SCHR: The Right to a Lawyer (Indigent
Defense)
A Report on
Pre- and Post-Katrina Indigent Defense in New Orleans
Southern
Center for Human Rights
March 2006
Click here for the full report
On August 29, 2005,
Hurricane Katrina swept across southern Louisiana, hitting St. Bernard,
Plaquemines, and Orleans Parishes, which comprise the entirety of the
jurisdictions within Louisiana’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal.
The hurricane left almost complete devastation of civil infrastructures,
including hospitals, schools, and the justice system. The storm also
bared massive pre-existing deficiencies, inter alia, poverty,
policing, and the justice system, where a great number of the 8500
detainees (pre and post-trial) ultimately evacuated from the region were
indigent, and held on minor offenses without contact or support from
their public defender.
When the levees in New
Orleans broke on August 30, 2005, there were approximately seven
thousand men and women awaiting trial in New Orleans who were too poor
to afford a defense attorney. Almost five thousand of these pre-trial
detainees were locked up in Orleans Parish Prison when the city flooded,
and were evacuated to prisons and jails throughout Louisiana. Most of
these indigent defendants, along with new post-Katrina arrestees, remain
locked up with no access to counsel.
At the invitation of and in partnership
with Safe Streets/Strong Communities, a citizens group working to reform
New Orleans' criminal justice system, the Southern Center for Human
Rights (SCHR) conducted a preliminary investigation into the crisis
involving the evacuated prisoners, meeting over a hundred detainees,
talking to scores of attorneys, and reviewing thousands pages of
documentation. What SCHR discovered was not just that none of the
indigent detainees had seen a lawyer since Katrina—within the last six
months—but that the vast majority of the defendants interviewed had not
seen a public defender outside of Court in the six months prior to
Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, SCHR discovered that the agency tasked
with representing these detainees did not know whom it now ostensibly
represents.
More than six months
after Katrina, a majority of those men and women remain behind bars,
where they have languished on average for over a year without any
communication with a defense attorney. There is an urgent need to
immediately staff and mobilize an indigent defense system that can
effectively and ethically represent the thousands of individuals who are
currently facing their criminal charges without assistance of counsel.
Click here for the full report