7 Things You Only Find Out as a Lawyer to the Poor

Have you ever heard of sovereign citizens? In brief, they're a bunch of people who believe the federal government has tricked everyone into following a set of false laws, and you can beat the government if you utter the right words. They think the law works like Harry Potter, where the right incantation makes you invisible to the IRS.

For example, here's the kind of flag you can expect to see in a court room:

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Sovereign citizens argue that the gold fringe makes it an admiralty flag, and thus none of your sea-laws work on me, judge! Also, sometimes these people kill cops. And by "sometimes," I mean "frequently":

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They take poor grammar and bad use of language and turn it into a legal theory. I've heard these people insist, "No, I don't have to pay child support, that's an obligation of my corporate surrogate." See, they believe the way your name is printed on legal documents refers to a fake version of you the government cooked up to make money somehow. Also, that the IRS is fake and you don't actually have to pay them. One of the guys was in deep trouble for acting on that belief. He was completely convinced he didn't owe a dime. This was all premised on the idea that Ohio hadn't been properly admitted into the Union. So, since he didn't live in a real state, the IRS couldn't touch him. "Due to a technicality, Ohio is basically Mad Max -- laws do not apply here!"

That man is now in prison for tax evasion. These are the types of people you will likely meet at some point in this job.

The Legal Services Corporation is a massive nonprofit set up by the federal government to administer all legal aid funding. Our funding is stretched incredibly thin -- we literally turn down one person for every person we help. There's an office in the LSC called the inspector general, whose job is to monitor legal service programs that might be breaking the rules. Because of political fuckery, a lot of those rules prohibit things like having any sort of political opinion. Like this federal investigation conducted because somebody took a vacation day to go protest. Their program fired that employee -- for protesting on their own time -- rather than risk an investigation that could cost them their funding.

Our funding has either stayed stagnant or been cut over the past 20 years, yet the inspector general's funding has increased. So now the office assigned to find trouble in the program is better funded than the program itself. Can you guess how much trouble they find?

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There's a reason I'm writing this anonymously. Even complaining about the LSC can be a violation of the rules, and I have been informed that they take that seriously. They run search algorithms with employee names routinely. If my name was attached to this, my 11 bosses would bounce me out if they even got a whiff of an investigation. They'd strap goat horns to me and string me up outside like that lady in King Kong.

Every day you hear stories like, "My ex-husband beat me so bad I need reconstructive surgery." Hardly anybody walks in saying, "My life is awesome and I need a free lawyer to help me high-five panda bears all day." They come to you on the worst day of their life. You deal with that day in and day out. And you have to compartmentalize. One box for the part of you that tells some weeping mother the best you can do is get her visitation rights, and another box that's capable of empathizing with a friend who just had their car towed. There's a risk of taking that too far, and eventually you wind up falling into the Fucks Donation Box, which is tragically empty.

There's really not a cure for it. Some folks go to therapy and get a Prozac prescription. A lot of folks self-medicate, hence lawyers on the whole have double the rate of alcoholism and drug addiction as the general populace. That self-medication doesn't always work, which is why lawyers are the fourth-most-likely profession to commit suicide. Other people just snap out of their fatigue one day and get right on with their lives. That's what happened to me -- I'm a lucky guy, though, and high-fiving those pandas really helped.

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Sometimes we plea that down to just disorderly conduct, because the prosecutor cares only about his record. Now you have a disorderly conduct charge. You got knocked down, but you got up again -- and now you know better than to do that second thing.

This turns into a form of moral algebra -- arguably the worst kind of algebra, which I realize is like saying shower farts are the worst kind of farts. Say that Person A has a legal problem. With X hours of work, we can moderate Person A's problem to a point where it is survivable. Call that Point S. If we double X -- the man hours we put into the case -- we can improve A's return to S plus one. Is that extra time worth it, for such a minimal gain? I would love to say that we are always able to put in that time, but we have new clients coming in constantly and a finite amount of resources. Sometimes you just have to deal with the aerosolized shower fart of life.

Here's how it works in reality: lawyers donate free services, true -- but to the people and organizations that benefit them. It's not at all uncommon for big-name attorneys and firms to work pro bono with a city's symphony. I'm sure the musicians appreciate it, but the lawyers also get the benefit of free advertising and schmoozing with the sort of people who fund and attend symphonies. Generally not the barter-with-pre-packaged-noodles crowd. Other lawyers provide free aid to banks, while the people too poor to technically qualify for a bank account go completely unrepresented.

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The "justice gap" has become wide enough that for every one legal aid lawyer there are more than 6,000 poor people who need their services. Most of my clients are elderly people on fixed incomes or the disabled. And those people surely need help, but so do single moms and dads. The trouble is, single parents working two jobs to barely scrape by still have income too high (they're rolling in over $1,100 a month!) to qualify for free services. So you're poor enough to need a free lawyer but make too much to qualify for one. Maybe try selling off that solid gold yacht, family surviving on $14,000 a year.

Here's a brief, woefully incomplete list of the things I can't help people with: access to abortion services, school desegregation, any sort of a voting-rights case, any labor group trying to organize, and moving your couch this Sunday (that last one's just a personal preference).

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Oh, and we can't do class action lawsuits, either. That's right! No taking part in class action suits whatsoever. So, say a company's eviction process violates federal law, and several thousand people are affected. Normally, that'd be a class action lawsuit -- everyone merges into one giant legal Voltron, sues together, and hits the company hard enough that they actually suffer a consequence. But these are poor people, hence the eviction thing. And the only lawyers they can afford are free. So I have to sue on each client's behalf, one at a time, litigating the same case over and over again. Now, rather than one big lawsuit that takes 12 months, I spend three years grinding the legal system like an RPG.

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So how did we get to this point? Well, back in 1995 the American Farm Bureau Federation was sick of poor immigrant laborers suing farmers for silly things like "not paying them." The Christian Coalition didn't like us for, in their words, "subsidizing divorce and illegitimacy." Congressional Republicans also opposed us, and in 1996 they cut the LSC's budget by a third, then added in all those restrictions I mentioned above. And that's why we are where we are now: helping some of the people a little bit, but legally unable to help most of the people who need us.

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I suppose it's not terribly surprising that the government binds the poor up in so much red tape it's like a Christmas-themed bondage porn, but maybe it's a little shocking just how graphic the fucking really gets.

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Robert Evans runs the Cracked Personal Experience team, and he also has a Twitter.

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Ways America's Justice System is Designed to Screw You and 5 Things I Learned as a Cop (That Movies Won't Show You).

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Check out Robert Evans' A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization, a celebration of the brave, drunken pioneers who built our civilization one seemingly bad decision at a time.