Life of the Law

In California, there is one place where people considered to be the most dangerous inmates are incarcerated, it’s called the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. Life of the Law Executive Producer, Nancy Mullane, pushes for access to this prison’s most restricted cells and to the people who are living inside them.

In California, there is one place where people considered to be the most dangerous inmates are incarcerated, it's called the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. Life of the Law Executive Producer, Nancy Mullane, pushes for access to this prison's most restricted cells and to the people who are living inside them.

Vietnamese fishing communities are still finding themselves grounded by the BP oil spill, one of the largest environmental disasters of the century. These fishermen and women are without adequate interpretation services and legal representation and are having a hard time keeping afloat.

  NEW ORLEANS:  There are a lot of languages spoken these days on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, many beyond English, Spanish, and Creole French.  One of the big languages here now is Vietnamese. As refugees started coming to the United States after the Vietnam War, quite a few made their way here for one big reason: fishing. Those immigrants who already knew how to fish found they could make pretty good money in the Gulf. Mini-fishing empires developed. But then disaster struck. Daniel Nguyen is Vietnamese-American, born in Louisiana. “IIt all started April 20, 2010. I remember that day,” Nguyen told The Life of The Law. On that morning, a fireball swallowed a deepwater drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. None of the fail-safe mechanisms worked, and the well began vomiting thousands of gallons of oil in what would become the largest oil spill  in U.S. History. Nguyen described how he got involved with relief efforts. “At that time, I was still bussing tables downtown, and a friend of mine came to eat at the restaurant that worked here and said “look, the fisher folk are displaced....we need interpreters. So, I said ‘OK, I'd be willing to volunteer my time.’” The Vietnamese fisher folk had largely been self-reliant. But self-reliance wasn’t enough as the BP disaster tossed them into a foreign world—that of the US legal system. A complex claims system was the only way they could get compensation for all the income they were losing as fishing shut down in the Gulf. Vietnamese immigrants made up roughly a third of the shrimpers here, and shrimpers were hard hit. For them, the spill illustrated how fragile their solid livelihoods really were.  And Nguyen says, it showed how much the outside world didn’t know how to communicate with them. “BP had people coming in from Vietnam who were using the wrong dialect, offiensive dialects. There's post and pre-1975 language. With post-1975 language, you have a split, you have American-based Vietnamese and you Vietnamese-based Vietnamese, and that's considered Communist Vietnamese, so they were using Communist terminology, which was really offensive to people here, who fled from the Communist regime.” Nguyen says the Vietnamese community in Louisiana started getting organized after Hurricane Katrina.  But the community development organization where he volunteered, MQVN,  had a whole new set of problems on its hands after the BP disaster  ”We had 50-100 fisher folks lined up outside of our office starting at midnight.” Daniel and his colleagues were helping people file compensation claims with the Gulf Coast Claims Facility.  In the process, they found out that those in the fishing community weren’t just losing income—they were losing their own food supplies as well. Vietnamese fishermen relied on their catch to feed their families, and to barter for other goods and services. But he compensation process was aimed more at purely commercial fishermen. Nguyen explained that important elements of the industry were ignored. “One of the things that wasn't being compensated for was subsistence use.” Leanne Hanh sells her catch at a New Orleans farmers market on weekends. She was born in Vietnam and came to the U.Sin 1983, when she was 13. She came to Louisiana when she married. Her boat and her husband’s were grounded after the oil spill, but BP had promised to rent local fishing boats during the cleanup. Hahn says for her, that never happened. “I do own a boat, too. And it's go now, too, but then they didn't call me to work, and we had to wait. Because everybody signed a contract, so we all have to wait to hear the phone call, sit at home to wait for the phone call.” But fruitless waiting  or bad interpreters weren't the biggest problems facing the Vietnamese fishing community in Louisiana. “After the oil spill there was a lot of people who um, felt that they were signed up for legal representation without fully knowing it,

I live on the bank of the Deschutes River. In this stretch of about a block, the river divides two distinct sides of our city, the east and the west. The riverbank is a public space open for everyone. But people do not always agree on how to best spend a hot summer day. Davis Park is on the East side of the river. It has the perfect combination of shade and privacy for people to hang out, let loose. Teenagers used to come here to make-out, or drink some beers. Now, on hot days, it’s where many go to cool off, including the ‘down-and-out.’ On the West side of the river, where I live, things like birding, jogging, and swimming are the norm. It is a different kind of park over here. I am riding along with Officer Marc Tisher as he patrols his beat of more than 50 city parks. We stop at an intersection and I see two tanned guys chilling at a bus stop. Tisher rolls his window down and gets their attention. I recognize the men. For the past two summers, these two have often made Davis Park their daytime home. In a way, they have come to represent the character of the park. “You guys been keeping Davis Park clean for me?” Officer Tisher asks them. “Yeah,” Matt, one of the men answers in an upbeat, friendly voice, “We’re going to the rapids. So meet us down there.” Tisher laughs and says, “Alright. Are you guys going to body surf it today?” Matt replies, “It’s eighty, I might get wet.” It’s a light hearted moment of laughter on a hot summer day. For years though, Davis Park’s shenanigans went un-policed, so Davis Park has become the place, which all cities and towns have, where local customs are at odds with city laws. But about a year ago, the parks department proposed building a bridge between the two sides. That got people’s attention on my block. Paul Stell is the Natural Resources Manager for the Bend Parks and Recreation District. He says they’ve tried most everything to enforce local laws and regulations in city parks. The Parks Department even got rid of the park rangers, “Because they did not have full authority,” Stell says, “because they couldn’t make citations or arrest or you know, carry a fire-arm and take care of business.” Now there’s a parks cop. That’s who you met earlier, Officer Tisher. The increased law enforcement, Stell says, is necessary because city parks still serve a critical function. “On a hot summer day it’s a great place for anybody. They can be there from when the park opens ‘til the park close. And if they don’t have any other place to be that’s a good place to be but there are rules and we need to follow the rules. That’s the only issue.” Here in Bend the rules are basic; no criminal activity, no endangering the peace and safety of others, no drinking alcohol or possessing an open container without a proper permit. If people can agree to this, Stell says, those living close to city parks have an obligation to “let it be” for the entire public. “Living next to a park is a commitment,” Stell says, laughing. Stell does not finish his thought. But I know what he means. Residents have no control over public land bordering their property. And there is a steady flow of different people and habits. On my block, some homeowners, want to project their idea of how the other side of the river should be. People on the West side engage the police like my neighbor, who I’ll call Sam. She didn’t want her real name used. “You know, we tried to figure out how to solve this problem.” I ask, “What problem?” “The problem,” Sam says, “of unhealthy and unsafe behavior dominating a small community park.” Sam says a group of men show up around ten each morning in Davis Park.  They claim a picnic table and spend all day there, drinking and smoking. “And that would happen every sunny day,” Sam says. “Two people would come and secure that picnic table. The hotter it was, the earlier they’d come. So that they’d make sure they had it for the whole day.”

Sometimes what’s considered as socially acceptable behavior can also be technically unlawful. Reporter Jason Albert follows one city as it grapples with how to enforce laws in a public park without unnecessarily restricting public use

In California, there are hundreds if not thousands of people practicing criminal law though they’ve never passed a bar exam. They don’t wear suits. They don’t have secretaries. And they can’t bill for their time. They’re called Jailhouse Lawyers. They’re inmates who pursue the equivalent of a lawyer’s education and who work as lawyers from within prison walls. “As a non lawyer, you cannot pretend to be a lawyer for somebody else,” said Charles Carbonne, a prisoners rights attorney based in San Francisco. “If you’re a free citizen, you got to go to law school, pass the bar if you wanna pretend to be a lawyer. Except if you’re in prison. Jailhouse lawyers usually begin by investigating their own cases. That’s usually how most jailhouse lawyers cut their teeth. They dig into their case, usually reading volumes of cases, criminal cases” Carbonne is one of the few lawyers outside of prison who will represent people behind bars pro bono or for free after they’ve been convicted. “It is a professional and personal interest of mine. I take it very seriously in terms of the quality of representation that I provide.” Carbonne explains that in America, once you’ve been tried, convicted and sentenced to prison, at that point, you lose your right to an attorney who is provided by and paid for by the state. If you’re on death row, the state will still pay for an attorney to represent you for an appeal. But if you’re not on death row and you want to challenge your sentence, you have to come up with the money yourself to hire a private attorney. “There are very few lawyers or firms that provide pro bono parole appeal representation,” Carbonne says, sitting in his second floor, bare brick office, “very, very few. You can count them on one hand. The number of cases brought every year by a pro bono attorney or firm. It’s very difficult if not impossible.” So, Carbonne adds, short of turning to people like him, prisoners have to teach themselves the law. And, he says, many do. Reuben Ruiz Martinez is serving time at Pelican Bay, a “supermax prison” in the far north of California. I have to get through eleven locked doors and sally ports just to interview him. Ruiz’s cell is about 6’ x 9’. There’s a fixed cement pad for a bed and it looks like it’s full of papers and books, at least from what I can see of it. Walking up to his cell door, I introduce myself and explain to Ruiz that it is difficult to see him looking through the rust colored sheet of metal covering his cell door. Martinez is a middle-aged man with military style cropped hair, deep set brown eyes and a full, gentle mouth.  “I had no idea a legal world existed. I didn’t even know the law that I was charged with and convicted of. I was 17. I just turned 17 and I went into a liquor story to buy some beer. I was a kid. I thought, ‘Hey. We can get away with it,' from that moment on.” Today, Martinez says he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, “It was a fight in a liquor store. We didn’t see no clerks around and we were going to try to run out with the beer, which you’ve probably heard as a beer run. In our attempt to do so we were confronted by the clerks of the store. They physically confronted us. We didn’t have no weapons. One of them had a baseball bat. Hit us with the baseball bat and in that fight, we took the bat and one of them subsequently got hit in the head with the bat and later died. Cause of death was a blow to the head.” Martinez was convicted of felony murder. That’s when you’re out with someone and you commit a felony together. If anyone dies or is murdered, then you are responsible for that murder, even if you didn’t actually commit it. “I had no concept of what felony murder was,” Martinez says, “Self defense is not a defense against the felony murder rule. Under normal circumstances, it was a much better likelihood I would have been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, and [I would have] done four to six years.”

In California, there are hundreds if not thousands of people practicing criminal law though they’ve never passed a bar exam. They don’t wear suits. They don’t have secretaries. And they can’t bill for their time. They’re called Jailhouse Lawyers. They’re inmates who pursue the equivalent of a lawyer’s education and who work as lawyers from within prison walls.

Paul Butler grew up in a black neighborhood on the Southside of Chicago. He was a smart, talented kid and ended up going to Harvard law school. When he graduated, he wanted to do something to give back to his community. Crime was at an all time high an...

Though jurors are sworn to uphold the law during their deliberation, they still have the power to decide that a defendant is innocent even when all signs point to their guilt. Prosecutor Paul Butler traces the ways this hidden process was a boon for abolitionists in the 1800’s, and a curse to contemporary prosecutors arguing for a guilty verdict.