allowed INS workers untrained in the asylum process to turn away potentially legitimate asylum seekers at the border. She also decried the strengthened border control measures that cause more asylum seekers to turn to smugglers who take them over dangerous terrain, too often transforming their quest for a safe haven into a death march.

Guebre-Christos urged religious organizations to “spread the word of welcome to asylum seekers in religious services” and educational programs.

She and other participants, including Tucson immigration attorney Lynn Marcus and U.N. attorney Elizabeth Dallam, urged support of two refugee bills making their way through Congress. One, the Refugee Protection Act (HR4074), introduced in the House March 20, would promote alternatives to detention and would loosen rules on asylum applications.

The other, the Senate’s Unaccompanied Child Protection Act (S121), would appoint lawyers and guardians to represent the interests of lone children detained at the border, and would reassign their oversight from the INS to a new Office of Children’s Services in the Justice Department.

Children in administrative detention were a special concern at the gathering. According to attorney Lee Tucker, each year 5,000 children are kept in INS detention for more than 72 hours. About 30 percent of them are held in juvenile jails, where they receive treatment equal to that of juvenile delinquents. Assigned to bare cells, mingling with criminal kids, they are taken to their court appearances (where 80 percent lack legal representation) in prison uniforms and restraints, handcuffed for as long as eight hours. “That’s a humiliating, degrading experience for these kids,” Tucker said.