Assistant State Attorney Lisa Haba’s compassion for victims aids her in the fight against human trafficking in Central Florida.
COMPASSION IN ACTION: VICTIMS ARE ‘NOT JUST A STATISTIC’
Assistant State Attorney Lisa Haba commands a courtroom with a thorough ease and sharp quips against her opponent.
She’s the kind of prosecutor who offers a deal once and says “game on” if it’s rejected.
But in her quiet office on the second floor of the Seminole County Criminal Justice Center, she has cried when human trafficking victims she represents have a relapse with drugs. She has rejoiced with them when they are freed from their pimps and succeed in rehabilitation. And she has called to check up on them during nights, weekends — even when she was on maternity leave.
“I need them to know they’re not just a statistic,” Haba said. “It’s not just a case for me.”
It’s her compassion for victims that makes her a great lawyer for prosecuting challenging cases, her colleagues and former professor say.
“It’s hard to get a prosecutor who is impassioned about human trafficking,” said Maurice Edwards, a Seminole County Sheriff’s Office investigator. “She’s extremely passionate about rescuing and helping the victims.”
It’s what has made Haba, 33, successful in the fight against human trafficking in Central Florida, one of the country’s most prevalent areas for the crime of forcing people into labor and sex.
Orlando ranked third for the number of calls per capita to the National Human Trafficking Hotline last year from cities across the nation, according to The Polaris Project, a non-profit, anti-human trafficking organization. Florida also reported the third-highest number of calls.
The crime spills over into surrounding counties as pimps move around to stay inconspicuous.
For her work, Haba was awarded the Florida Attorney General’s Prosecutor of the Year during the Human Trafficking Summit last month in Orlando.
She discovered her passion for helping human trafficking victims while she was a student at Ave Maria Law School in Michigan, before it moved to Naples.
Haba worked for class credit in Professor Elizabeth Donovan’s law clinic. One of the cases involved a young woman who left Guatemala for the U.S. seeking a better life and was forced into sex trafficking.
“That kind of opened my eyes to this travesty that was going on that nobody was really talking about,” she said.
To successfully prosecute human trafficking, lawyers need not only excellent legal skills and understanding, but empathy, Donovan said. Haba exhibited that empathy even as a law student.
“She cared about the clients,” she said. “It wasn’t just a class.”
Haba went to work for the 18th Judicial Circuit in Seminole County in February 2011, under then-State Attorney Norman Wolfinger. It was her second state attorney’s office after law school. Wolfinger promoted her to a felony prosecutor that same year. She asked to lead the charge in prosecuting human trafficking cases, and he agreed.
Before that, the office wasn’t prosecuting human trafficking cases, Haba said.
“It was a brand-new crime we’d never really thought about before. Everyone saw a prostitute as a criminal,” she said.
Society is starting to see prostitutes as victims, Haba said.
“What girl wakes up one day and says, ‘I want to be a prostitute?’ ” she said.
A 2012 Florida law contributed to the societal shift.
The Florida Legislature passed the Safe Harbor Act, which considers prostitutes as victims instead of criminals and gives law enforcement discretion to take children to welfare professionals instead of juvenile detention.
Simultaneously, Edwards and the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office were ramping up efforts to investigate human trafficking. He and Haba joined forces to reinvigorate the Seminole County Human Trafficking Task Force.
Edwards, who nominated Haba for the award, said he was impressed when he presented her with a case that had several holes.
“It was a mess,” he said.
He almost expected Haba to reject the case altogether. Instead, she listed six or seven ideas to bolster the case.
“I saw right there that she really cared,” Edwards said.
Long after cases are closed, Haba still checks in with the victims. She celebrates their successes and laments their setbacks.
“When you work with somebody for so long,” she said, “you truly want to see them succeed.”