Cloud Over State Bar’s Legal Aid Fund Lifted

A legal challenge to a trail-blazing, $12-million California State Bar program that uses interest from client trust funds to finance legal aid to the poor was rejected Monday by the Supreme Court.

The justices, in a brief order, refused to hear claims that the program--one of many instituted recently to support legal aid operations across the country--represented an unconstitutional taking of clients’ private property.

LeRoy Cordova, director of the State Bar’s Legal Services Trust Fund program, welcomed the action.

“This removes the last lingering legal cloud over this program,” he said.

The California program is one of dozens instituted by state bar groups and other officials in the wake of cutbacks in federal legal services programs. Under the concept, called interest on lawyer trust accounts, attorneys take otherwise idle funds that they hold for clients and pool them in an interest-bearing account.

Held Briefly

Individually, such funds--held temporarily for court filing fees, real estate closings and other transactions--are too small or held too briefly to earn interest. Collectively, however, they can earn substantial sums.

In all, 35 states and the District of Columbia have instituted such programs, and California is among four states that make participation by attorneys mandatory. California began distributing funds to legal aid groups earlier this year for use in civil, non-fee cases. By the end of the year, about $12 million will have been distributed, Cordova said.

A group of San Diego lawyers challenged the State Bar program on the grounds that it required using clients’ funds without their approval. Last December, however, a state Court of Appeal in San Diego upheld the program, finding that clients suffered “no real economic loss,” because the system affected only nominal funds held for a relatively short time.

The state Supreme Court left that ruling intact last May (Chapman vs. State Bar, 85-169).

In another action Monday, the justices let stand a ruling by the state Court of Appeal in San Francisco that upheld the warrantless, nighttime arrest at her home of a San Rafael woman suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol, a misdemeanor.

According to court records, the woman, Sherry Stephanie Hampton, first was detained by an officer as she was driving two blocks from her home at 4:30 a.m. He confiscated her car keys, drove her home in the patrol car and said he would bring her keys to her later in the day.

Later, however, the officer saw that the car had disappeared and, suspecting that the woman had used another key to drive it away, he went to her home, where he found the car parked. He went to the door and, when Hampton answered, entered the residence and arrested her for driving under the influence of alcohol.

Hampton challenged the validity of the arrest, but the Court of Appeal upheld the action as necessary to prevent danger to life or damage to property.

In an appeal to the Supreme Court, Hampton said the arrest was an “awesome incursion” on her rights and could lead to similar actions in other states.

The justices refused to hear the case in a brief order (Hampton vs. California, 84-1950).