Happy Holidays!

The following is from my annual holiday update to my friends.

A blue postcard says “Happy Holidays” in the center with white snowflake stars. This image is from this e-card link.

I dreaded writing this year’s update. Although I was appointed as co-chair for the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois’ Attorneys with Disabilities Committee and a member of the Statewide Independent Living Council of Illinois (SILC), I haven’t been as productive as I would like to have been this year. I’m so used to doing everything at 90 mph that my slower pace is hard for me to get used to.

Another SILC member I just met worked at the University of Illinois when I was a freshman. When I asked her why we never met before this year, she replied that she saw me but she could never catch me because I was too fast. So perhaps there are benefits to living a slower pace. Please forgive me if I was going too fast to be there for you. I’m definitely here now if you need me.

Last December, I was just ending my pro bono work with the Legal Council for Health Justice, or the organization formerly known as Aids Legal Council of Chicago, which was a fantastic six months of hands on experience with Social Security matters directly from the Executive Director. I was enthusiastic to launch my own law practice, the Disability Law Collective, with the assistance from my legal incubator program. I soon realized that successful self-employment requires more than shared office space, particularly as a person with a disability. I did get my first case through Access Living and am eager to grow my practice.

I see improving independence and employment for myself and others with disabilities as the reoccurring theme of my work and my ultimate life goal. Able Community is the non-profit housing cooperative for people with and without disabilities that I have been working on with a fantastic group of people, who all happen to have disabilities and are all graduates from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Our Able Community members are working towards improving independence for people with disabilities, personal assistants, and their families.

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Able Community is not having a fundraiser this year because we are working on our 501(c)3 incorporation; we are extremely close to filing the application. I realize that I’ve been saying this for a while, but we have just submitted our materials to our non-profit pro bono attorneys and our next step is filing the application. We will have more fundraisers once we file for our 501(c)3 status, so we can provide tax deductions. If you still want to donate to Able Community anyway, we would of course gratefully accept your generosity; here is a link to our PayPal info on the bottom of this hyperlinked page. We are incredibly grateful for everything our supporters have done for us already.

(In case you missed it, above is our fundraiser video from last year. It explains what Able Community is and who the members are better.)

I consider myself so blessed to be back home in Illinois, near the city I love and to be closer to the other Able Community members. As someone who pursued a legal career to practice civil rights and fight racial injustices, I am appalled by the recent police brutality incidents. I am conscious that the systematic violence and racial inequalities deeply rooted in our nation’s history call for even greater collective systematic change at the city and national level. I have also come to realize that the everyday injustices are just as important to advocate for as the systematic ones and I hope that my law practice, the Disability Law Collective, will meet the everyday legal needs of the disability community.

(A sneak preview of Disability Law Collective’s animated promotional video.)

I also feel blessed to be back, closer to my friends in Illinois, to celebrate life’s happy and sad moments together. I lost 3 friends this year. While this comes with being a part of the disability community and I have lost schoolmates from an early age, I don’t think I will ever get used to it. I’m sure that my losses do not remotely measure up to what the families who lost their loved ones with disabilities or the teachers and professionals who continuously loose people with disabilities they work with must go through.

Having said that, I believe it is wise to make legal preparations so your loved ones and family know what your final wishes are. This can be done through estate planning, including wills, and medical and financial powers of attorneys. I’d be happy to help you figure out what legal options meet your needs and if for some reason I cannot (I’m only licensed to practice law in Illinois and California), I’ll be happy to help find someone else who can. And please let me know if there is anything else I could help you with, legally or otherwise.

I have been enjoying Chicago. One of the Able Community members would marry football if he could, whereas I would definitely marry Chicago. My sister and I have been doing the touristy things that we never did before, like architecture tours. We’ve also been going to Broadway musicals. I’m really glad that my love of musical started in an early age (thanks to my elementary school music and art teachers). I did subject to my whole law school to this love by making many of the professors and students participate in my law school musical production during my last year.

I’ve also taken up some inherently dangerous adaptive activities, including water skiing and alpine skiing (I’m sure some of you would love to throw me off a mountain). It feeds my rebellious-defying-what-people-say-I-cannot-do-because-of-my-disability spirit. Similar to the teams of people assisting people with disabilities find independence through sports traditionally meant for able-bodied people, I am excited to be a part of teams advocating for the independence for people with disabilities through the Disability Law Collective and Able Community.

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(Photo with the crew of volunteers who made sure that I didn’t kill myself my first time skiing.)

I am taking better care of my health with adaptive yoga and horseback riding. I look forward to adding adaptive scuba diving to the list of my inherently dangerous adaptive adventures. Perhaps I am training to be the next James Bond… I know that I am not an attractive British able-bodied man. But how cool would it be if there was a movie with a female spy with a disability who is a person of color?!?

Happy Holidays, but especially a very Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah (showing my Judeo-Christian biases)!

Sincerely,
Esther S. Lee,
Attorney at Law
esther@disabilitylawcollective.com
Disability Law Collective <http://disabilitylawcollective.com>
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Michael Brown: Civil Rights and Racial Justice for All

Michael Brown’s picture in his graduation cap and gown, holding his Normandy High School diploma, from this online article.

Darren Wilson, has been named as the police officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, on August 9, 2014. This shooting occurred 2 years, 5 months, and 14 days after an unarmed, teenaged Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator. Unfortunately, this scenario has become commonplace; an African American being subjected to police brutality, excessive force, and even death.

Perhaps this is why 42 U.S.C. § 1983, referred to as “Section 1983,” which is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, is still in use today. Section 1983 allows governmental actors, including police officers, to be liable for damages, declaratory, or injunctive relief for violating a citizen’s rights, such as the Freedom from Excessive Force under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Sadly, this legislation, also known as the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” which was used to prevent racial hate crimes in the 1800s, is still needed today to deter racial injustices, often at the hands of the police, who are supposed to protect us.

Functionally, Section 1983 serves as a method to deter governmental officers from violating citizens’ rights. This often comes in the form of making governmental officers pay money for inflicting personal injuries, including wrongful deaths, on citizens, when it was not warranted. Is any amount of money going to lessen the loss of the Brown family? Understandably not. And what good is deterrence after the fact? Unfortunately, this is just how our judicial system works in our society that values money.

Below are excerpts from articles involving Michael Brown:

“The ghost of Dred Scott haunts the streets of Ferguson,” was written by Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan (ellipses omitted and bracketed information added):

Thousands have been protesting the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. He was due to start college just days after he was shot dead in broad daylight. Police left his bleeding corpse in the middle of the street for over four hours, behind police tape, as neighbors gathered and looked on in horror. Outraged citizens protested, and police brutally cracked down on them. Clad in paramilitary gear and using armored vehicles, they shot tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and flash-bang grenades, aiming automatic weapons at protesters. Scores of peaceful protesters as well as journalists have been arrested.

Portrait of Dred Scott from this Wiki article.

The protests have raged along Ferguson’s West Florissant Avenue. Four miles south of the protest’s ground zero, along the same street, in the quietude of Calvary Cemetery, lies Dred Scott, the man born a slave who famously fought for his freedom in the courts. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 [Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 19 How. 393 393 (1856)] ruled that African-Americans, whether slave or free, could not be citizens, ever.

Scott was born into slavery in Virginia around 1799. Scott’s owner moved from Virginia, taking him to Missouri, a slave state. He was sold to John Emerson, a surgeon in the U.S. Army [and was subsequently taken to free states and territories]. In 1847, Scott sued Emerson for his freedom in a St. Louis court. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney, a supporter of slavery, wrote, “A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a ‘citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.” Thus, the court ruled that all African-Americans, whether slave or free, were not citizens, and never would be.

The people of Ferguson demand justice for Michael Brown, including the arrest of Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, who killed Brown. A number of groups are calling for a special prosecutor to take over the case, the removal of the National Guard and a Justice Department investigation into every shooting of an unarmed person of color.

On Monday, August 18, 2014, Democracy Now reported that 1,300 people packed the Greater Grace Church for a rally attended by Michael Brown’s parents. Brown’s cousin Ty Pruitt addressed the crowd: “So, before I say anything, [raises hands in air]. I just wanted to kick it off like that, because what I want you all to remember is that Michael Brown was not just some young black boy. He was a human being. He was a younger cousin. He was a son. He was an uncle, a nephew. He was not a suspect. He was not an object. He was not an animal. But that’s how he was killed.”

While the verdict is still a whiles away for Darren Wilson after a jury hears all of the evidence presented for the case, I fear that justice will get lost in our deeply rooted history of racial inequalities, that Michael Brown will not be portrayed as a human being, and that this will lead to race riots (like the 1992 Los Angeles Riots after the acquittal of the police officers, who beat Rodney King). I wish there were solutions to end racial injustices and oppressive policing. I wish that we didn’t need Section 1983 to remedy the wrongs that our government commits on our citizens. I wish our society would finally treat all of its citizens as citizens. For now, let’s keep our eyes on the prize and keep on marching towards our Civil Rights and racial justice for all.