Eric Dinnocenzo - The Tenant Lawyer (2 page)

I handed the complaint back to her.

“Don’t you want it?” she asked.

“No, you keep it. But make sure to bring it with you tomorrow.”

I had a couple of reasons for not taking the complaint. First, if she chose not to show up to our appointment, I didn’t want to be in possession of what might be her only copy. Second, keeping it might give her the idea that I was going to take her case, a perception that I didn’t want to encourage. Drug eviction cases from public housing were extremely difficult to win for tenants such as Anna, and I had become selective about which ones I accepted. The “One-Strike” law passed by Congress during the Gingrich revolution permitted the eviction of public housing tenants if any household member or guest engaged in illegal drug activity, even if it occurred outside of the apartment. Unfortunately for Anna, her son was listed on her lease, and he had been arrested for illegal drug activity. That meant the housing authority had a strong case against her.

The “One-Strike” law was considered by tenant advocates to be extremely draconian and unfair. A lot of innocent people had been harmed by it, forced to suffer the consequences of crimes committed by family members and significant others. Legal services challenged the law all the way up to the Supreme Court in a case entitled,
Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Rucker
, where it lost in a unanimous decision. For Anna and other tenants like her the stakes were high and the odds of prevailing were slim. It didn’t matter that Anna might not have had any control over her son or knowledge of his illegal drug activity. All it took was a drug arrest of a household member or guest, and as a result, the entire household could be put out on the street. In the case that went before the Supreme Court, a 63-year-old grandmother who had lived in public housing for thirty years was evicted because her grandson was caught smoking marijuana in the parking lot.

Making matters worse for innocent tenants like Anna, the housing authority only had to prove that the drug activity occurred under the civil standard of a “preponderance of the evidence.”
In layman’s terms that means “more likely than not,” a far easier standard to satisfy than “beyond a reasonable doubt” which applies in criminal cases.
Accordingly, the simple fact that the police had arrested Anna’s son meant that the deck was already heavily stacked against her.

Although I took most of the eviction cases that came my way, I had over time tightened my standards for drug cases and now only took a slim percentage of them. After losing a few battles in court, I came to realize that it made little sense to put time and effort into a case that would have little chance of success—time that I could spend helping other tenants with better cases. Besides, there was often more to these cases than clients initially related to me, which made me even more wary about taking them on. More than once I had listened to a mother fervently profess her son’s innocence at our first meeting only to discover, once the case was underway, that the housing authority had convincing evidence of his extracurricular activities. To make matters worse, the guys who got arrested for the drug activity usually weren’t of much help. They rarely showed up at my office to prepare for trial, and when they testified in court they frequently made poor witnesses. Furthermore, if they had prior criminal records, as they often did, they were vulnerable to impeachment on cross-examination.

So far Anna’s case looked like one I would reject. I figured I would probably help her fill out an Answer and Demand for Discovery, which would set up her defense to the case with the court and postpone her trial date for two weeks. Then I would give her some advice on how to represent herself in mediation and trial, and that would be it.

When Anna and I said goodbye to one another in the lobby, she smiled, giving off a warm vibe, and all of a sudden I felt rather sorry for her. She hadn’t done anything wrong but was about to lose her affordable housing anyway.

My clients were mainly single women with children who lived in the projects, for the most part Puerto Rican and Dominican. Through representing them I learned about the lifestyles of the men who were their sons and boyfriends and the fathers of their children. Many of the guys lived fast-paced lives, partying for days on end, driving around in unregistered vehicles, and fathering children with different women. Domestic violence was not uncommon. One case from about two years ago, shortly after I started working at legal services, always stuck with me. I was defending a Latino couple in their early-twenties who were accused of fighting with each other late at night and causing a lot of noise and disturbance at their apartment building. They both denied the allegations and maintained that the complaints were manufactured by neighbors who disliked them due to a disagreement over a parking spot. On one occasion, I met alone with the girl, who confided in me tearfully that the boyfriend would beat her when he got drunk at night. I was shocked by what she told me, but nodded with understanding, and then advised her to report him to the police and seek domestic violence counseling.

Right after she left my office, it dawned on me that I had made a mistake from a professional standpoint. I had given her advice that was harmful to another one of my clients—her boyfriend—creating a clear conflict of interest. Even if I hadn’t done that, I still had a conflict between one client, the girl, who had basically admitted that the allegations in the case were true, and another client, the guy, who had previously denied them to me. I quickly came to the conclusion that I had no choice but to withdraw from the case.

Some days later, I stood in front of Judge McCarthy and asked for permission to withdraw, fully aware that without representation the girl would probably get evicted and end up homeless. After the judge granted my request, I started to walk out of the courtroom and noticed the girl looking at me with utter helplessness in her eyes. I absorbed her look for a few seconds, then turned away and kept walking. Her look haunted me for days afterward.

Many of my female clients didn’t know where their boyfriends were at any given time. They were like phantoms who flashed in and out of their lives. One day I was doing an intake of a girl of about twenty who was being evicted from public housing because her boyfriend allegedly lived with her as an unauthorized occupant. She denied the allegation, but when I asked her where he lived, she responded that she didn’t know.

“How do you get in touch with him when you want to see him or talk to him?” I asked.

“He calls me when he wants to see me.”

“But how do you get in touch with him? Does he have a phone?”

“He uses people’s phones.”

“So you can’t really get in touch with him?”

“No.”

This state of affairs amazed me. In contrast, Sara generally always knew where I was and what I was doing. Some guys I knew were resistant to being in that type of relationship, believing that it infringed on their freedom. But I figured that if two people were in a relationship, they should each know what the other person was up to. Anyway, I had no distractions or social activities that made me yearn for freedom away from Sara. I really liked being with her and never tired of it. However, truth be told, sometimes she could be too possessive and too fervent in keeping tabs on me, which I didn’t care for at all, and on occasion we got into arguments about it. “Where were you?” “What were you doing there?” “Why didn’t you let me know?” These were questions that I sometimes got from her that I didn’t think were justified or deserved.

The previous summer I suggested that we attend couples’ therapy to try to mend our relationship. Our therapist, Eileen, a thin, elegant woman in her late fifties, told us after our second session that we had communication problems. We talked right past one another, not listening to what the other person was saying. We were also quick to interpret each other’s words in more negative terms than they were intended, a major reason why our fights often escalated. About me, she said that I was a “fixer” rather than a “listener,” meaning that when Sara came to me with problems, I didn’t provide her with compassion and understanding but instead would focus on how to fix the situation. That was something that came as a revelation to me. At the same time, I thought that Eileen had a more negative view of our relationship than was warranted. Despite our problems, there was a tangible energy between us that a lot of other couples didn’t have. I could see it in Sara’s eyes sometimes when we engaged in a little back-and-forth teasing; they’d open wide as if a current of electricity were running through her. We had lively conversations and joked around and laughed a lot. We were never bored with one another.

Eileen tried to help us. She gave us communication exercises to perform at home that required us to sit across from one another holding hands while we each took turns talking about our feelings for five uninterrupted minutes. Admittedly, I ruined the exercises. It simply ate at me to have to sit there quietly and listen to Sara say things about our relationship that I felt were inaccurate or blown out of proportion, and so at times I would interrupt her in order to set the record straight. Afterwards I felt bad for doing that, but then the next time we did the exercises I’d do it again. It really upset Sara.

The rest of the therapy wasn’t very successful. Eileen kept trying to open us up to each other’s perspective, but after years of arguments and grudges, we were too entrenched in our own separate camps to reach a middle ground. After six months we gave up on therapy altogether.

2

Ov
er my two years at legal services I had grown so accustomed to handling eviction cases that they had become routine. The landlord would file a non-payment of rent action, and I would assert sanitary code or security deposit
violations, or both, as defenses. At court, the parties would usually reach a settlement requiring the tenant to move out within a few months that included a waiver of the back rent. If the landlord brought a case based on tenant misconduct, I would assert a general denial of the allegations. The case often settled with a probationary agreement allowing the tenant to stay in the apartment, but authorizing a quick eviction if the misconduct continued. Every once in a while a case would go to trial.

Over time I came to see myself as someone who was simply performing damage control, rather than working to improve housing conditions in Worcester. From a professional standpoint, I felt that I wasn’t fully developing my legal skills. In eviction cases there were generally no complex issues and discovery was limited with no depositions. Trials were conducted without a jury, were brief in duration, and the lawyers did not deliver opening or closing statements. Sure, I got to conduct more trials than my peers at large law firms, but they were constricted trials. Altogether, I felt I was more or less running in place and not moving forward in my career.

The next thing I did, after talking to Anna, was go over to Maria Roman. Although I had told her to dress nicely for court, she was wearing skin-tight jeans that were fairly provocative. Oh well, I thought, nothing I can do about it now.

“So what’s going to happen now?” she asked me.

“We go to mediation. Either the case will settle or we’ll have to go to trial.”

Like Anna, Maria was being evicted from George Washington, but her case was based on different grounds—that her boyfriend, Jose, resided with her as an unauthorized occupant. At my request, Jose had accompanied her to court in the event the case went to trial so that he could testify that he lived at another address, which was the story that he and Maria had all along insisted was the truth. The problem, however, was that he had no proof that he lived elsewhere.

Public housing authorities routinely moved to evict tenants who they believed had unauthorized occupants living in their apartments. There were three policy-based reasons for this. First, a tenant with an unauthorized occupant could be bilking the program, because public housing rents were calculated based on household income. For instance, if Jose lived with Maria and he earned a good salary, enabling them to afford a market-rate
apartment,
she would be depriving low-income people who really needed public housing. Second, before they were given public housing, applicants were subjected to a screening process that included a criminal record check. Obviously, an unauthorized occupant evades this requirement. The final reason was plain old social engineering. The government wanted to prevent female public housing tenants from sleeping with their boyfriends and having out-of-wedlock births which would entitle them to more public benefits.

Many tenants I represented in the past failed to understand that they could be evicted for having their boyfriends live with them in public housing. They thought that whatever went on inside the four walls of their apartment was their own business.

“What would be a good result,” I advised Maria, “is if you could get an agreement where you won’t have Jose stay overnight anymore for the next six months or so—it’s called a probationary agreement—and if you comply with the agreement during that time period, your case will be dismissed. Jose could start visiting you overnight in accordance with the terms of your lease, which means up to twenty-one nights a year—”

“Twenty-one nights a year?”
Jose said incredulously.

“Twenty-one?
That’s ridiculous,” Maria chimed in.

“Unfortunately, that’s the rule in public housing,” I responded. “It’s in your lease.” I had previously explained this to her in detail in a meeting at my office.