Enforcing Surrogacy Agreements in Wisconsin

scan2Let’s say you are part of a married couple in Wisconsin. Due to a leukemia diagnosis and treatment for that disease, your eggs are no longer viable. Doctors agree that you are currently in good health and the disease is “a nonissue,” but your husband and you want children and you cannot bear them. A friend has offered to help you out. This woman has been your friend since grade school; you’ve each participated in the other’s wedding.  You and your husband are godparents to her youngest daughter. Your friend and her husband have five children of their own and have said they are done expanding their family. Her husband even had a vasectomy. Twice in four years she has offered to carry and bear a child for you.  Finally, you agree.

You and your husband visit a lawyer, and your friend and her husband visit a different lawyer.  The gist of the arrangement is that your friend will be artificially inseminated with your husband’s sperm. She will carry and bear the child, but she agrees that you and your husband alone would raise the child and she agrees to terminate her parental rights to allow you to adopt the child.  She would still be able to see the child; after all, you have long been friends and you plan to continue to see each other through social visits. You’re a bit concerned, though, that your friend may have difficulty giving up a child to whom she has biological ties, but she assures you she can do it. Your lawyers create numerous drafts of your agreement and each revises these drafts until finally all of you agree that what is written accurately reflects your understanding of the arrangement.  You all sign this agreement in November.  By this time, your friend is already almost five months’ pregnant.  She is due the following March.

After all of you sign the agreement, your relationship with your friend crumbles, and before the child is born your friend informs you that she will no longer terminate her parental rights to the child, as she had agreed.  Furthermore, she wants to have custody of the child.  In March, she gives birth to the baby.

Now what?

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Truth in Sentencing: We Like the Symbolism, But Have Mixed Feelings About the Practical Policy

Two-thirds of Wisconsin voters support truth in sentencing, the 1998 law that abolished parole in the state and required prisoners to serve the full term of their sentences.  At the same time, a majority of Wisconsin voters (54.5 percent) agreed that once a prisoner serves half of his term, he should be released and given a less costly form of punishment if he can demonstrate that he is no longer a threat to society.  These seemingly inconsistent opinions point to complex, mixed feelings about sentencing policy in the state.

The numbers come from the Marquette Law School Poll, which earlier this week released the results of its latest survey of Wisconsin voters regarding politics and public policy.  This edition of the poll included a rich array of questions relating to truth in sentencing.  (Full disclosure: I collaborated in the design of these questions with Poll Director Charles Franklin and Professor Darren Wheelock of the Marquette Social and Cultural Sciences Department.)

The poll results this year were remarkably consistent with results from a year ago, when some of the same questions were posed.  Last July, 63% supported truth in sentencing, while 55% supported release opportunities at the half-way mark.  An even more decisive two-thirds majority supported awarding credits toward early release to recognize prisoners’ rehabilitative accomplishments, which also violates truth in sentencing (at least in the particularly hard-line way in which it was adopted in Wisconsin).

What gives?  

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The Role of Specialized Practice Groups in a Public Law Firm

Wis State Public Defender TorchThe Wisconsin State Public Defender (SPD) has dual responsibilities: we are a large law firm and a state agency. Although there is overlap, each function has its own set of expectations and stakeholders, and we strive to achieve harmony between both roles. In this blog post, I am going to discuss an area where we achieve congruence by developing specialty practice groups.

From the beginning of the SPD, we organized ourselves based on specializing in appellate and trial work. The agency continues to maintain both of these general areas of practice, and we have identified additional specific practice areas: juvenile, forensics, termination of parental rights, racial disparity, immigration, and sexually violent persons (Ch. 980).

The SPD benefits in several ways. From a state agency perspective, specialty practice groups allow us to share specialized knowledge and expertise efficiently, lessening the need for staff and private attorneys to “reinvent the wheel” in these complex practice areas. From a law firm perspective, specialization allows us to enhance the quality of legal representation provided to our clients statewide.

Each practice group is led by a coordinator. That person stays abreast of the latest developments in the practice area and shares this expertise as an advisor, mentor, and educator to other SPD practitioners. Coordinators serve as a clearinghouse of sorts as they assist others in quickly changing areas of legal practice. Staff contact them as needed when they are preparing a client’s case or have a question in a new or undeveloped area of the law.

Each coordinator pulls together practice materials, including motions, briefs, transcripts, case outlines, and research/articles/studies to share with practitioners. Coordinators keep track of the legal nuances and mundane details in their practice areas and catalog them for easy dissemination to attorneys when requested. They assist with the agency’s training efforts, including presenting at the annual conference. Some coordinators conduct or assist with expert examinations at motion hearings and trials. The coordinators also assist private bar attorneys with their questions related to the respective practice areas.

Cases involving clients charged as a sexually violent persons typically involve a number of very intricate and arcane actuarial statistics. A practitioner who only occasionally takes such cases would find it challenging to build the expertise needed to work with statistics. In this example, the Ch. 980 practice group assists the attorneys with training in these math and statistical elements. Similarly, the forensics coordinator helps others with the technical aspects of this practice area. In fact, as I write this post, the coordinator for our forensics practice group is assisting in a jury trial by focusing on the forensic elements of the case.

As the agency continues to utilize such specialties, we will, as necessary, change and adapt to the ever-evolving and changing field of criminal justice in Wisconsin.

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