For the last ten years at the University of Colorado Boulder Law School, or CU Law School, Clinical Professor of Law Violeta Chapin has led second- and third-year law students in a clinic to help United States non-citizens navigate criminal misdemeanor and federal immigration cases.
Previous to her career at CU Law School, Chapin served for seven years as a trial attorney with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. While in this position, Chapin was one of the few bilingual attorneys in her office. Her fluency in Spanish often led Chapin to take on monolingual Spanish speakers as clients. Sometimes, her clients were not U.S. citizens. As a result, “I had to learn what the consequences of a criminal conviction were for non-citizens,” she said.
Chapin’s experience working on criminal cases in the District of Columbia helped her to land a position teaching CU Law School’s Criminal Defense Clinic in 2009.
The first few years in the role, Chapin guided student attorneys as they worked exclusively on criminal cases. In 2012, Chapin added an immigration component to the program and changed its name to the Criminal and Immigration Defense Clinic.
The Criminal and Immigration Defense Clinic is a two-semester-long class wherein roughly 12 students per year have the opportunity to work under Chapin’s supervision and bar license to represent non-citizen clients in state criminal and federal immigration courts.
In addition to working on the three to four cases assigned to them individually per year, students undergo a seminar portion of the clinic to learn “the substance of the law that they need to know to be able to use on behalf of their clients,” Chapin said. Although the clinic is only scheduled to meet three hours per week, students spend plenty of additional hours outside the classroom connecting with clients, collecting information on cases and appearing in court.
Students also have frequent, individual meetings with Chapin to discuss their cases — a common practice in the field.
“This is an opportunity for law students to start feeling what it’s like to work in a law firm where they would need to discuss strategy for cases and ways to move forward with their senior partner or the senior lawyer in their office,” Chapin said. “My job as a professor is to teach students how to both competently and zealously defend all of their clients.”
The clinic takes on cases from the Boulder Public Defender’s Office and, more recently, from clients who contact Chapin directly to request the clinic’s pro-bono services.
“People have now come to be aware of me and the students in the clinic and the work we do as a law school,” Chapin said. “I often get a lot of random calls from people who are seeking assistance in some way or another.”
The clinic is interested in representing non-citizen clients who have been charged with a misdemeanor in Boulder County or who want to file “affirmative applications for immigration relief, assisting recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), immigrant victims of crime and asylum seekers,” as stated on CU Law School’s website.
According to José Ramón García-Madrid, a third-year student at CU Law School, the Criminal and Immigration Defense Clinic’s free legal services are crucial for immigrants in the community who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford legal representation.
“In Boulder County, there is not another pro-bono legal service provider for immigrants,” García-Madrid said. “So for people who need to file for DACA or people who are facing criminal charges and need to figure out how that impacts their immigration case, it can be really expensive depending on who you go to. Pro-bono work is so critical for anybody, but especially for immigrants who are dealing with an immigration judge or a criminal judge.”
García-Madrid described his academic experience as “mostly Socratic” — a teaching method that focuses on students and educators engaging in dialogue to stimulate critical thinking — until last year when he participated in the Criminal and Immigration Defense Clinic.
“I think the (Criminal and Immigration Defense Clinic) has been the one space (in law school) where I have seen my skills as an attorney really develop,” García-Madrid said. The areas where García-Madrid believes he grew the most from the clinic are in his ability to write a good argument and in his analytical skills.
In the midst of students representing non-citizen clients in a variety of different legal matters, they sometimes run into areas where the law is not very clear. Trying to figure out how to resolve criminal cases in a way that doesn’t expose non-citizens to the risk of being deported, García-Madrid said, is “niche, expert-level attorney work” that he was exposed to in the clinic.
While working on cases, García-Madrid was profoundly aware of the fact that he was representing individuals on legal matters where the results would sometimes determine a person’s entire livelihood.
“You’re working with people who are facing jail, deportation, detention … So of course there’s pressure. But that’s part of our lives as attorneys and that’s the work we take on,” he said.
García-Madrid credits Chapin for inspiring her students to be the best attorneys they can be. “It has a lot to do with Violeta; she is a treasure, a powerhouse and a bad ass attorney. The fact that we have her at CU Law School showing us what she does and how she does it is so invaluable.”
For Chapin, a “win” in the clinic does not only occur when a student wins their case in court. In fact, “sometimes it will happen where we’ll go to court and come in second place,” she said with a laugh. In any case, Chapin measures success by the client’s level of satisfaction with their representation.
“For me, a win is when a client feels like they have been heard; like they have participated in decisions with the attorneys and they felt like things were explained well enough to them,” she said. In the event of a loss in court, the win arises “if the client feels satisfied nonetheless that everything was done to litigate the case in a way that makes them feel happy.”
