LAWRENCE, Mass. -- Isabel Miranda got sick of watching roaches and mice scurry around her apartment with impunity so she called the building inspector. Two weeks later, the 28-year-old mother of four got an eviction notice from her landlord.
"I figured, well, if he's evicting me I got to go," Miranda thought, before a friend directed her to Neighborhood Legal Services, where she dropped in on a clinic and discovered she had options. Days later Miranda was in Lawrence District Court armed with documents and a lawyer.
She was among the lucky ones.
Soon, Miranda and 20,000 low-income residents of Massachusetts will lose their free legal help at a time when demand is growing. The funds from interest-bearing accounts for client deposits are drying up, forcing legal aid groups not only in Massachusetts, but Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia to cut back on the number of residents who receive free legal services.
The Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corp., the state's largest funding source for civil legal aid, recently announced it is cutting aid grants by nearly 40 percent as its funding dropped from $22 million last fiscal year to $13.5 million this year.
State law requires all lawyers and law firms to establish interest-bearing accounts, and pooled interest from those accounts are used to fund civil legal services for low-income residents -- whose earnings fall 125 percent below the federal poverty level, now $17,600 for a family of three. As a result of the economic downturn, the agency is expecting a 54 percent drop in the income it receives from those accounts.
That means legal aid groups that already turn away more people than they can help will have to decide which battered woman, which evicted family fighting foreclosure or which worker seeking back pay will have to go without legal assistance.
And there are few, if any, other alternatives since law firms in northern Massachusetts have mostly reached the limit of their pro bono responsibilities.
Lonnie Powers, executive director of the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corp., said their interest-bearing accounts are suffering because of lowered federal interest rates and a dire housing market.
"And that's despite the fact we were already turning away half of the people who were eligible to receive services and who came to us for help," Powers said. About 110,000 clients received free legal services last year, the group said.
John Murphy, a 43-year-old from Salisbury, said without legal aid, he'd probably be fighting his tenant case himself because he can't afford a lawyer. "And I'm not really good at vocalizing for myself," he said.
An unemployed plumber and a single father of a 9-year-old daughter, Murphy was fighting his landlord to fix a gas leak in his apartment. The gas leak, he believes, was responsible for getting his daughter sick with headaches.
It's unclear just how long legal aid groups will have to deal with cuts in funding. Since the accounts are tied to the economy, it may take months -- maybe years -- before legal aid groups recover some of the lost funds, Powers said.
Robert A. Sable, executive director of Greater Boston Legal Services, said his group is expecting to see a 13.5 percent reduction in funding. "With a cut of this magnitude, we'll probably serve 2,000 fewer people than we do now," he said. "There is almost no other place to refer people."
Sheila Casey, executive director of Neighborhood Legal Services in Lawrence and Lynn, said she's expecting a 29 percent drop and now won't be able to fill an open attorney position. "It will be hard to make up all of that shortfall without some impact on our staff," she said.
Legal aid groups in Connecticut, Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia also are expecting deep declines in legal aid to low-income residents and say they, too, are looking at hiring freezes, reduced work schedules and possible attorney layoffs.
New Haven Legal Assistance in Connecticut is planning to drop eight of its 32 employees. Sandy Klebanoff, executive director of the Connecticut Bar Foundation, said state funding is expected to dip to just $4 million in 2009 compared with $20 million in 2007 and $8 million this year.
"It's a crisis," she said. "I've never seen anything like this."
Funding cuts couldn't have come at a worse time for Texas, where legal aid groups have been busy representing Hurricane Ike victims. They expect to have $7 million next year, down from $20 million in 2007.
"Nobody knows when this is going to end, maybe in two to five years," said Betty Balli Torres, executive director of the Texas Access to Justice Foundation.
That spells trouble for residents in poor cities like Lawrence, a working-class enclave of 72,000 bordering the New Hampshire border. The city, where about 70 percent of residents are Latino, has the highest foreclosure rate in Massachusetts. A large number of those residents fighting foreclosures, Casey said, is what legal aid groups call "innocent victims" -- renters who keep paying rent to landlords even though the landlords fail to tell renters the bank has foreclosed on the property.
It happened to Juan and Isabel Muneton, whose bank recently gave them notice that they had a month to move out of their apartment because of a foreclosure, even though their landlord never informed them.
For now, though, the couple, both 62, are represented by a lawyer from Casey's office and they remain in the apartment. But if the case drags, Isabel Muneton worries they and others like them will be on their own.
"Everything is so confusing," Muneton said in Spanish. "We don't know why this is happening."
(Copyright (c) 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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