After spending years holding plaintiffs accountable as a deputy city attorney for Los Angeles, Rosemary Chávez will now be holding other prosecutors accountable as part of the Long Beach-based legal nonprofit Unite The People.
“It’s important that someone with a background in criminal work looks to see that the prosecution was done correctly and the judge’s rulings were applied with justice in mind,” Chávez told the Signal Tribune.
Now that Chávez has joined Unite The People, her expertise will be available to people who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
Unite the People offers legal help to incarcerated people as well as those going through criminal trials, with fees decided on a sliding scale based on a client’s income.
“They get stuck going to a public defender’s office, where somebody has 300 cases and don’t have time to really try to help you. That’s where a lot of the problem comes in,” said Unite The People co-founder Cesar McDowell in July 2021 in regards to defendants that can’t pay for an attorney.
McDowell has first-hand experience with the impact a thorough case review can have on an incarcerated person’s life—he was eligible for release in 2016 but didn’t learn that until 2020 after he founded Unite The People.
At that point he had already spent two decades of a triple life sentence in prison after being charged with making criminal threats, false imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child due to threatening his ex-wife and yelling at her to get back in the house while their 2-year-old child was home.
Although he was unaware of it at the time, he became eligible for release when Prop 57 was passed in 2016 by California voters, which allowed people who committed nonviolent felonies to be considered for parole.
According to a 2014 report by the ACLU, in the U.S. approximately 65.4% of prisoners serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses are Black, while 17.8% are white.
“Even if they’re accused of something terrible they still have a right to a trial and a fair trial,” Chávez said. “And sometimes the judge may miss something or make a decision that now has been changed by a change in the law.”
In Chávez’s new role she’ll use her trained eye to review the cases of Unite The People’s clients, looking over their record, transcripts and proceedings.
“I think that that benefits the entire community because, aside from the monetary cost of keeping people in prison for decades, we’re losing the benefits of the intelligence and the energy and the innovation that could be brought into the community by people who are now trapped in a cell,” Chávez said.
Chávez is proud of her career as a prosecutor, but admits that the justice system is flawed, often penalizing without proper rehabilitation.
“I started seeing the other side of what happens to people who have been convicted of a crime,” Chávez said. “A lot of times the impact is stigmatizing for a lifetime. If someone is arrested and convicted of petty theft, for example, they’re never going to hold a job where they have to handle money or be bonded, because that impacts their record.”
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the rate of unemployment for formerly incarcerated people between the ages of 25 to 44 is 27.3%, compared to 5.2% unemployment for that age group in the general population.
The same report said that formerly incarcerated people are 50% less likely to be called back when they apply for a job.
“It just seems to me that that is just a very harsh thing to do when someone has exercised poor judgment, made a human mistake,” Chávez said.
She used McDowell and the creation of Unite The People as an example of what incarcerated people can accomplish and contribute when given a chance.
“He decided while he was incarcerated that he wanted to help other people,” Chávez said. “That was years ago, and now he has a thriving organization that’s going to be able to help other people come out of the darkness that he was in. I think that’s fabulous, and I’m excited to be part of that.”
To contact Unite The People, email info@unitethepeople.org, call (888) 245-9393, or visit their website at unitethepeople.org for more information.
