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PBS Show Details Landmark Asylum Case; Nancy Lemon '80 Serves as Case's Expert
PBS aired a documentary on October 26 featuring the landmark asylum case of Rodi Alvarado, who escaped from her native Guatemala after a decade of brutality by her husband. Boalt lecturer Nancy K. D. Lemon '80 is the domestic violence expert in the case, which is pending before the U.S. Attorney General. The author of numerous books and articles in the field of domestic violence, Lemon has taught a Domestic Violence Law Seminar at Boalt since 1988 and a Domestic Violence Clinic since 1990. The PBS episode, “Breaking Free: A Woman's Journey,” chronicles Alvarado's case, which will decide whether battered women qualify for political asylum in the United States.
Fearing for her life, Alvarado fled to the United States in 1995 after repeated incidents of domestic violence. Granted political asylum by a San Francisco immigration judge in 1996, Alvarado saw her case reversed in 1999 by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). In 2001, then-Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the BIA to reconsider the case after the release of proposed Department of Justice regulations on the subject of gender asylum. Those regulations have not been finalized by the Bush administration. The Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at UC Hastings College of the Law has championed Alvarado's cause. Lemon has represented battered women seeking restraining orders, consults and testifies as an expert witness in domestic violence issues, and is on the board of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. The editor of the textbook Domestic Violence Law, Lemon is assistant editor of the Domestic Violence Report, a bimonthly national newsletter.
(10/28/2005)
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