CLAP for Change

Eight months ago, Bart Burris died in Cache County Jail. His family still doesn’t know what happened.

The Criminal Law and Policy for Change club, which was started by Chris Fairbanks at Utah State University this semester, plans to raise awareness about the criminal justice system in Cache Valley and let people know what their rights are.

“They wouldn’t release an autopsy and they still haven’t,” Fairbanks said about the Burris issue. “We have two attorneys that are working on it and are trying to get an autopsy right now. I think it’s a negligence case.”

“We just want the family to be able to get answers,” said Jeff Hastings, vice president of CLAP for Change. “They do have rights and we just want to make sure they are receiving them.”

This is not the only issue CLAP for Change has been working on.
 
“Currently, Cache County has only two public defenders for the local office,” Fairbanks said. “Last year they saw 9,000 cases and only 1,200 were opened at trial level.”

Fairbanks finds this unacceptable and he wants to bring more awareness to the issue.

“They averaged about 56 minutes on each of these cases and they’re not properly able to represent anybody with that time,” he said. “They can’t pay attention to details that may lead to the innocence of the client. Prosecutors are dismissing a lot of cases because there are so many and guilty people are walking free.”

“They work an incredible load of cases and there’s a low incentive to research these cases because they don’t get paid much,” said Jeff Hastings, vice president of CLAP. “The quality of legal care is really low because of such a low budget.”

Fairbanks hopes to create enough awareness to help bring in more funding to the court systems in Cache Valley.

“The court system needs to be funded up here and it’s the state that needs to step in,” Fairbanks said. “They have excessive caseloads for the local system in Cache Valley.”

The CLAP for Change club hopes to bring awareness to college students about their legal rights.

“We just want to find places where things can be reformed,” Hastings said. “We just want to make sure citizens are aware of their rights because they are so easily trampled on.”

“I think the more people are aware of laws and the process of the criminal justice system, the better off they are,” said Jason Leiker, a criminal law and justice professor at USU. “We don’t see a lot of students get active with politics or go and vote, so it’s nice to see people get involved.”