Times-Picayune / Landov
The men in the orange jumpsuits marched into the courtroom. There were 11 of them on this June morning in New Orleans, and the chains around their ankles rattled with each shuffled step. They slid into the pews at the far side of the room.
Arrested the day before, none of them had been formally charged with a crime yet. This was their first hearing. They were to learn how much money they would need to walk free before nightfall. The magistrate court judge, at the front of the room behind a tall, dark-wood desk, called each name and asked each man two questions. Did he have a lawyer? Did he have a job?
Only one of the defendants had a lawyer. More than half did not have a job. The ones who did have a job made the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, maybe a dollar or two more. The judge appointed a public defender to 10 of the 11 defendants. All 11 were black.
After the defendants answered the questions, the judge called for a short break. The public defender assigned to the magistrate court met with her new clients, one at a time for around five minutes each, in a small soundproof room beside the pews.
This process repeats twice a day, five days a week, continually welcoming in the newest batch of entries into the city’s criminal justice system. More than 80% of defendants in New Orleans can’t afford a lawyer, and so a public defender represents them, their only ally in a long journey toward freedom or imprisonment. Yet while the office handles most cases that pass through the courthouses, it remains “the stepchild of the criminal justice system” in New Orleans, said Anthony Radosti, vice president of the city’s Metropolitan Crime Commission. “And it’s always been considered the stepchild.”
Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans didn’t even have a full-time public defender’s office. As the city picked up the pieces the storm left behind, a group of dedicated reformers set about ensuring that the indigent would have full-time legal representation.
“The most substantial impact and consequence of Katrina,” criminal court judge Arthur Hunter told BuzzFeed News, was the creation, for the first time, of a full-time public defender’s office in New Orleans.
But as the federal recovery cash dried up and the state’s economy declined, the public defender’s office slid backward, leaving behind a system that imprisons the city’s poor in vast numbers without spending the money necessary to provide them an adequate defense.
New Orleans has the highest incarceration rate in the state with the highest incarceration rate in America, the country with the highest incarceration rate. Prison stays are longer here because Louisiana's sentencing guidelines are among the harshest in the country. And injustice is more common here than anywhere else: No state has a higher rate of documented wrongful convictions than Louisiana.
On this June morning, 10 of the men in orange jumpsuits shared a defense attorney. During each five-minute meeting in the small soundproof room, the public defender listened to the defendant’s version of events, wrote some notes, told the defendant what to expect over the coming hours and days, then rushed back out of the room to grab the next file from her briefcase before stepping back in to meet with the next name on the list.
When the meetings were done, the hearings began. The prosecutor recited the state’s case, aggregated from police reports and officer statements. The public defender presented a few positive personal details about the defendant. The judge set bail. Each hearing took less than 10 minutes, each defendant’s story blending into the next one’s.
Joseph Edwards, 24, was arrested after an officer found 10 pills of tramadol, a prescription painkiller, in his car. The officer had pulled him over for pausing too long at a stop sign. The public defender noted that Edwards had been taking GED classes, three a week, and lived with his mother and father. The judge set the bail at $5,000. Jonathan Johnson, a 26-year-old musician, was arrested when a cop found weed during a traffic stop. The officer also found a gun in the car. Johnson owned the gun legally, but in Louisiana it’s against the law to possess a gun while also possessing drugs. Johnson had no prior offenses. The judge set the bond at $10,000. Daniel Miller, 42, was arrested when an officer pulled over a car he was riding in because he and the driver weren’t wearing seatbelts. The officer found a syringe containing a brown liquid that tested positive for cocaine and heroin. Miller had a record: armed robbery in 1992, bank robbery in 1998, marijuana and cocaine possession in 2009. He faced a minimum of 20 years in prison for this drug possession because of his priors, the judge noted. Bail: $21,000.
The possibility of getting caught in this spiral of increasingly longer prison time hung over the defendants who passed through the criminal courthouse. During one hearing, for a woman facing a drug charge, a judge suggested to her lawyer that she consider pleading guilty. She was a first-time offender. She could enroll in a drug treatment program and have the crime expunged from her record. The lawyer said this was a bad idea. If she gets another conviction, the crime pops back up on her record and a prosecutor could use this first offense to argue for a longer sentence.
“Which gives me so much comfort to know that I’m gonna [let someone out on bail] who’s worried about another conviction,” the judge said.
The lawyer shot back, “I think everybody in this city should be worried about another conviction,” and several people in the courtroom laughed.
From 1974 to 2004, New Orleans’ jail population jumped from 800 to 8,500, even while its overall population dropped from 570,000 to 460,000. By 2005, 13 of every 1,000 residents in New Orleans were in jail, more than double the rate of the city in second place, Baltimore, and more than four times the national average even as the rest of the country was embracing mass incarceration as a solution to crime. Louisiana had taken the trend even further.
Marijuana possession becomes a felony the second time a person gets charged. Three drug convictions can make a person eligible for life without parole. Three nonviolent convictions with sentences of 12 years or more can lead to automatic life without parole. These stacked sentences are particularly dangerous in New Orleans, where the criminal justice system is largely funded by the defendants who pass through it. Fines and fees make up 80% of the traffic court’s revenue, 40% of the municipal court’s revenue, and 30% of the criminal court’s revenue, all among the highest in the country, according to the National Center for State Courts, which deemed the practice “fraught with constitutional and ethical ramifications.” The end result is that low-level, even nonviolent, crimes can easily lead to a lifetime of debt and long-term incarceration. All of which makes consistent and effective representation for the poor people most likely to get caught up in the system more significant.
“We criminalize a lot of conduct. Our sentences are severe,” said Derwyn Bunton, Orleans Parish’s chief public defender since 2009. “You couple that with a lot of poverty and lack of resources, you get a pretty bad mix.”
By the early 2000s, 23% of residents in New Orleans lived below the poverty line, the seventh-highest rate among big cities. Eighty-four percent of those living in poverty were black, and the great majority of them lived in neighborhoods where the poverty rate approached 50%. These were the neighborhoods that took the brunt of the lock-’em-up culture that emerged in the second half of the 20th century.
And yet by the early 2000s New Orleans, like every other parish in the state, didn’t have a public defender’s office. Instead, a network of private attorneys represented poor defendants part-time, for $29,000 a year. A board of local lawyers oversaw the Orleans Indigent Defender Program, as it was then called. Traffic violations and other court fines and court fees funded more than 75% of the program.
Louisiana had established this system in the 1970s in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling that the Constitution requires states to provide legal representation to defendants who can’t afford a lawyer. According to Bill Rittenberg, a New Orleans defense lawyer since 1970, it was a part-time system because state legislators didn’t want to fund more than that and because they valued a tough criminal justice system.
Louisiana courts, as far back as 1993, had deemed the program unconstitutionally underfunded. That year, public defender Rick Tessier told the criminal court that he couldn’t afford to pay for experts or investigators for his cases. Tessier had so many cases, one judge noted, that his clients were “routinely incarcerated 30 to 70 days before he meets with them.” But the courts concluded that because of the separation of powers between government branches, they couldn’t order the legislature to increase funding.
At the start of 2005, the Orleans Indigent Defender Program’s office, a small room in the criminal courthouse, had four computers. Two of them were not connected to the internet; the other two were on dial-up. There was no secretary to answer phones. There was no office phone number. The attorneys had no database keeping track of cases, and they often didn’t have their clients’ files. Some attorneys spent most of their time on their private casework, for which they were paid more. “You got paid the same whether you spent two minutes or two hours or two days on a public defense case,” said Bunton.
The Southern Center for Human Rights, after a review of the office, found that public defenders in New Orleans “did not visit crime scenes, interview witnesses, check out alibis, did not procure expert assistance, did not review evidence, did not know the facts of the case even on the eve of trial, did not do any legal research, and did not otherwise prepare for trial." One attorney, the review stated, filled out puzzles in court. Attorneys missed court dates and failed to meet with new clients for months. In one case, a defendant spent more than a year in jail on a burglary charge without ever meeting with his public defender.
“Nowhere are the New Orleans systemic justice deficiencies more glaring,” the National Legal Aid & Defender Association concluded, “than in the delivery of defense services to people of insufficient means.”
The storm hit on Aug. 25, 2005. The levees in New Orleans broke four days later. Across the region, more than 1,800 people died, the majority of them in New Orleans. Flooding swept away large swaths of the city.
The criminal justice system ground to a stop, and there wouldn’t be a single criminal trial in New Orleans for nearly 10 months. Courts held hearings at a bus terminal or in the room used for police lineups. Judges and lawyers wore T-shirts and shorts. Most of their clothes were still in their New Orleans homes, and many of them commuted dozens, sometimes hundreds, of miles for court dates. Prosecutors worked out of an old dance club. With the jails flooded, the sheriff’s office shipped inmates to facilities across Louisiana, and since the public defender program had no database of cases, their clients were effectively invisible.
“Many of them were literally lost,” said Rittenberg, who is a former president of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “They just sat in jails in rural areas all over the state.”
With no revenue coming in from traffic citations and court fines, the public defense system collapsed; 34 of the 41 attorneys were laid off. Over the following months, a group of volunteer lawyers drove around to each facility in the state to track down these defendants, and manually built a public defender case list from scratch. With the courts shut down, the backlog of cases built up. And in the months after the storm, at least 6,000 defendants had no legal representation.
In February 2006, criminal court judge Arthur Hunter announced that he was suspending all public defender cases. “For all practical purposes, the public defender program no longer exists," Hunter said in court. Months later, as trials began once again in New Orleans, hundreds of defendants still had not met with a lawyer. Hunter, in a court order, said that he would begin releasing these defendants if the public defense system wasn’t fixed soon. “If we are still part of the United States and if the Constitution still means something then why is the criminal justice system 11 months after Hurricane Katrina still in shambles?” Hunter wrote.
It became known as “Katrina Time” — inmates serving months behind bars for no reason other than for being in jail on the day the storm hit. Greg Davis, arrested for failing to pay $448 in overdue court fines, spent seven months. Thomas Lee White, arrested for public drunkenness two days before the storm hit, was imprisoned for a year without getting a single court hearing.
By mid-2006, most judges, lawyers, and city officials agreed that the criminal justice system could not move forward without an overhaul. After the devastation and the horror, after the waters receded and the people prepared to push their lives forward, there was hope. Locals talked of how the rot and corruption and power structure, hardened over decades, had washed away with the trees and the cars.
“The turmoil was instrumental to reforming the public defender’s office,” said Tessier. “When people started to come to after the devastation, they decided that this was an opportunity. Something bad had happened, and maybe something good could happen now.”
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1L8zQ7R
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