Mother Jones - The failings of America’s criminal justice system are common knowledge, but our civil legal system, which affects even more people, is no less compromised—and there’s no civil equivalent to the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel in criminal cases. A 2022 report from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), a nonprofit that Congress established during the 1970s to fund free civil legal aid for the poor, notes that “low-income Americans do not get any or enough legal help for 92 percent of their substantial civil legal problems.”
More than 70 percent of low-income families encounter at least one such issue a year, the LSC reports. As in Ray’s case, these are often true emergencies—domestic violence, eviction, predatory debt collection—with life-altering stakes. A 2018 study found, for example, that tenants facing eviction in the Minneapolis area were four to five times more likely to be forcibly removed from their home if they lacked legal representation. But lawyers charge around $300 an hour on average, putting their services out of reach for even much of the middle class.
State legal aid organizations, meanwhile, are independent nonprofits and, despite some government support, are badly underfunded. In Mitchell-Mercer’s home state, there is only one Legal Aid attorney for every 8,000 eligible people—those with annual household income of no more than $39,000 for a family of four (125 percent of the federal poverty level). The National Center for Access to Justice ranked North Carolina the third-worst state for access to civil attorneys—only Mississippi and South Dakota scored lower. About half of its counties are legal deserts, with fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents. More
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