According to today's Sacramento Bee, Sacramento federal court employee Sujean Park was honored with the Ninth Circuit's 2011 Robert F. Pekham Award for excellence in alternative dispute resolution.
Since her arrival in 2009, Park has been responsible for developing resources to assist the Sacramento-based Eastern District of California in dealing with the unusually large number of people representing themselves, primarily in lawsuits they have initiated.
Most of them – called pro se litigants – are inmates in state and federal prisons located within the sprawling district, which stretches from the Tehachapi range on the south to the Oregon border on the north and from the coastal mountains on the west to the Nevada border on the east.
The district is home to 19 of California's 33 adult prisons, housing nearly 70 percent of the state's prisoner population. Prisoner lawsuits have consistently given the district the highest caseload per judge in the nation – approximately 1,200.
These suits are mainly challenges to the plaintiffs' convictions or claims that the plaintiffs' civil rights have been violated since entering prison.
Prisoner petitions constitute nearly 54 percent of the district caseload, far exceeding a district's more typical 10 percent.
Park is credited with revitalizing the Eastern District's pro bono program, where an unpaid attorney represents someone who would otherwise be forced to proceed without counsel. She has more than doubled, to 235, the number of attorneys who are making themselves available for these court-appointed assignments.
She has also significantly expanded the use of alternative dispute resolution in prisoner cases, including drafting court papers, making arrangements for settlement conferences, and promoting live conferences at prisons and via closed-circuit video.
"It's tough sometimes to match an attorney willing to take a pro bono case with a prisoner," Park said. "So we offer limited-purpose appointments; maybe the attorney just handles the settlement, or just helps draft a complaint. We have a videoconferencing pilot, where we'll use three experienced mediators who take five cases each. We're trying everything to see what is effective."
Park has worked closely with faculty members at the McGeorge School of Law to establish a mediation clinic on prisoner rights. Students staff the clinic, collect information about a case, prepare a pre-conference memorandum and participate as co-mediators.
