A defense lawyer for the deaf

A defense lawyer for the deaf

Local justice gets boost with young lawyer’s sign language skills.

By Steven Kreytak
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, Jan. 2, 2011

When Amber Farrelly Elliott was 9, her mother enrolled her in an American
Sign Language class in hopes of keeping the inquisitive youngster occupied
during summer vacation.

The language immediately fascinated Elliott, whose hearing is not impaired.
Every day she eagerly rode her bike to the class in a church in her hometown
of Lawton, Okla., a military town near Fort Sill. Elliott studied signs at
night to keep up with her adult classmates.

That summer began an affinity for sign language and deaf culture that
Elliott calls upon today as a criminal defense lawyer in Travis County.
Licensed to practice law for just over a year, she fills a niche at the
Travis County Courthouse with her ability to directly communicate with deaf
clients instead of indirectly through an interpreter.

“It’s a beautiful language,” Elliott said. “It’s just so expressive. And
captivating. When you see somebody sign you can’t help as a hearing person
to look and be like, ‘Wow, they are communicating with their hands and they
completely understand each other.’

Court officials say they assign Elliott to represent all the deaf people in
Travis County who have been arrested for Class A and B misdemeanors and
can’t afford to hire their own lawyer. That amounts to about two or three
defendants a month, said court administrator Debra Hale. Certified
interpreters still translate for those clients during most official court
hearings. Because of her limited experience, the local judges have not yet
approved Elliott, 34, to represent court-appointed clients in felony cases.

County Court-at-Law Judge Nancy Hohengarten said that Elliott’s ability to
communicate with clients in their language further ensures that the
defendants will receive fair representation.

“I think she’s a very good lawyer,” Hohengarten said. “She has good
communication skills and perhaps that’s in part because of her (sign
language) training.”

County officials estimate there are 50,000 to 60,000 deaf and hard of
hearing people in the Austin metropolitan area. That’s one of the largest
populations in the country, according to deaf advocates and county
officials, who believe it is partly because of the presence of the Texas
School for the Deaf and government agencies that offer services to deaf
people.

Paul Rutowski, president of the Texas Association of the Deaf, an advocacy
organization, said in an e-mail that some deaf people have been skeptical of
Elliott, worrying that she is using her sign language skills to “patronize
the deaf community.”

Rutowski does not believe that is the case.

“I value Amber’s contributions to her profession as we all benefit from her
expertise,” he wrote. “Her knowing sign language is really a benefit to us
and everyone else. She has a good personality and is a good person.”

Proper discretion

Elliott is 5 feet tall with a high-pitched voice. But that can be
misleading, said Alexandra Gauthier, the president of the Austin Criminal
Defense Lawyers Association, who has worked closely with Elliott.

“She’s a little pit bull” in court, Gauthier said. “She’s also whip-smart
and extremely well-organized.”

Elliott estimated she has represented about 65 deaf clients, most of them in
Travis County and a few in Williamson County, mostly on misdemeanors, such
as driving while intoxicated and theft.

She said that because the deaf community is so small, she has to take extra
steps to protect their privacy, such as not scheduling deaf clients to come
to her office or to court at the same time.

“I tell my clients, if they see me at a deaf event, I won’t acknowledge that
I know them unless they come up to me first,” she said. She refuses to talk
about their cases in public, in part because other deaf people can see what
they are saying.

In many of the cases, she said, prosecutors have dismissed charges after
Elliott convinced them that there was no crime and simply a misunderstanding
between hearing and deaf people. Some deaf clients, for example, were
charged with assault after tapping someone to get that person’s attention,
she said.

“If they really want you to pay attention to them , they tap harder,” she
said. “If you want to get technical, I’ve been assaulted by my (deaf)
friends many times.”

In one case, she had a homeless deaf man as a client, who received a written
criminal trespass warning by University of Texas police. Later, when the man
was found on campus again, he was arrested for trespassing, Elliott said.

Elliott said the man, whose reading skills were poor, did not understand the
warning on the ticket and because he did not get the benefit of a verbal
explanation he did not know he was not to return to campus.

“His reading level was not college level, which is required to read one of
those stupid warnings,” she said.

When she explained this to prosecutors, they dismissed the case, she said.

Confluence of signs

Elliott has continued to augment her knowledge of deaf culture after her
first sign language class as a child.

A self-described “complete nerd,” Elliott said that first class motivated
her to work odd jobs to earn the money to take a more advanced class. She
memorized a book on sign language that her uncle had bought her for 25 cents
at a garage sale and befriended children who were deaf.

Elliott stopped practicing sign language while attending the University of
Oklahoma but began again with deaf colleagues while working a
post-graduation job at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Waco, where she
evaluated veterans’ levels of disability.

“It’s like riding a bike,” she said. “It came right back.”

After enrolling in law school at the University of Arizona in 2006, Elliott
found a group of people, about half of them deaf, who would meet regularly
to communicate using sign language. Soon she was attending happy hours for
young, professional deaf people.

“It was a great stress reliever,” she said.

During law school, Elliott studied for a year at the University of Texas and
spent the fall semester of 2008 working with a group of defense lawyers who
were preparing for the retrials of capital murder defendants Michael Scott
and Robert Springsteen, who were accused of killing four teenage girls at a
North Austin yogurt shop in 1991.

She spent hours sifting through the more than 30 boxes of evidence in the
case, watching recorded interviews and conducting legal research. At night,
she took sign language classes at Austin Community College. Citing new DNA
evidence, District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg dismissed the charges against
Scott and Springsteen last year, about the time Elliott passed the bar exam.

The case, she said, solidified her interest in practicing criminal law.
After she became certified to practice, she introduced herself to the
criminal judges at the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center and told
them about her sign language skills.

Now, she said, “I can put my two passions together — sign language and the
law.”

[email protected]; 912-2946

Source:

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/a-defense-lawyer-for-the-deaf-1159280.html