CITY'S PUBLIC DEFENDER SYSTEM TROUBLED BEFORE KATRINA

Activists, Lawyers, Feds See A Chance To Fix New Orleans' Judicial Problems

New Orleans police got a reminder of the challenges facing the local
justice system two weeks ago, when they finally pried open the rusty
doors of their department's evidence rooms, which had been flooded in
the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year.

As was the case when a similar evidence vault was opened at the local
courthouse six months earlier, much of what was inside was a moldy
mess. A jumble of rusted guns was on the floor, and plastic bags of
narcotics were stuck in the ceiling's rafters, left there when the
water receded.

It's unclear how much of the evidence will be salvageable. For
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan and other local
officials, the damaged evidence represents only a small part of the
difficulty in restarting their criminal justice system, which is
unable to guarantee thousands of crime suspects their right to a
speedy trial and does not have nearly enough public defenders for
low-income defendants.

As dire as the situation seems now, Katrina has given New Orleans an
opportunity to repair a criminal court system that did not serve
low-income residents well even before the hurricane swept in from the
Gulf of Mexico. The system's woes have brought together civil rights
activists, U.S. Justice Department officials and lawyers from across
the nation who have begun working to help overhaul the criminal court
system in Orleans Parish.

The challenge is huge. Most of the 6,000 people awaiting criminal
trials are poor, and New Orleans' chronically underfunded public
defender's office had difficulty providing adequate representation to
all its clients even before Katrina hit. Jordan acknowledges that
about 2,100 of the suspects awaiting trials are in jails across
Louisiana, and that many of them do not have adequate legal representation.

"Katrina illuminated a staggering problem with the way impoverished
defendants have been treated for generations here," says Neal Walker,
a defense lawyer who heads a group that handles capital murder cases.
"People didn't know how bad it was."

Rick Tessier, a defense lawyer who was tapped by the court system to
assess the situation, says the public defender system was "on life
support" before Katrina.

The Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based public
interest law firm, sent attorneys and staff members to New Orleans in
March. In a scathing report, the center concluded that even before
Katrina, overwhelmed public defenders in New Orleans generally "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."

In interviews with 100 suspects statewide who were jailed before
Katrina hit, the center said, it found several examples of
inattention by public defenders to clients. "One public defender is
known for spending his days in court solving puzzles rather than
talking to clients," the report said.

Public defender's offices across the nation have been plagued by a
lack of funding, but the problem has been particularly acute in
Louisiana. It's the only state that funds public defender's offices
primarily with traffic ticket revenue.

The New Orleans public defender's office received 75% of its budget
from ticket revenue, which virtually dried up after Katrina. That led
to 31 of New Orleans' 39 public defenders being laid off from their
$29,000-a-year jobs.

As a result, legal help to the poor has all but vanished. A recent
Justice Department report said the New Orleans public defender's
office had "no client files or any other records, data, (except for)
a monthly tabulation of cases closed and how they were closed. There
is no phone number for the office, and clients cannot come to the office."

In its review of jailed suspects, the Southern Center for Human Rights found:

A man arrested May 12, 2005, for alleged purse snatching. His bond is
$5,000. He does not have prior convictions and still has not had "any
meaningful" contact with his public defender, the report said.

A man arrested Dec. 10, 2004, on drug charges, whose court date had
been postponed several times. At a court appearance Aug. 10, 2005,
his public defender did not show up, the report said. He was told he
would be brought back to court in October. Then Katrina hit Aug. 29,
and his court date was put off indefinitely.

A man who had been in jail for more than 400 days on a burglary
charge. His ex-girlfriend had accused him of taking $50 from her
house, the report said. He still had not been interviewed by his
court-appointed lawyer.

There are some hopeful signs for the public defender system. After
the Justice Department issued a report that called for an overhaul of
the New Orleans public defender's office, the office's board of
directors resigned last month and was replaced by a new panel.

The biggest hurdle to improvement remains funding. The Justice
Department has said it will cost New Orleans $8.2 million a year to
operate a public defender system that protects its clients'
constitutional rights. It calls for hiring 70 full-time lawyers and
paying them $54,000 annually.

So far, the office has been awarded almost $2.8 million in federal
hurricane relief. The Louisiana Bar Association has donated more than
$100,000 toward hiring back some of the laid-off defenders.

Meanwhile, the Louisiana Legislature is considering a proposal to
give $10 million to boost the state's public defender system, but it
has not passed.

"The money the Legislature is talking about is wonderful and
welcome," says Pamela Metzger, director of the criminal law clinic at
Tulane Law School.

"But they are not talking about a long-term sustained vision of how
to fund this system."