Legal Committee Meeting Minutes – 10/29/2011
Present:
Shayna, Joy, Sergieus, Juliana, Sarah, Natalie, Chelsea, Anthony, Daniel

1) Regular meeting times:
GA requires that all committees meet at least twice a week at scheduled times and post minutes to the OA website. Group decided our preference was to meet three times a week. Selected Monday and Thursday at 6pm and Saturday at 3pm. The location will always be wherever GA is being held that day. Juliana will post the meetings on the website.

2) Bottom liners
There is currently confusion around who is serving as bottom liner for Legal. The responsibilities of bottom liners were discussed. These include: a) attending the Legal Committee meetings, b) attending General Assembly, c) representing Legal in the special/emergency actions committee, and d) facilitating communications among committee members and partners. Bottom liners are not decision makers.
There was consensus that new bottom liners are needed. There was also consensus that Legal should have three bottom liners, one specific to jail support and two to serve as more general bottom liners.
The consensus was for Sergieus to serve as jail support bottom liner, and Anthony and Juliana to serve as general bottom liners. They will coordinate to ensure that there is generally a bottom liner available at HQ and will try to give each other breaks so that no one person feels like they always need to be available.

3) Jail support
a) Contact and communications with jail support

Sergieus does not currently have a cell phone, but his being available is critical. Consensus was that it’s acceptable to use funds donated to legal to get a pre-paid cell phone for Sergieus.

There is also confusion about what phone numbers can be called from jail, since frequently the calls are placed as collect. This is critical now that we will no longer have access to the main AFSC land line to use for jail support. We probably can’t use a Google Voice number for this. Anthony believes we can use a general cell phone if we have set it up with the cell company ahead of time. Juliana will check with Joab (NLG attorney) since he expressed willingness to share his office space with OA.

b) Finding James Crider
James was one person arrested who was not released from jail on Wednesday (due to an outstanding warrant in Blairsville, GA). However, we have not been able to identify where in the system he currently is. Fulton County Jail, Union County Jail (Blairsville) and the state do not have any record of him in their systems based on online searches. Chelsea will start calling facilities that he might be at to see if he’s there. Juliana will try to get his date of birth from the lawyers, and will ask Brian Spears if he can help track him down.

c) Out take forms
Juliana has drafted a new version of the out take form, based on the Midnight Special form, but with some additions. She shared these with the committee, which thought they were fine. Sergieus will work on getting these completed for the 51 arrestees that have been released. Other legal committee members will help him with this.

d) Electronic forums for sharing information about defendants
Sharing information about arrestees, and potential arestees (such as the jail support forms) would be a lot easier if they were in an electronic format and could be shared online (such as via google docs). Sarah discussed this with a NLG mass defense attorney and was told that the key pieces of information to not share electronically are citizenship status and assigned attorney. Juliana will also send the question out to the NLG mass defense list serve to see what other folks thing.

e) Tuesday follow-up meeting with defendants/arrestees
Mawuli Davis, one of the attorneys, proposed having a meeting with all the defendants and the attorneys on Tuesday so that the defendants can talk about why they’re involved in OccATL and what kind of relationship they would like to have with the attorneys. Juliana will coordinate with Mawuli to see when the attorneys may be available. Anthony will check the Fulton County Library to see if their conference room is free. Committee members with GSU ties will see if we can get meeting space there. Sergieus is working on a complete list of emails and phone numbers for all the defendants so that we can notify them of the meeting. We will likely need to have a second meeting since not everyone will be able to make the first meeting.

f) March to court to file notices of appearance
This idea was proposed by Mawuli. It would be particularly powerful if we have one attorney representing each client (total of 50). This idea was taken to GA yesterday (Friday 10/28) and received consensus. Legal Committee discussed that this is still tentative until we make more firm plans with the attorneys. We may have to reschedule to a later date.

g) Attorney representation for criminal cases
There was general agreement that we need to coordinate this better among volunteer attorneys. There were a number who volunteered to take on cases, but we haven’t heard from them recently. Consensus was to discuss this at the Legal Round Table and develop a clear follow-up plan. Anthony will also follow-up with GA Indigent Attorneys to see if they’re interested in supporting us.

3) Announcement to GA about availability of legal support
There was consensus that Legal needs to clearly communicate to the rest of OccATL the following message:
“We are here and we want to support people who get arrested during activities associated with Occupy Atlanta. But, we on the Legal Committee do have limited capacity and ideally need to know about actions ahead of time, or about planned/potential moves to sites where arrests are possible. We will always do our best to provide legal and jail support, but we can not always succeed in that if we are not able to engage in some planning ahead of time.”
We need to make this announcement to GA.

4) When to take things to GA versus deciding internally
There was discussion about how to decide when things should be taken to GA versus decided internally (within the Legal Committee). One proposal was to create a general list of items that we would be comfortable deciding internally, and a list of topics that we would take to GA. We could then take these general lists to GA for approval. We reviewed what the original intent of the committees was, including that the GA generally deferred to committees for decision making. However, not everyone on legal was comfortable with this approach, since some topics should go to GA. There was also some concern that we not overstep our bounds. It was generally felt that we should always discuss internally when things should be taken to GA and rely on our internal consensus process to determine what should go to GA, that this would serve as a sufficient check to make sure we don’t overstep Legal’s role. No formal consensus was done on this, but no one expressed concerns or disagreement with this approach.

5) Legal Round Table
Based on earlier discussions (last week), we are organizing a Legal Round Table for Legal Committee members and Legal support/partners to discuss overall strategy and coordination. This has been set for 7:30pm on Monday 10/31 at 505 Whitehall Street. Chelsea will send out invites/announcements.

6) Status of We Pay account
Legal has a separate donation account for bond and jail support. People can donate via the OA website. We currently have ~$1300 in the account. Since we may need immediate access to this money for bail, Chelsea has set up a bank account at Gwinnett Federal Credit Union to receive the We Pay money so that it is immediately accessible. The account is currently in her name, since we do not have a legal entity for Occupy Atlanta yet. Legal Committee was comfortable with this approach and trust Chelsea to be a responsible steward of the funds.

7) Joint Finance/Legal conference call
There was a conference call Saturday afternoon with Brian Spears (NLG attorney) to discuss different options for creating legal entities for OccATL. There was substantial debate about the issue of pursuing non-profit status versus status as a LLC (Limited Liability Corporation). It was concluded that this isn’t something we need to definitively decide at this point, but we do need an entity that will enable us to set up a bank account ASAP. The group agreed to file paperwork for to create a Georgia non-profit, called Occupy Atlanta Support, that will enable us to establish a bank account this week, since the paperwork can be filed and processed quickly. This Georgia-specific non-profit status is not related to federal non-profit status (501(c)3 or 501(c)4), which would require filing substantially more complicated paperwork and would take longer to establish. A joint legal/finance committee group is working on the paperwork.