The Portland Law Collective is seeking a non-attorney member.

Who We Are. The Portland Law Collective, LLP was founded in January 2010 as a collectively-run law firm. We represent organizations, activists, and individuals in civil rights, labor law, and criminal defense cases. For example, we represent individuals subjected to excessive force or other abuses by police and prison authorities. We represent criminal defendants, some arrested for political activity and many not. We bring wage and hour claims on behalf of individual employees. We also represent labor unions and provide a range of advice and assistance to other activist organizations.

The Collective’s core values include:

• expertise and excellence in the service of our clients,
• supporting progressive social movements,
• working in an egalitarian and supportive environment, and
• building a financially stable law practice without letting financial considerations dominate our choice of work.

Our Structure and Compensation. To the greatest extent that is consistent with professional ethical obligations, the Collective applies the principles of consensus and equality to all aspects of our practice, including compensation. We are committed to making sure all members have an equal voice in shaping the organization and to building a culture that is non-hierarchical, sustainable, supportive, and fun.

Job Description. The Collective seeks a new, full-time member to do a variety of non-attorney work. We’re looking for someone with an aptitude and interest in the following work functions:

• Office management including book keeping,
• Preparation of legal documents and correspondence, and
• Discovery and trial preparation.

Qualifications. Dedication to the Collective’s vision and to excellence in legal representation will be key in our choice of a new member. We will also consider qualifications such as:

• Paralegal or office assistant training and experience,
• Office management training and experience,
• Book keeping training or experience
• Activist experience,
• Experience with Collective living or working arrangements,
• Writing and interpersonal communication skills,
• Computer skills (e.g., Word, Excel, QuickBooks, and local area networks), and
• Spanish language skills.

If you are interested in becoming a member of the Portland Law Collective, please send us a resume and a letter describing what you would bring to the Collective and why you are interested in becoming a member. If possible, please also include a writing sample such as legal, professional, activist or academic writing. You should also feel free to provide any other material you think is helpful.

Please send your applications to: hudson @ portlandlawcollective.com or 1130 SW Morrison St., Suite 407, Portland, OR 97205. We are accepting applications now and we will take them on a rolling basis until the position has been filled. So the sooner we know you are interested the better.

You can learn more about us from this website. You might also want to look at the website for the Portland Chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild, of which we are all active members. For a PDF of this job announcement, click here.

In one of the Collective’s medical malpractice cases, the Multnomah County Circuit Court approved a settlement today that provides $2,100,000 to the family of a man who died in prison from medical neglect. Because the decedent was in prison, he couldn’t go to the hospital, and the doctors in prison wouldn’t treat him, so he slowly died from liver failure. Benjamin Haile achieved a settlement in which the decedent’s parents, widow, and children received compensation for their loss of financial support and companionship due to the death.

The decedent was serving a relatively short prison sentence, and his employer testified that his job as a construction working was waiting for him the day he would have been released. Aggressive development of the case by Ben and co-counsel Steven Goldberg included retaining an expert in prison healthcare to explain the medical procedures that prison doctors and nurses failed to follow, a hepatologist to explain how these errors caused the patient’s liver to fail, and an economics expert to explain the financial support he would have been able to provide his family if he had survived. The case is Cruz-Reyes v. State of Oregon, Multnomah County Circuit Court Case No. 1107-09220.

On January 1, 2012, Collective member Ben Haile became the new secretary of the Oregon State Bar’s Federal Pleading and Practice Committee.  This committee coordinates with the Local Rules Committee of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon and as well as judges and judicial staff and other organizations to review and revise the rules of procedure of the U.S. District Court.  The Federal Pleading and Practice Committee also sponsors Continuing Legal Education Seminars about current issues in federal practice.  Oregon senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden on making changes to the process of selecting candidates for judicial appointment.  Ben has been active in all of these projects since he joined the committee in May 2011.  As secretary, he has taken on added responsibilities for coordinating meetings, maintaining the committee’s minutes, and facilitating the work of the committee chairman.

Kenneth won a stellar victory for his client this morning. On appeal, defendant (by and through the Collective) argued that a trial judge had committed error in denying her the right to make a closing argument. Closing argument is an extremely important part of a trial where a defendant and their lawyer finally get to argue their defense. The human rights embodied in our state constitution win again! Check it out here.

Here, when the trial court unequivocally ruled that it would not entertain closing argument and announced its decision, any additional effort to request or offer a closing argument would have been futile. We conclude that defendant was not required to do anything further to preserve her objection to the denial of closing argument. And with the denial of closing argument, defendant had no ability to present the facts in the best light and to attempt to dissuade the trial court from rejecting testimony favorable to defendant, as the trial court indicated it would do based on credibility when it disallowed closing argument. Accordingly, the “trial itself was affected in this case because the court denied one of its required elements[,]” Lovins, 177 Or App at 538, and that denial substantially affected defendant’s rights.

Reversed and remanded.

The Collective, working through the National Lawyers Guild, has been helping Occupy Portland with legal needs ranging from Know Your Rights trainings to defense against criminal charges to advice on possible injunctive relief against the dismantling of their camp.  As Cathy explained at a recent press conference organized by the Working Families Party,

We are deeply excited about Occupy’s exercise of its First Amendment rights.  We believe that the First Amendment protects more than your right to hold up a sign for a while and go home.  The First Amendment protects the right to engage in vigorous, creative, effective dissent.  Creative, effective dissent is a proud American tradition that predates even the First Amendment.  It’s why so many of us have the vote.  It’s why we have weekends.  It ended one era of gross inequities in wealth, and we believe that it can end another.

For Cathy’s full statement click here and go to 12:20.

For the Oregonian’s coverage of Cathy’s support click here.

Cathy recently helped the Oregon Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (OFNHP) negotiate a settlement with Kaiser Permanente that will significantly improve working conditions for respiratory therapists at a local hospital. Respiratory therapists provide treatments to people who are having trouble breathing, so when there’s an emergency with one of their patients, they have to drop everything to respond. Respiratory therapists at Kaiser found that over the years the demands on their time had increased to the point where they often weren’t able to take the breaks they were entitled to under their union contract. They filed a grievance and proceeded to mediation.

Cathy helped OFNHP negotiate a settlement that added the equivalent of four full-time positions to the department. The new positions will improve patient care, make the therapists’ work lives much better, and ensure there is adequate coverage for breaks. The settlement also included $50,000 in back pay for existing employees.

On March 23, 2011, the Collective issued the following press release:

___________________________________________________________________________

Contact: Kenneth A. Kreuscher, Attorney, Portland Law Collective, LLP.  Cellular Telephone: 503-880-5767; Email: Kenneth@portlandlawcollective.com

NEWS RELEASE

For March 24, 2011

Civil Rights Lawsuit Against NORCOR Jail and Guards for Forcefully Swinging a Behind-the-Back Handcuffed Man Face First into a Concrete Wall in an Incident Caught on Video Camera.

(Portland, OR—morning)/(The Dalles, OR—afternoon) – A Portland man will file a federal civil rights lawsuit on March 24, 2011, accusing Northern Oregon Regional Correctional Facilities (NORCOR) in The Dalles, Oregon and NORCOR officials of using excessive force when corrections officers forcefully swung Mr. Chadwick James Yancey face first into a concrete wall, breaking his teeth and jaw.  Yancey was handcuffed behind his back at the time.

Jail officials at first failed to give Yancey dental care despite a doctor’s orders.  However after 5 days of severe pain, and repeated requests for dental care, the jail allowed Yancey to see a dentist. The dentist informed Yancey that at least three of his front teeth were broken or cracked.  During a follow-up dental visit, Yancey learned that his jaw was broken.

Yancey was booked as an inmate at NORCOR on April 9, 2009.  Yancey reports,

“While in jail, I was sitting at a table, handcuffed, talking to the Sergeant.  This big guard interrupted and began to talk trash to me.  He pulled me up and swung me face first into the wall, like I was a baseball bat.  Another guard helped.  Some of my teeth broke and cracked like a mirror.  My neck and shoulder exploded with pain. The guards dragged me off camera and continued to beat me up.  The jail wouldn’t let me see a dentist for days even though I was in extreme pain, and a doctor told them to.

“I’m in pain to this day.  It just isn’t right.  The guards made fun of me, laughing about pieces of my teeth being stuck in the wall.  They told me that they wouldn’t get into any trouble, that they ‘take care of punks like me everyday’ and told me that I was lucky they weren’t charging me for damaging the wall with my teeth.  It was terrible.

“I’m a peaceful person.  I was at NORCOR for a probation issue involving medical marijuana.  I just don’t want them at NORCOR to get away with it or to do it again to others.”

Yancey’s attorneys state that they are aware of other incidents of abuse of restrained inmates at NORCOR but that Yancey’s experience presents a rare case.  “Unfortunately, NORCOR seems to have a problem with abusing restrained inmates,” states civil rights attorney Kenneth A. Kreuscher. “But Mr. Yancey’s case is different.  It presents the rare case where the acts of excessive force are clearly captured on video.  After the initial ‘wall slam’ of Mr. Yancey by two NORCOR deputies, the video depicts the deputies dragging Mr. Yancey off camera, where Mr. Yancey reports that he was abused further.”

NORCOR is a regional jail with a history of misconduct allegations.  In the recent past, NORCOR has been plagued with employee-reported accusations of abuse of restrained inmates, mismanagement, discrimination, and sexual and age harassment of inmates and employees.  Despite a district attorney investigation of the complaints, a NORCOR County Commissioners’ Board investigation, and repeated employee complaints that blamed Captain Larry Lindhorst (the day-to-day jail supervisor) for creating a hostile and dangerous jail environment, Captain Lindhorst has kept his job.

(On the morning of March 24, 2011 at 11am, there will be a press conference on the steps of the Federal Courthouse, 1000 Southwest 3rd Avenue, Portland,OR.

In the afternoon at 4pm, there will be a press conference in front of NORCOR, 211 Webber Street, The Dalles.

Mr. Yancey and his attorneys will provide statements.

Copies of the Lawsuit Complaint will be available at the press conferences;

Video of the incident has been posted on the internet and is viewable by searching Youtube.com for the phrase “STOPCROOKEDCOPS” all one word with no spaces, or Googling “STOPCROOKEDCOPS” all one word with no spaces.

Representatives from the “Fire Frashour Campaign” will also be present with a prepared statement.)

Contact: Kenneth A. Kreuscher, Attorney, Portland Law Collective, LLP.

Cellular Telephone: 503-880-5767; Email: Kenneth@portlandlawcollective.com

_____________________________________________

The full video can be see below

The Portland Law Collective is active in the national and local activities of the National Lawyer Guild.  Recently the Portland Chapter of the Guild (of which the Collective is proud to be a part) sent the City of Portland leadership the following letter on joining the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force:

Dear Mayor Adams and City Council Members-

Recently, the issue of resuming participation in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has been publicly raised. We write today to encourage the City of Portland to maintain its current position and decline participation with the JTTF. The reasons Portland severed ties with JTTF in 2005 remain acute concerns; moreover, recent events cast doubt that a Portland JTTF would be able to adhere to the values of Portlanders, nor allow participating Portland Police to follow state law.

In 2005, Portland took a brave step in withdrawing from the JTTF. As the Council is well aware, the FBI was not willing to allow proper local oversight to ensure that participating police followed State law. ORS 181.575 prohibits the Oregon law enforcement from collecting any information on groups or individuals unless it directly relates to a criminal investigation and there are reasonable grounds that the suspect or group is involved. This problem remains: Portland, its taxpayers, and its residents deserve the requisite oversight. Actions of various JTTF’s since 2005 around the country only amplify this problem. It is worth a brief look at the actions of JTTF offices around the country.

At the 2008 Republican National Convention there was widespread, and well documented, JTTF directed surveillance of lawful and peaceful political protestors. In June 2008, the Minneapolis Newspaper City Pages, discovered that JTTF officers were tasked with infiltrating protest groups in the lead up to the Convention. Indeed, the University of Minnesota Police acknowledged that Sgt. Erik Swanson arranged for meetings between would-be informants and the FBI. Sgt. Swanson was that departments JTTF participant.

In 2005 domestic political espionage surfaced again in Denver, CO. There, a frightening number of documents were obtained by the ACLU exposing routine surveillance of peaceful organizations and individuals. Tactics taken by the local Detective assigned to the JTTF include: following peaceful demonstrators to their vehicles in order to identify them, intercepting emails about political events, and ongoing surveillance of organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee and the Denver Peace and Justice Committee.

Most recently, the homes of political activists were raided on September 24, 2010 in Minneapolis and Chicago. No arrests were made; rather, hundreds of items were seized from their homes including portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and children’s drawings. In the same light, the New York JTTF searched the home of, and arrested, Elliot Madison for operating a twitter feed during the 2009 G-20 Protests in Pennsylvania. His crime: including information to the twitter subscribers relaying dispersal orders the police were issuing, and general movements of police officers throughout the day. Mr. Madison’s subscribers included CNN and the New York Times, whose offices were not raided. Objects seized from his home included Curious George stuffed animals and a needle-point of Lenin made by his grandmother.

Such abuses of lawful, peaceful political activity are reminiscent of a dark era of Portland. As the Portland Tribune reported, the Portland Police’s Intelligence Division waged a decades long surveillance operation on the political activities of Portlanders. When finally unearthed, the secret files numbered some 37 boxes containing over 800 manila file folders. These folders contained intelligence on over 3,000 people and hundreds of organizations.

This is not an era we want to return to. Please continue to refrain from participation in a Joint Terrorism Task Force. We look forward to offering additional comments as this issue continues to be discussed.

Sincerely,

Portland Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild
www.portlandnlg.org

As the Collective announced previously, an attorney with the Portland Law Collective has the honor of representing inmates confined in the Government’s overly restrictive Communications Management Units (CMU) in a case entitled Aref et al. v. Holder et al. The Collective works on the Aref legal team, headed by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In Aref, Plaintiff-inmates and Plaintiff-family members challenge the conditions of confinement and communications restrictions in the CMUs as violating the Plaintiffs’ First Amendment, Due Process, and Equal Protection rights and rights against cruel and unusual punishment.  Plaintiffs also challenge the Government’s arbitrary assignment and location of Plaintiff-inmates into the CMU.  Essentially, the CMU communications restrictions interfere with Plaintiffs’ abilities to maintain healthy relationships with their family members and interfere with Plaintiffs’ abilities to engage in free speech activities.  A healthy relationship with family members is, of course, one of the best indicators that someone who gets out of prison will stay out of prison.  In Aref, Plaintiffs argue that the CMU restrictions are not reasonably related to a legitimate government interest.

Recently, Plaintiffs filed their response brief to the Government’s motion to dismiss the case.  Our preliminary statement provides a good summary:

This case arises from the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOPs’) secret establishment, in 2006 and 2008, of two small and experimental prison units in the Midwest.  These units, known as “Communications Management Units,” or “CMUs,” are explicitly designed to isolate prisoners from the rest of the prison population and the outside world.  Plaintiffs are prisoners with innocuous disciplinary histories and no record of management or communications-related problems.  Yet, they have been indefinitely designated to the CMUs, and there are subjected to communications restrictions that are harsher than those found in supermaximum security confinement.  Plaintiffs have never been told why they were designated to the CMU.  And more importantly still, they have never been given a chance to demonstrate that they do not belong there.  This case presents their first chance to do so.

Rather than address Plaintiffs’ individualized allegations about the deeply troubling circumstances under which they were designated to the CMU, Defendants move to dismiss their claims by relying on broad and alarmist abstractions.  “There have been cases,” they caution, “of imprisoned terrorists communicating with their followers regarding future terrorist activity.”  Motion to Dismiss (“MTD”) at 25.  The BOP, they assert, has a “legitimate penological interest in effectively monitoring the communications of high-risk inmates.”  Id. at 2.

Neither of these statements is controversial, and nowhere do Plaintiffs suggest otherwise.  But in issuing their blanket admonitions, Defendants entirely evade – and attempt to obscure – the nature and substance of Plaintiffs’ actual claims.  As will be explained in the pages that follow, Plaintiffs present no unique security concerns. They are all low- and medium-security prisoners.  They have no history of communications-related infractions that would justify their CMU designations.  They have never been flagged as management problems at other facilities.  Two of them were convicted of crimes entirely unrelated to terrorism.  There are, meanwhile, thousands of “high-risk” and terrorist prisoners within the BOP. Yet Plaintiffs, who are litigious, hold politically unpopular views, or are devout Muslims, were designated to the CMUs.

Defendants, in short, move to dismiss the wrong case.  Plaintiffs do not argue that the government may not monitor the communications of high-risk prisoners consistent with Constitutional principles.  And they do not contest that the BOP has broad discretion in realizing that goal.  Rather, Plaintiffs assert that the draconian communications restrictions to which they are being subjected do not fulfill this purpose.  And Defendants’ conspicuous failure to provide for meaningful explanation or review of CMU placement has resulted in designations not based on security need, but on illicit rationales.  Defendants’ repeated and strained attempts to avoid these troubling allegations result in a motion that never departs from the general, and as a result completely fails to address Plaintiffs’ well-pled and specific allegations.

Read the full response brief here. For more information (and for other substantive legal filings), check out the Center for Constitutional Rights website on Aref.