U.S. Probes Legal Aid Firm’s Role in Abortion Cases

Federal officials on Monday began an investigation into whether California Rural Legal Assistance violated a ban prohibiting federally funded law firms from using public funds in abortion cases.

Jose Padilla, director of CRLA, said the investigation is retaliation for its challenge of Gov. George Deukmejian’s attempt to slash $24 million from the state’s family planning clinics.

Deukmejian, bowing to pressure from fellow Republicans, allowed a $20-million family planning bill to become law without his signature last week, putting an end to what had been an embarrassing political issue for the governor.

“This is clearly a case of political harassment,” Padilla said. “They should be praising us for ensuring that poor women are now able to get health care, not investigating us and threatening to reduce our funding.”

Four investigators for the federal Legal Services Corp. began questioning attorneys at CRLA headquarters in San Francisco and reviewing documents Monday, Padilla said.

Terrance Wear, president of the Legal Services Corp., said the investigators are simply trying to determine whether CRLA twice violated the federal regulations.

In the most recent case, CRLA filed suit against the state to restore state family planning funds that Deukmejian had slashed last year in a budget veto. The case particularly rankled the governor because the suit was successful in the lower courts, and had been under appeal.

Early last year, Deukmejian had expressed concern that the clinics were promoting abortion. But, said Joel Diringer, a CRLA attorney who filed the suit against the state, the clinics are prohibited by law from providing or promoting abortions.

The 500 clinics throughout the state provide a wide array of services, including birth control services, Pap smears to detect cervical cancer, breast exams and tests for sexually transmited diseases and the AIDS virus.

Wear said he decided to send a team to investigate CRLA after he saw a newspaper article about the law firm’s suit against the state. The article, he said, led him to believe “the clinics were giving advice on abortion.”

“I asked our people to check up on it,” Wear said. “This is a routine type of thing.”

The second case federal investigators are looking into involves a lawsuit, filed in 1979, in which CRLA joined five other public interest law firms in a suit to maintain Medi-Cal funding for abortions.

The case was decided in 1981, but CRLA has continued to fight for abortion funding in state legislative battles. Padilla said the lawsuit and other legal work on the issue did not violate federal law because CRLA paid the lawyers involved with funds provided by the State Bar of California, not public funds.

Wear said CRLA was being investigated now because federal investigators just learned of the situation.

“I suspect,” Wear said, “if we had known about it earlier, we would have investigated it earlier.”

Legal Services Corp. is a private, nonprofit organization established by Congress in 1974 to provide legal help to low-income people. The President appoints its 11-member board, which names its own chairman.

CRLA, which has 15 field offices throughout the state, employs 50 attorneys, and receives 80% of its funding from Legal Services Corp.