Attorney Lourdes Sanchez Ridge said she first noticed the trend when she got a call from a Spanish-speaking inmate at Allegheny County Jail who said he'd been locked up for 10 months and hadn't seen his lawyer.

When Ms. Sanchez Ridge contacted the absentee lawyer, he said, "Why should I go see him if I can't communicate with him?" She agreed to serve as a translator for the initial interview, though she knew this private lawyer could have long ago hired a professional translator himself.

"The guy was in for felony drug charges. Nobody went to see him [or explained the charges]. And he's scared out of his wits," recalled Ms. Sanchez Ridge, an international and white collar defense lawyer who heads Pittsburgh's Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and co-founded the county bar association's Hispanic Attorneys Committee. "As a result, I understood there were a lot of Spanish-speaking people at the jail. A lot more than I thought."

Richard Delgado, an emeritus law professor at University of Pittsburgh who teaches at Seattle University, said Latin American immigration to the U.S. has actually decreased slightly in the past few years. He attributes any spike in the numbers in the jail to "hypervigilance and this country's paranoia about undocumented immigrants." He said he believes law enforcement officers are on "a rampage" and Latino immigrants "are in the crosshairs."

"I'm a Latino and when I go out I'm on high alert. And I'm a 70-year-old law professor," he said.

Inmate data provided by Warden Ramon Rustin showed that on average, 43 undocumented immigrants from Latin America were lodged in the jail per month from September 2008 to August 2009.

Defense attorneys say most of these individuals are in for relatively minor infractions, like driving under the influence or disturbing the peace.

Many stay for a short time before they are transferred to a federal detention facility in York if they face immigration proceedings and possible deportation.

Mr. Delgado said, "Immigrants, especially Latinos, are a low-crime group, in part because of immigrant ethic but also because they don't want to come to the attention of the authorities."

After Ms. Sanchez Ridge's eye-opening experience, she organized an impromptu meeting to draw criminal justice officials' attention to the demographic shift in the community. The warden, two criminal court judges, the court administrator and the public defender attended.

Then the wheels of the local justice system slowly creaked forward toward better access.

The judges and court administrator pulled together thousands of pages of standard court forms, like jury trial waivers, protection from abuse orders, subpoenas and warrants. Ms. Sanchez Ridge and three fellow attorneys from the Hispanic Attorneys Committee volunteered to translate the mountain of documents into Spanish.

The warden arranged for one of the lawyers, Marilin Martinez-Walker, to dub the orientation video at the jail.

The public defender, Michael J. Machen, kept pretty quiet at that meeting, Ms. Sanchez Ridge remembered, but nevertheless he, too, snapped into gear to improve services for non-English-speaking defendants.

Under his directive, the public defender's office considers any inmate without a lawyer a potential client. Paralegals interview about 250 to 300 new clients at the jail each week, another chance to review the Latino population.

Patrick Corr, an intake paralegal for the public defender's office who estimates he's done 10,000 intakes, did an empirical study about a year and a half ago at Mr. Machen's direction and found that the population of monolingual Spanish-speaking clients at the jail had multiplied eightfold over a six-month period.

Once Mr. Machen reviewed this data, he instituted a task force to address the need for representation in Spanish.

Now, when a Spanish-speaking inmate shows up at the jail, Mr. Rustin has asked his staff to contact the public defender's office, where a Spanish-speaking staff attorney, Anthony Borrero, or one of the Spanish-speaking paralegals, is on call to do these interviews. The office created an intake form in Spanish that paralegals can use in a pinch if they're caught without backup.

Mr. Machen also hired a Spanish teacher to give a weekly language class for interested employees. Mr. Corr, who grew up in Northern Ireland and is a student in the class, said the teacher covers really practical material, like asking clients whether they have an attorney.

Five paralegals, five investigators, two intake clerks and a secretary have completed a semester's worth of coursework and Mr. Corr said that all 13 students have signed up to continue this fall.

Ms. Sanchez Ridge nominated Mr. Machen, and he was chosen to receive the Hispanic Attorneys Committee's El Sol Award for "his extraordinary efforts ... to ensure Hispanic defendants with limited knowledge of the English language are receiving competent and effective legal counsel," according to the official announcement. He will be honored Wednesday at the group's Hispanic Heritage Month celebration, which is co-sponsored by the Allegheny County Bar Association and Thorp Reed & Armstrong LLP, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Rivers Club, Downtown.

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