Last summer, Public Justice was proud to present Rosa Moreno with our Illuminating Injustice Award. Rosa, who worked at an electronics factory on the Texas-Mexico border, lost both her hands when the machine she was operating malfunctioned and fell on her arms. In a matter of seconds, the income her family depended on to survive was gone.
When Rosa went to court, her case was thrown out on a technicality. She, and her family, were left with virtually no money to survive on.
Rosa’s story is exactly why Public Justice created this award: To highlight the cases of those who have suffered a catastrophic injury but were unable to get the just compensation they deserved because of a barrier to access to justice. The award, which includes a $25,000 check from the Public Justice Foundation, is presented each year at our annual gala. Among other things, the award highlights the importance of the work that trial lawyers do for injury victims and other people harmed by corporate misconduct.
Nominations for this year’s award are now open, and anyone can nominate a deserving case by visiting our website, downloading the nomination form and submitting that no later than April 25th.
The winning case not only receives a substantial cash award. Public Justice’s communications team also works with our winner to highlight their story in the news, and ignite important conversations about justice in our courts. In Rosa’s case, our team worked with her on publication of an op-ed in The Guardian newspaper. As a result, her story was shared 85,000 times, making it one of the paper’s most-read pieces of 2015.
And that’s not all. Letters, emails and gifts of support flooded in from around the globe, and public pressure on LG Electronics (the company Rosa was manufacturing flat screen televisions for) became so great that the company was forced to issue a public apology about her case.
Today, Rosa travels throughout the United States and Mexico, educating workers and consumers about the working conditions so many face in the race to provide cheap products to the masses.
That’s the power of our Illuminating Injustice Award. We’re proud that it is changing lives, igniting debates and bringing some small semblance of justice to those who have been denied it for too long.
If you have a case we should know about for our 2016 award, please click here and tell us about it. With your help, we’ll continue to illuminate injustice, and work for change.
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