Prisoners' Legal Education and Advocacy Project (PLEA)

The Prisoners' Education and Advocacy Project is Penn Law's  central organization for criminal justice related pro bono work.  The Project is an umbrella for several different component projects, including:

The Prisoners' Legal Education Program

Each week, several Penn Law students volunteer to teach legal education courses in four Philadelphia prisons.  Students have taught courses such as Criminal Law, Evidence, Criminal Procedure, Mental Health Law, and Employment Law. It’s a mutually beneficial activity: Penn Law students are able to solidify their knowledge as they prepare lesson plans, and the inmates are exposed to a new way of thinking and a new wealth of legal knowledge. Students teach in groups, with an upperclassman serving as the team leader and assigning roles for each group member.  Our teaching curriculum is advised by Penn Law Professors and approved by the Philadelphia Prison System.

The Pardon Me Clinic

The Pardon Me Clinic is an excellent opportunity for law students to provide clients with much-needed direct services while requiring a minimal time commitment.  In the Clinic, students assist individuals who are seeking pardons from the office of the Governor of Pennsylvania.  The pardon application process, while complicated, offers an opportunity to overcome the ongoing challenges and stigma that accompany a criminal record.  Students help applicants to understand the basic guidelines of the process and to aid them in completing their applications.  The Clinic meets once a month for two hours.

The Expungement Clinic

The Expungement Clinic is organized in conjunction with the National Lawyers Guild to provide individuals with free assistance in obtaining expungements.  Expungements are needed in order to remove records of arrests that did notlead to conviction from a person’s criminal record in Pennsylvania.  That means that anyone who was tried for a crime and found not guilty, or even had the charges dropped immediately after arrest, still has these charges listed on his or her criminal record unless the charges are expunged. Expungement is particularly important in the modern employment context because employers can easily obtain this information through criminal background checks, and a non-conviction arrest can mean the difference between getting a job and not getting one in today’s economy.  The clinic meets four times per month for three hours, but volunteers can participate in as few as one clinic each month.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project is a non-profit, public policy organization located at Temple Law School and is comprised of lawyers and law students working to exonerate wrongfully convicted persons through DNA testing and a general reform of the criminal justice system. Students can review case files and other crucial documents to determine whether convicted individuals have a legitimate claim of factual innocence.

The Defender Client Interviewing Project

Students in this program volunteer to conducting client intake interviews at the Defenders Association of Philadelphia.  The project is unique in that it gives students an opportunity to interact directly with clients on a one-on-one basis.  Most of the interviews are conducted to open files for the public defenders office on charged individuals - students take down the client's account of his/her arrest and any alibi story and also open investigation requests if necessary.  Participants dedicate 4 hours per week interviewing clients.

"Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behavior, social isolation, depression and problems in school -- all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood."

-- Erik Eckholm, In Prisoners' Wake, a Tide of Troubled Kids, N.Y. Times, July 4, 2000, available at www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/us/05prison.html.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project, based at Temple University's Law School, opened on April 6, 2009. It will review petitions submitted by inmates from across Pennsylvania who claim they are serving sentences for crimes they did not commit. The Project will start at Temple with approximately a dozen lawyers and a dozen law students, and will eventually expand to involve law and journalism schools state-wide.

Unlike some others, the Project will not limit itself to cases in which biological evidence exists for DNA testing, but will also look at cases in which questionable forensic evidence or other investigatory issues are identified. The Project also seeks to reform the criminal justice system by fixing systemic flaws that allow such miscarriages of justice.

For more information, see: www.innocenceprojectpa.org/

Inmates Sue Governor Rendell Over Parole Moratorium

Civil rights lawyers Leonard Sosnov and David Rudovsky have filed suit on behalf of four state inmates whose paroles were cancelled at the last minute by Governor Rendell's September 2008 state-wide moratorium on parole.

Although the corrections department is part of the executive branch, the state parole board is an independent agency. "If the governor is displeased with the performance of parole board members in making decisions of whether to parole or reparole," the lawsuit reads, "his only statutory authority is to remove a member with the advice and consent of two-thirds of the Senate, or to suspend that member for cause while the Senate is adjourned."

For more information, see: www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/20081021_Inmates_sue_Rendell_over_parole_moratorium.html

Governor Rendell Freezes Parole in Pennsylvania

On September 29, 2008, Governor Ed Rendell froze parole state-wide in reaction to the September 23, 2008 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Patrick McDonald by a paroled felon. Rendell then named John Goldkamp, head of Temple University's criminal justice department, to conduct a top-to-bottom review of how the Board of Probation and Parole decides who gets paroled.

Although Goldkamp's review will presumably be expedited, Rendell did not set a deadline. That fact drew immediate criticism from prisoner advocates who say the state prison system is overcrowded and depends on the monthly release of about 1,100 parolees to safely operate.

The September 30th census of the state's prisons tallied an inmate population of 46,883 - 8 percent above what prison officials say is appropriate to maintain "quality of life and safety for both staff and inmates." Since then, according to the Pennsylvania Prison Society, the prison population has swelled to 17 percent above capacity.

For more information, see: abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story