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“For example,” says John, “a woman comes in and she needs a divorce, and she’s been beat up: Where do we go first? When you have someone walk in with a black eye, who has been assaulted the night before, we drop whatever we are doing and someone will take the case. We walk them over to court and file the petition for an emergency order of protection.”
The next day there is someone new waiting at the door.
The real heavy hitters: Mary John (facing page) and Amanda Cortese work for Hiscock Legal Aid Society, a dedicated group of lawyers who aren’t in the profession to get rich; for them, it’s about helping people. MICHAEL DAVIS PHOTOS
If you’re getting thrown out of your apartment, if your boyfriend has taken to beating you and your children, if you have cancer, if you’re homeless, losing your unemployment benefits, about to have your house foreclosed or you have immigration problems, you might want to have this phone number handy: 422-8191.
For a lot of people dealing with these threats, the call they make is to Hiscock, a not-for-profit law firm that just concluded its 60th year serving the legal needs of the indigent. The entity was founded in 1949 when the family of Frank Hiscock, a former chief judge of the New York state Court of Appeals, bequeathed their home to the Bar Association, for the purpose of creating a legal aid society. Today the agency struggles to keep up with a client base of people from all over the world and from right next door.
“The Hiscock bequest was our startup money,” says Susan Horn, a Syracuse attorney who has served 25 years with the society, the last 20 as its executive director. Today the agency runs on a $3.2 million budget cobbled together from a number of mostly public funding sources. That budget supports 24 staff attorneys and a total staff of 44. The largest chunk of the budget, $2 million, comes from Onondaga County to pay for mandated services, mostly to represent poor people in Family Court.
“Last year that meant just under 2,000 cases,” says Horn, “including issues of abuse and neglect, adoptions, custody and visitation, and paternity cases. The U.S. Constitution requires that counsel be provided in cases where people are unable to afford it, and we are the agency locally that represents adults in Family Court.”
The remainder of the agency’s budget is divided among civil programs dealing mostly with immigration, housing and family issues. “Most of our clients are the working poor,” notes Horn. “About half come from within the city, and the rest from throughout Onondaga County.” To qualify for representation in the county-funded mandated programs, an individual must earn less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level (approximately $27,500 gross income for a family of four). Eligibility requirements vary in the civil programs, and a mortgage foreclosure prevention program is available to any sub-prime mortgage holder in danger of losing their home, regardless of income.
“Our clients in the domestic violence program are mostly women,” says John. “I’ve represented two men in my time here. It’s not just women from Syracuse, but a lot from the outlying areas as well. We represent mostly the working poor, but you would be surprised. Sometimes we find a woman living in a very nice house, but she’s been cut off from all support.”
Justice for All
That was the situation facing Lydia Marushek (not her real name), who came to the United States in 2000 from the former Soviet Union along with her teenage son. She married a man she had met online; he quickly became abusive once she was settled in his Fayetteville home.
Her son Damian (not his real name) is 27 and today he is a successful computer analyst in New York City. “We didn’t know what to do,” says Damian in a telephone interview. “My mother’s husband was yelling all the time, and throwing things, and making death threats. We were going to just leave and go back home.”
Before they could move out, Lydia received a call from Damian’s guidance counselor at Fayetteville-Manlius High School, Carl Pesko, asking why the boy had missed three days of school. Damian eventually told Pesko what was happening, and the counselor put them in touch with Hiscock. “They got us a lawyer and an order of protection,” recalls Damian, “so he had to stay away from us while we were in the house. Then they found us a house to stay in, with the help of a church.”
Immigrants like the Marusheks are particularly vulnerable to domestic violence, says Amanda Cortese, a staff attorney at Hiscock, because they do not have legal status and often do not speak the language. Cortese works with Hiscock’s International Victims Project, which is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to assist victims of domestic violence and human trafficking.
“People in this situation are often afraid to go to the authorities,” says Cortese, a Rome, N.Y., resident and graduate of California Western University School of Law in San Diego. “They are afraid that they will be sent back home. Most typical is the immigrant spouse of a U.S. citizen. This is someone who would be in status {i.e. have legal papers proving their right to be here} but the paperwork has not been filed. The abusive partner uses this as a means of control.”
The other part of her portfolio deals with human trafficking cases. “Most of these involve people who have been brought to the county with the promise of a job,” says Cortese. “In one case a woman who came to me was only allowed to leave her house to go to work, and her paycheck was given to her partner.” Like other victims of human trafficking, she lived virtually as a slave.
The government grant that funds the International Victims Program is up for renewal this year. “With this grant we are now able to represent immigrant and refugee victims of domestic violence in immigration matters as well as civil issues,” adds Cortese, who currently manages a caseload of 30 clients. They must be brave souls, and the ones she meets represent just the tip of the iceberg. In order to come to Cortese’s desk, the victims must have broken free from their captors and gone to the police or other law enforcement agency, something most immigrants are unlikely to do.
In their six decades of existence the Hiscock Legal Aid Society has provided free legal representation for people who need a lawyer but can’t afford one. Up until 2004 they represented people charged with misdemeanors in City Court; today most of their work is in Civil and Family Court. They also represent convicted criminals in the appeals process.
According to New York state statistics, approximately 2,500 residents of Onondaga County are diagnosed with cancer annually. In 2006, Hiscock and Legal Aid Services of CNY formed the Cancer Legal Advocacy and Service Project to help these patients deal with everything from outstanding debts to medical insurance payments to executing a final will and testament.
All in the Family
Susan Griffith has been with the Family Court program since it got up and running in 2004. The 38-year-old Sedgwick resident has worked at Hiscock Legal Aid for nearly 17 years, and is now the supervising attorney for the Family Court program. “Our domestic violence program started in 1998,” says Griffith. “We had a very large federal grant that did not get renewed.”
Mary John is one of three full-time attorneys in the Family Court program. One paralegal assists them in working with domestic violence cases. “It still doesn’t come anywhere near to meeting the needs,” she notes.
New York state, she explains, assigns an attorney in many family law cases. “If you are involved in a child support case, a custody case or an order of protection, you are assigned an attorney,” she says. “When parents are accused by DSS {Department of Social Services} with abuse or neglect, we get involved.”
When working with domestic violence cases, lawyers end up serving as legal counsel, social workers and a shoulder to cry on for countless clients. They work closely with Vera House, Syracuse’s best-known social agency dealing with domestic violence. “We try to take a holistic approach,” says Griffith, “to get them everything they need, whether it’s help with a divorce, or support issues, orders of protection.” A specialized court unit, the Integrated Domestic Violence Court, has been set up to keep needy clients from having to make multiple court appearances.
“For our clients to miss work, that’s money out of their pockets. To lose work for a chance to get an extra $25 per month in child support—they just can’t do it. We see a mix of men and women, all of them indigent. We see people for whom poverty is generational, and people who have held good jobs, but because of the economy now need help. Just the other day I received a call from an attorney looking for help.”
In what would seem like a job ready made for burnout, Hiscock lawyers manage to stick around for a long time. “We have a lot of young attorneys and a lot of people who have been here a long time,” notes Griffith. “We are very lucky to attract people who care. The work is hard, the people are needy, and the concerns are very basic. What keeps us going is the camaraderie. We have meetings every week to talk about cases, and talk about the frustration. It’s a great support system—it keeps the morale up. You have to want to be in this for the right reasons.”
Yet even the most idealistic law school graduates might have a hard time making ends meet on a legal aid salary. Starting salaries are about $38,000 and attorneys who have spent decades at the firm might barely break six figures. Now, $38,000 may seem like a lot if you’re trying to make a living at many local jobs, but with law school debt averaging more than $100,000 per graduate, according to Forbes magazine, it can render altruism unaffordable. A New York state program recently put in place will help pay law school or college loans up to $3,400 per year for recent graduates.
“It’s a tough call,” says Horn, “for an indebted law school graduate to come here and earn less than, say, a starting teacher. But people come here because they are committed.”
Amanda Cortese knows firsthand the sacrifices required to be a lawyer for the poor. With more than $200,000 in law school loans to pay off, the 29-year-old attorney lives with her parents in Rome and commutes to Syracuse in order to make ends meet. She works for a program constantly in danger of losing its funding, but finds it satisfying to stay at Hiscock Legal Aid. “Do I want to give up what I really want to do and go out and make the money?” she asks. “It’s a struggle every day, but here I am working with people for whom these issues affect their daily lives.”
The Legal Aid Society itself has faced tough financial times over the years but none as daunting as right now. The $1.2 million in civil programs is constantly in jeopardy as government programs shrink.
“We’re squeezed on both sides,” admits Horn. "Government doesn’t have the money. The United Way and IOLA {Interest on Lawyers Accounts—a fund distributed by New York state} are squeezed. And in hard time private sources cut back.”
Still the phone keeps on ringing. Last year the number of civil cases handled rose by more than 20 percent, and Family Court cases jumped from 1,800 to more than 2,000. “None of the money is increasing, but the work is,” says John. “We could hire so many attorneys, but we just don’t have the money to do it.”
For more information, visit www.hiscocklegalaid.org.
