A report from Kevin and Stacy on the state of justice and hospitality in Louisiana:
(T)hings went pretty good (those little sandwiches they had were GREAT!) until Kevin asked the Chief Justice if her daughter still had that tattoo on her thigh...
My son's been learning some good lessons this week. At the moment, he and I are watching a movie that he brought home from school about one of his new heroes, Ruby Bridges.
I was pleased to Google her story and find the connection to one of my old heroes:
On November 14, 1960, a 6-year-old Bridges, escorted by four gun-toting US federal marshals, walked past a screaming mob of angry white people to do the unthinkable in New Orleans at the time: Go to school with white children...
Backed by an order from Federal District Court Judge J. Skelly Wright, she walked quietly up the steps of William Frantz public school, past youths who were chanting, "Two, four, six, eight! We don't want to integrate..."
My third-grader is incensed by the way the people in the movie are treating this first-grader. Thank you, Ruby. G d bless you, Joe.
Homage to Judge Wright, from Susan Estrich: My Hero
J. Skelly Wright, a self-described "good Catholic boy" from New Orleans, a night-law-school graduate, a working-class kid who took seriously what he learned in school and in church, had been appointed to the federal district court by Harry Truman while still in his 30s because he was the only guy around who thought every ballot was supposed to be counted, once. But no one expected this good ole boy to decide that if separate but equal was inherently unequal, it was his job as a federal judge to order the first blacks to attend LSU Law School, to integrate the New Orleans school systems...
He didn't set out to be a hero. He just believed it was his job to do what was right, to enforce the law... He never got rich... As the Supreme Court changed, he got reversed more and more often. But he never stopped fighting...
Now you know just a tad more about this blog's patron saint.
(shown here with his wife Helen Patton Wright)
Well-written post from Dangerblond in New Orleans:
drugs and tennis shoes
Tonight, there were about 15 prisoners at HOD. Also, Popeye was back, making short work of a po-boy from Mandina’s. The older deputy told me that things had calmed down since this weekend, when there were 40 people arrested on Saturday and 30 on Sunday.
I said, “what happened? Everybody being good all of a sudden?”
He said, “no indeed. The cops just don’t want to arrest anybody...”
Public defender intern Kimberly gets it. From Dangerblond:
I’m taking a class this semester on Louisiana Criminal Procedure, taught by a guy who works in the Orleans Public Defender’s office... We’ve been asked to observe some criminal proceedings for the class, and I figured the best way to go about it would be to intern down there a few hours a week... Today was my first day of interviewing prisoners prior to their first appearances...
My job was to quickly determine indigent status and to fill out certificates stating that they qualified to be represented by a public defender. I also got contact numbers and personal data... After the attorney interviewed them, I went back to the office to call their contacts. Most of them already knew about the arrests, but the brother in California did not. He sounded weary. I really can’t imagine how it serves society to have this old man in jail for crack and make his poor brother deal with a bail bondsman from long distance. Society exacts its punishment on the family members for the mistake of having a drug-addled brother...
Welcome Brand New Orleans PD:
It's one thing to tell yourself that you'll accept a job offer from the New Orleans Public Defender on the spot. It's another to actually do it.
I had turned down all other job offers waiting to hear from three offices - the Philadelphia PD, New York Legal Aid Criminal Defense, and the Orleans Public Defender. My friends were rooting for Philadelphia or New York. But I wanted to be at the front lines of a brand new office at the cutting edge of criminal justice. I wanted to work with lawyers who weren't afraid to get their hands dirty. I wanted to go to New Orleans...
Via The Legal Reader, from the New York Times:
Judge Sends Public Defender to Jail
The chief judge in the city’s juvenile courts had a top public defender arrested Tuesday in a bizarre escalation of a fight over changes in the city’s troubled program for representing indigent defendants.
The judge, David Bell, was upset that no public defender was in his courtroom when he was ready to start this morning, and he drove to the defender’s office and waited outside for Stephen Singer, the chief of trials, to arrive.
The judge took Mr. Singer to his courtroom, where he found him in contempt for not being prepared to provide representation and ordered him jailed for 36 days, three days for each of the 12 items on Tuesday’s docket. Mr. Singer then spent about five hours in jail before a state appeals court stayed the order...
Recommended by Raymond P. Ward of Minor Wisdom, read this if you haven't read it yet -
Justice on Katrina Time - Hundreds, if not thousands, languish behind bars without their day in court
(I)n post-Katrina New Orleans(,) (a)n untold number of people got "lost" in the prison system in the weeks immediately after the storm... Many are still among the 3,000 active criminal court cases. At least 85% of them qualify for representation by a public defender...
The city's indigent defense system has long been plagued by negligent attorneys who provide haphazard and deficient representation. But in the months after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the program spiraled into chaos...
Ray observes that the characterization of the attorneys "...is probably an unfair criticism of people who did their best in impossible circumstances."
See also Do Not Pass Geaux.
Will the last public defender leaving New Orleans please turn out the courtroom lights? From the Times - Picayune, via Lexis One and The Legal Reader:
Trapped in the courtroom - As indigent defense lawyers vanish, one attorney is left
The Orleans Parish public defender situation is beyond crisis. And it is far past time that the Louisiana Supreme Court intervened.
This summer, changes at the public defender's office resulted in the resignation of a number of attorneys, including two of the three remaining attorneys who handled death penalty cases. Five lawyers had been handling 27 capital cases pre-Katrina... that insufferable caseload then devolved upon the remaining three.
Of the three remaining attorneys, one resigned... Another was reassigned to non-death-penalty cases. That left me...
Thanks to Ray Ward, this cover story from BestofNewOrleans.com:
Defenseless - Saddled with huge caseloads and low budgets, public defenders often have to give their clients -- the city's poorest citizens -- legal representation on the fly. It's just one part of a broken system.
Seventy percent of the people arrested on state or local charges in Orleans Parish are initially represented by Meghan Garvey, one of two public defenders assigned to Magistrate Court, the first stop in the local criminal justice system...
Arriving in New Orleans four years ago to begin Tulane Law School, Garvey read articles about problems in Municipal Court and became intent on trying to prevent mentally ill and drug-addicted people from entering the cycle of arrests that often begins with a minor offense such as "obstruction of a public passage."
"It made me want to take them out of the criminal justice system and put them in the mental health system," says Garvey, who has been practicing law less than one year... "It's a matter of pride in my city," she says. "I don't want to live in a place where the Constitution doesn't apply."
See, what happened was, down in New Orleans, someone unseen seems to have sent the juvenile clients a few deliverers:
We've spent time doing juvenile public defender work (lots of motions, lots of interviewing) over the past few weeks. The regular guy, the one who says "I try to plea all the kids guilty because it saves time"...he's been on vacation, so our office has been subbing for him...
If the guy checks in, tell him to take his time getting back.
EBR public defender dies at 62:
Longtime public defender Bert Garraway died Wednesday... from an apparent heart attack.
A 20-year veteran of the East Baton Rouge Parish Office of Public Defenders, Garraway litigated many death-penalty cases and murder cases and... a variety of clients, from the black Muslims in the 1970s North Street shootout to Barbette Williams, who slashed the attorney with a razor blade in the East Baton Rouge Parish Courthouse last year.
People occasionally wander here from searches for "Skelly Wright," and at least one commenter seems to think that I am Skelly Wright, owing to the icon there in the upper right-hand corner. So, as a public service, here is a bit of history about this blog's patron saint, the Honorable J. Skelly Wright.
It was 1946, and New Orleans had won the war. After a "perfunctory" trial, Willie Francis, a 16-year -old African-American, had been convicted of murder of a white man by the State of Louisiana and sentenced to die in the electric chair:
But at the moment of electrocution, the chair malfunctioned: some current flowed through Francis’s body, enough to cause intense pain but not enough to kill him. Neither of the men who had installed the portable electric chair were electricians, and the actual executioners were probably drunk at the time they threw the switch. Prison guards dragged Francis off to his cell and called an electrician. Meanwhile the NAACP and others mounted a crusade to prevent the state from trying to electrocute him a second time.
His lawyer at the U. S. Supreme Court: New Orleans native J. Skelly Wright, age 35:
Skelly Wright, then in private practice, argued the case before the Supreme Court. He framed the issue as whether the electrocution retry would violate the Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy provisions, the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, or the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection requirements.
To no avail:
The state of Louisiana again electrocuted Willie Francis, this time effectively, on May 9, 1947. For him, the travesty of reason in judicial decision-making had come to an end, but the Justices were not yet done with the questions that his fate had placed before them so poignantly.
The Supreme Court bungled Willie Francis’s appeal as badly as the drunken executioners had bungled the first electrocution try. The resultant mischief lives on. Later courts recurrently cite Francis v. Resweber, along with In re Kemmler, as authority for the proposition that the Eighth Amendment does not bar death by electrocution, shutting their eyes to mounds of empirical and graphic data demonstrating beyond any doubt that, far from being "instantaneous and painless", as numerous judges have termed it, death by electrocution is horrifyingly violent, prolonged, and painful. Though no opinion in Francis addressed that issue, the case lives on, misapplied to perpetuate state torture.
Bonus link goes to "Professionalism: Lawyers as Heroes, Villains and Fools" by Roger A. Stetter (pdf file). Skelly Wright is in the first category.
Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Katrina Relief Blog is here:
This Blog is being established to assist the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in providing relief to criminal defense lawyers across the state whose lives and practices have been disrupted by Hurricane Katrina. Anyone may add a comment to a post.
NACDL's Katrina relief project page is here.
A post-Katrina status report from A Fighting Chance, an organization "giving poor people facing the death penalty the facts for their defense":
The staff of A Fighting Chance and the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center (LCAC) have decided to reconstitute in Houston, TX. We don't know when we will be able to return to New Orleans so we are setting up temporary residence in Houston for the next 2 months or more, as needed...
Link via JohnHays.net by way of Greg Worthen of Public Defender Investigator Network.
Remember that Louisiana's system for indigent criminal defense wasn't in the best shape before the hurricane? Now it's in shambles:
"I talked to one guy who was arrested for reading a tarot card without a permit... These are mostly poor people. They haven't been in contact with their family. They have no word at all. A lot of them are pretty devastated... The warden said they hadn't had food or water for two or three days. So a lot of them were just grateful to be out of the sun, in an air-conditioned place where they could find food and a shower and a mattress."
In addition to the logistical problems of setting up courts, finding a place to meet, and getting judges, lawyers and evidence, a major question looms about how to pay for the defense of indigent detainees. Louisiana has been in a low-grade crisis for years over the issue, and currently two-thirds of the money to defend those too poor to afford lawyers comes from court costs for traffic and parking offenses.
But with the evacuation of New Orleans and its environs, none of that money will be available.
Legal officials say that without a quick resolution of the problem the state may be forced to apportion cases to public defenders on a level that makes adequate representation impossible or to free prisoners rather than violate their constitutional right to a speedy trial...
From The Guardian - Stranded:
For 12 years the Justice Center in New Orleans campaigned for poor inmates facing the death penalty. Now it has been completely destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. Clive Stafford Smith, the human rights lawyer who founded it, says hope is also lost for scores of its clients.
Read the story, then go to the Justice Center site. They can use your help:
In order to set up a temporary office we need the following:
• Office space: a substantial amount of office space has already been donated by the Gulf Region Advocacy Center;
• A new server, with back up tape drive capable of recovering and maintaining our data;
• Remote server hosting to allow broadband access to our files for staff at the temporary office and those who are still located in other states;
• Desktop or lap top computers for 8 staff to work on;
• Three laser printers;
• A copier machine;
• Desks and chairs for 10 staff (half of this has already been donated by the Gulf Region Advocacy Center);
• Office supplies – pads, pens, filing cabinets, hole punches, staplers, highlighters, post-it-notes – you name it, we need it;
• Phone and fax lines and an internet connection and networking;
Due to the urgent need for the offices to regain access to the server and its data we have made arrangements to have our data restored and a new server established. This will end up costing about $9,000 and has been put on a credit card. The Gulf Region Advocacy Center, itself a cash strapped non-profit, has already generously donated office space and some office furniture, as well as a fax machine.
We would also be grateful to receive assistance for our staff who are now homeless and have lost their possessions.
If you are able to donate goods, services or cash or have any questions about the Justice Center please contact us: Richard Bourke, rbourke@thejusticecenter.org or Christine Lehmann, christinel@theusticecenter.org, or make an on-line donation.
(link via Talk Left)
(bonus link goes to an evacuation report from New Orleans resident and editor Jordan Flaherty, via Creek Running North)
During this difficult time, NLADA has been reaching out to our members in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, especially those in areas that have been most affected by Hurricane Katrina. We've been able to reach some of you, while others remain in areas without phone service, electricity and in some cases the very infrastructure of their programs. Contact with them has been difficult. Much like some of the reporters we see on TV who are relaying messages of survival and hope, NLADA would like to hear from our members who are in a position to report on their personal status as well as the status of the programs and organizations in which they work. If there are members out there who have been able to reach colleagues in New Orleans, the communities along the Gulf Coast and all the other areas so terribly affected by Hurricane Katrina, please take a moment to let us know their status and of course to let us know what we in the NLADA community can do to help. We will relay any and all information as it comes in through our Web site, list servs and various electronic publications.
All of us at NLADA are working to develop and coordinate responses to the legal needs of our members. Currently, NLADA is gathering the names of members who have handled a wide variety of issues resulting from crises ranging from the tragedy of September 11 to the hurricanes in Florida to the wildfires in the West. These members have forwarded a great deal of information in the form of manuals, procedures and collection of real case studies in the wake of disasters and are willing to act as resources for our members in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, who have the overwhelming task of attending to people who have literally lost everything. This information will both be distributed electronically and available on our Web site. If you have information that you would like us to distribute, please contact Deborah Dubois at d.dubois@nlada.org. For those programs funded by the Legal Services Corporation, you should know that NLADA will work closely with LSC to help it secure funds for emergency services in a supplemental appropriations bill.
We will continue to work with our board of directors and our civil, defender and client policy group members to effectively coordinate our efforts in meeting your needs as they arise. We know that the individuals we serve will unfortunately occupy a significant portion of the population in need and that the resources on both the civil and defender sides of our community will be stretched greatly. The enormity of the tasks that lie ahead are daunting, but please know that NLADA is a resource for you and we will do all that we can to support you during this very difficult time.
We will keep you in our thoughts and prayers.
Sincerely,
Jo-Ann Wallace, President & CEO
National Legal Aid & Defender Association
Keep a positive thought for Raymond, Ernie, and other colleagues in the wake of the storm.
A Hurricane Katrina aid wiki has started here.
Update:
Trying to keep a client out of Parchman (Mississippi State Prison) is stressful enough, but for John Helmert, Katrina made it that much more difficult... Helmert, one of three public defenders in Lee County, was trying a case involving a young man... charged with felony malicious mischief....
Despite the trial, Helmert also was wondering about his relatives on the coast. "If you hear anything about another Helmert, a detective on the Biloxi Police Department, let me know," Helmert asked a reporter during a recess. "That's my brother. He's the only Helmert down there."
