Kentucky Spent Hundreds of Millions on Fancy Courthouses Since 1998 While Cutting Legal Services Appropriation to Just $500,000 a Year, Says Civil Justice Leader
Legal Services E-lert

Date of E-Lert – 09/26/08

Bibliographic Info:
Author: J. Warren Keller
Source: Op-ed “Shabby Justice in Judicial Palaces,” Lexington Herald-Leader (KY)
Date: September 22, 2008

J. Warren Keller, a president of the board of directors of the Kentucky Access to Justice Foundation, writes in the Lexington Herald-Leader:  "In the Herald-Leader's series about Kentucky's courthouse construction boom, a quote from Wolfe County Judge-Executive Raymond Hurst caught my attention:  'You have to have a good building to have court in.  The poverty, we'll have to take care of that from another angle, but I think courthouses should be a priority.'  Whether large courthouses are needed in every county and the manner in which they are being built may be issues worthy of honest debate.  But that poverty should be taken care of 'from another angle' is an aspiration, however obliquely acknowledged by Hurst, that has incontrovertibly been given short shrift in our justice system to the detriment of the least fortunate among us facing civil legal challenges without adequate representation.  While more than $880 million has been allocated to build 65 justice centers since 1998, state appropriations for civil legal services for the poor have recently been cut drastically from $1.5 million to the paltry sum of $500,000 annually . . . .  Thus, the doors of all the fine new courthouses are closed for poor people, and the ideal of equal justice under law remains unfulfilled . . . .  This begs for better coordination of our scarce resources through a strong, sustained partnership by all stakeholders in our civil justice system."  

Tags: Feature Story, Funding