A boon for the GOP, the results will have stark consequences for state policy, easing the way for new legislation that would target LGBTQ+ residents, and empowering politicians who have championed draconian anti-crime measures and attacks on public education. They will likely set up more clashes between the conservative state government and the city of New Orleans. 

The results also signaled that election conspiracies continue to resonate with the GOP base, as several campaigns emerged triumphant after fueling false allegations of fraud during a critical juncture for the state’s voting systems. Jeff Landry, the incoming governor, tried to help Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as attorney general, and he doubled down on his alliance with the former president during his campaign this year.

Bolts covered the elections in the lead-up to Oct. 14, with an eye to its ramifications for criminal justice and voting rights. Below are seven takeaways on the results. 

1. Landry’s win hands the GOP a new trifecta

Jeff Landry, the state’s arch-conservative attorney general, easily prevailed in the governor’s race on Saturday, receiving 52 percent in a 16-person field. He will replace John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who was barred from seeking reelection due to term limits. 

Landry’s victory hands Republicans full control of the state government for the first time since 2015, since his party also defended its large majorities in the state House and Senate.

The result will free conservative policy ambitions, which were held back over the last eight years by Edwards’ veto power. Even when the GOP gained a supermajority capable of overriding Edwards’ vetoes earlier this year, it remained frequently unable to do so. This summer, for instance, the GOP failed to muster the votes to override Edwards on a bill that would have prevented discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. 

Landry is sure to bring an entirely different outlook on such issues. Throughout his career, he has pushed Louisiana to restrict LGBTQ+ rights and block teaching of such issues in education, including at the collegiate level. Last year, Landry created a new tool for people to file complaints against teachers and libraries. He has also worked for the state to obtain information about Louisiana residents who travel out of state to obtain gender-affirming care or abortions.

Landry has fiercely fought local and state reforms meant to reduce the state’s near-record incarceration rate, Bolts reported in a profile of the attorney general in August. This year alone, he ran ads lambasting “woke DAs,” fought efforts by Louisianans on death row to seek clemency, and championed a measure, which ultimately did not pass, that would have opened the criminal records of children as young as 13 to the public—but only in three predominantly Black parishes. 

2. Things are about to get more complicated for New Orleans

Republican-run states commonly preempt liberal policies adopted in their cities, so just the fact that the GOP gained a trifecta in Louisiana would put New Orleans in a tough spot. But beyond that, Landry has been particularly aggressive in undercutting his state’s most populous city. As attorney general, he retaliated against New Orleans officials when they crafted policies to protect immigrants and to shield residents from anti-abortion laws, proposing to withhold flood protection funds. He has also undermined efforts to reform New Orleans police while also setting up a short-lived state task force with the authority to make arrests in the city. 

And Landry has made it clear he would double down as governor, telling Tucker Carlson last year that the governor’s office in Louisiana “has the ability to bend that city to his will,” and that “we will.”

New Orleans voters on Saturday signaled their appetite for a very different politics. Landry received less than 10 percent of the vote in the city, far behind Democrat Shawn Wilson who drew 71 percent. A former public defender with some progressive support, Leon Roché, also defeated a former prosecutor for a position as criminal court judge in the parish. And one of Louisiana’s most left-leaning lawmakers, Mandie Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry), defeated more centrist challengers in a heated state House race for an uptown district.

On Sunday, even as she celebrated her own win, Mandie Landry said she was preparing for a “sobering” stretch for her city. “I think there is going to be more of a push from Baton Rouge to interfere in New Orleans than usual,” she told Bolts. “I am not under any delusions.”

3. This was a low-turnout election

For an election that will deeply affect Louisiana, engagement was very low: just 36 percent of registered voters turned out on Saturday.

Turnout fell sharply in the state’s two most populous urban regions, which vote very Democratic. Compared to the 2020 presidential election, the number of voters who cast a ballot fell by 60 percent in New Orleans and by 52 percent in East Baton Rouge Parish. In the rest of the state, it only fell by 49 percent. 

Mandie Landry, the New Orleans lawmaker, faults the state Democratic Party for doing little outreach to her city’s voters. Compared to the “huge efforts to get out the vote” she witnessed in 2015 and 2019, “there was none of that this time,” she told Bolts. “I didn’t see any get out the vote effort.” The state Democratic Party, which scarcely spent money in the run-up to the primary, did not respond to a request for comment. 

4. Secretary of state race heads to a runoff, but a new frontrunner emerges

Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin has tried to appease election conspiracists since 2020, for instance quitting a multi-state consortium that monitors voter registration after false claims that it was tied to George Soros. With Ardoin retiring this year, the big question on Saturday was which of the many Republican candidates would advance to a runoff. 

Ardoin’s deputy Nancy Landry (no relation to Jeff Landry or Mandie Landry) barely edged out her rivals, coming in first with 19 percent. Bolts reported earlier this month that, much like her boss, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals while also echoing unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities. 

Mike Francis, the Republican who most firmly rejected election conspiracies, very narrowly lost out on a runoff spot, coming in third with 18 percent. Brandon Trosclair, a little-known businessman who ran as a hardline election denier and called for fully hand-counting ballots, got 6 percent.

Landry will now face Democrat Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who snatched the second runoff spot. Collins-Greenup got 19 percent as well, but Landry will be the clear front-runner since all Republican candidates combined for 68 percent of the vote cast on Saturday. The state is at a crossroads on election administration since it has to soon replace its outdated voting equipment, an issue around which the far-right has mobilized.

5. In first referendum inspired by “Zuckerbucks,” voters ban private election grants 

Voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1, a measure that will block Louisiana’s election offices from receiving private grants from outside organizations. 

A non-profit with ties to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 to local election offices nationwide, in order to help them run elections during the early pandemic. The right quickly dubbed these grants “Zuckerbucks,” fueling conspiracies about election interference, and many GOP-run states proceeded to pass laws to ban such grants. To circumvent the Democratic governor’s veto, Republican lawmakers in Louisiana placed such a ban directly on the ballot for the first time.

Some elections experts critical of such bans share the reservations about private money flowing into elections, but they also stress that public funding is woefully inadequate, and that the bans risk further starving cash-strapped offices, threatening election security rather than protecting it. 

“Nobody’s got money to pay election officials what they’re worth (particularly in this new environment), to invest in new systems, to make improvements to back-end security,” Justin Levitt, a voting expert who now teaches at Loyola Law School, told Bolts on Sunday. “If the state actually responded by funding the elections we deserve, banning private money wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Private donations were only ever there to stop the bridge from collapsing entirely. They never should have been necessary. Yet they were.”

He added, “I think we can all hope that we’re not dealing with that kind of 10-alarm fire in 2024.”

6. In sheriff’s races, a sea of white men—again

Sixty-three parishes held sheriff elections, and only three even featured women running for the office. All lost on Saturday. 

This means that all 63 parishes have elected a man, or are sure to do so after the Nov. 18 runoffs. This dynamic is nothing new: All of these parishes already have a male sheriff. 

Nearly all incoming sheriffs will also be white. Across these 63 parishes, only three elected a Black sheriff on Saturday, with Black candidates advancing to a runoff in three additional parishes. By contrast, 57 of these 63 parishes elected a white sheriff on Saturday or will do so after the runoff. Louisiana’s population is 30 percent Black. 

This pattern is symptomatic of the societal biases regarding what law enforcement should look like, though breaking it up would not in itself change brutal conditions and treatment inside the state’s jails. And here again, New Orleans stands out from the rest of the state.

Its sheriff, Susan Hutson, is a Black woman who took office in 2022 (New Orleans holds its elections on a different cycle than all other parishes, and so Hudson was not on the ballot this fall). “As a woman and as a Black woman, I go through additional types of microaggressions in the job,” Hutson told Verite News last year. “So just having somebody else there who might be experiencing something similar with me, it’s good—it’s good to see someone like you.”

7. East Baton Rouge sheriff secures another four years 

The jail in Louisiana’s most populous parish is notorious for an alarming death rate and for the brutal treatment of people detained there. But, as Bolts reported in August, organizers and civil rights lawyers have run into Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, who has overseen the facility for 15-plus years, boosted by campaign contributions from people and groups that benefit from more jail spending. 

Gautreaux won reelection with 86 percent of the vote on Saturday. He is a Republican in a heavily blue jurisdiction but he faced no Democrat; two opponents were kicked off the ballot over the summer, though neither was expected to mount a serious challenge to the entrenched sheriff.

Reverend Alexis Anderson, co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, a local organization that has pushed back against the sheriff’s practices, told Bolts on Sunday that she would continue to demand accountability regardless of these results. “I stand committed to working towards independent investigations of each and every death that has occurred in that facility under the Gautreaux administration,” she said. “We will continue engaging our community on the development of real public safety tools.”

Anderson added, “There are too many lives at stake to become discouraged.”

Piper French contributed reporting for this article.

The post Louisiana Takes a Hard Swing to the Right appeared first on Bolts.

Jeff Landry faces 15 opponents in Louisiana’s gubernatorial race this fall, but at times, it seems like the Republican attorney general is really running against the state’s Democratic, majority-Black major cities. 

In his announcement video, the candidate blasted Louisiana’s “incompetent mayors and woke District Attorneys” for what he sees as their role in allowing crime to proliferate. He doubled down in a series of campaign videos that called out the DAs of Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans for the three parishes’ crime rates, highlighting images of the two Black prosecutors but omitting any footage of East Baton Rouge DA Hillar Moore, who is white. “When DAs fail to prosecute—when judges fail to act – when police are handcuffed instead of the criminals—enough is enough,” he announces. 

In 2022, he assisted a Republican lawmaker in unveiling a bill, House Bill 321, that would have made public the criminal records of young people between ages 13 and 18 who are accused of a violent crime—but only in Caddo, East Baton Rouge, and Orleans, all parishes with some of the highest concentrations of Black residents in the state. Landry made news appearances advocating for the bill and spoke at the press conference announcing it, later using portions of his speech for campaign ads attacking those three parishes’ DAs. 

Bruce Reilly, a formerly incarcerated criminal justice reform advocate who testified against the bill at the Capitol, sat behind Landry as he spoke in favor of HB321. “If you think this is a good thing, why wouldn’t you do it in your own town?” he wondered.

It’s not uncommon for Republican candidates to blame Democrats for crime rates in the cities they control as a way of establishing conservative bona fides. But Landry’s campaign rhetoric isn’t just bluster. During his seven-plus years as attorney general, he has used the power of his office in standard, unorthodox, and at times highly controversial ways to single out New Orleans and the state’s other big cities. 

Landry’s actions have ranged from creating a short-lived anti-crime task force that made arrests in New Orleans without clear jurisdiction to to spearheading punitive legislation that only applied to Louisiana’s three major cities. He also tried to strike down a federal consent decree ensuring a majority-Black state supreme court district in Orleans Parish. And he even recently tried to withhold flood protection funds after city officials suggested they wouldn’t prioritize enforcing abortion crimes. 

Landry, whose campaign did not respond to interview requests from Bolts, will face off against his actual opponents in the primary on Oct. 14. If no one candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two, regardless of party, will compete in a runoff on Nov. 18. The incumbent, Democrat John Bel Edwards, cannot seek re-election due to term limits, and Landry has so far been the front-runner in public polling. 

A win by Landry would return unified control of Louisiana’s government to the GOP. But it would also elevate and empower a man who has tirelessly sought to undermine the political power of the state’s major cities and shield law enforcement from local and federal reform efforts.

“The place is being run like a third world-country,” the attorney general said of New Orleans during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last October. “Why doesn’t the state just take it over?” Carlson asks. “It’s a great question,” Landry responded. “In Louisiana, we have one of the most powerful executive departments in the country. The governor is extremely powerful. He has the ability to bend that city to his will, and he [Edwards] just doesn’t.”

“But we will.”

After an early stint as both a police officer and sheriff’s deputy, followed by law school, Landry was elected to Congress in 2010 as part of the ascendant Tea Party, the proto-MAGA movement that crusaded against taxation and federal government overreach. During his lone term representing Louisiana at the national level, Landry posed with a chainsaw in his office, meant to symbolize his willingness to make sawdust of the national budget. His time in Congress would be short lived—ironically, his congressional seat was eliminated during redistricting after New Orleanians left the city in droves in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—but he brought the chainsaw approach to his new role as attorney general, especially when it came to opposing Obama-era federal policy and executive orders.

Since he took office in January 2016, Landry has waged a rhetorical war on crime in New Orleans filled with racist dog whistles implying that the majority-Black city is lawless and out of control. “He definitely appeals to race,” said Bruce Reilly, the Deputy Director of Voice of The Experienced (VOTE), a group of formerly incarcerated Louisianans and their allies that advocates for criminal legal reform. “You pile on the Black mayor, the Black DA, the Black sheriff, right—it’s known as a Black city.” 

“I think it’s obvious,” Caddo Parish DA James Stewart, who is Black, said in an interview about the campaign videos in which he and New Orleans DA Jason Williams are depicted but their white counterpart in East Baton Rouge is not. 

Landry’s belief that New Orleans and other major cities are being poorly run is inextricably tied to his desire to police them more heavily and without restraint. In Landry’s interview with Carlson last October, he made it clear what he believes to be the solution to New Orleans’s woes. “That’s the way you start to take back control of these cities: by instituting state and local control—in law enforcement,” the attorney general said. He has also argued that New Orleans police should be allowed to use stop-and-frisk practices, which a decade-old consent decree, which grants federal oversight of the city’s police department in order to institute reforms, prohibits. 

“I think he genuinely is completely unwilling to entertain the idea that there are solutions to crises that we have in our state that are not driven by criminalization,” Mercedes Montagnes, a local civil rights lawyer, said of Landry. 

In July 2016, citing rising crime rates in the Big Easy, Landry created a Violent Crimes Task Force consisting of five state agents from the Louisiana State Police Bureau of Investigation who would patrol and make arrests within New Orleans city limits. His announcement was met with statements of support from some local officials, but within months, the New Orleans chief of police had signaled to Landry that his office had no authority to engage in law enforcement in the city, and a spokesman chided Landry for using the department, and the city itself, as a “prop in political agendas.” 

Landry ultimately disbanded his task force amidst criticism from local officials and a federal judge, who said she believed that Landry lacked the authority to direct agents to make arrests in New Orleans and stressed the importance of police operating only where they have the authority to do so in order to ensure that arrests were valid. Its actual impact was far thinner than the controversy it fomented: In nearly a year of operations, the task force had made only 16 documented arrests, leading to at least one case where a public defender argued the arrest was illegal (it was upheld).

Landry has also heaped scorn on the consent decree governing the New Orleans Police Department, consistently implying that it is a misuse of federal authority (he recently called it a “pernicious threat to federalism”) and said that it “handcuffs cops instead of criminals,” a pet phrase of his. 

The decree, which Landry also likes to refer to as an example of what he calls “hug a thug” policies popular with Democrats, was put into place in 2013 after a U.S.Department of Justice investigation—itself sparked by an incident just six days after Hurricane Katrina in which a group of New Orleans police officers in street clothes toting AK-47s shot at a Black family and their friend as they were walking to the grocery store. Two of them were killed, including a 17-year-old; four others were severely wounded, including one woman whose arm later had to be amputated. The department then tried to cover up the shooting. Federal investigators found “patterns of misconduct that violate the Constitution and federal law,” which they stressed went far beyond the incident itself. 

The subtext to Landry’s crusade is not merely opposition to federal power or a desire to assert state-wide control—it’s a distaste for any checks on police power. In 2017, he penned an editorial heralding the news that the end of the consent decree was near (it wasn’t). “As expected when police priorities are subject to the approval of activist judges and Washington lawyers, the community suffers and criminals benefit,” the AG wrote.

In recent years, Landry’s campaign against the consent decree has aligned with the efforts of New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, otherwise a frequent sparring partner of Landry’s, to put an end to the decree. (Still, as of April, more than half of the city council opposed the mayor’s stance as of April and said the consent decree should stay.)

But Montagnes, the civil rights lawyer, stressed that Landry’s actions were more about politics than his assessment of how far the New Orleans police department has progressed since the implementation of the consent decree. “[Jeff Landry] is not talking to people in New Orleans,” Montagnes said. “He’s not holding community meetings. This is just based on his unilateral position that we should not trust the federal government, and we should get them out of our business.”

Landry has used his office to retaliate against city leaders who disagree with him on abortion criminalization and immigration enforcement, at times withholding key funding and jeopardizing important city functions with his political gamesmanship. 

In 2016, after New Orleans police adopted a policy preventing officers from inquiring about people’s immigration status, Landry helped craft a bill that would prevent so-called sanctuary cities from accessing state bond money for construction projects. The bill would have also granted him, as attorney general, sole authority to define what a “sanctuary city” actually was—under his definition, New Orleans was the only municipality that qualified. 

Some lawmakers worried that the bill would give Landry too much power, and could place the city in conflict with its own consent decree. New Orleans, meanwhile, maintained that its police force’s anti-discrimination policies, including its best practices around immigration status, came at the behest of the federal government itself. Versions of the bill died in 2016, 2017 and 2023. 

In late 2022, Landry used his position on the Louisiana State Bond Commission to try and hold up $39 million dollars in flood prevention funding for New Orleans after the city council passed a non-binding resolution related to Louisiana’s harsh new abortion law, which lacks rape or incest exceptions. The city resolution requested that police and prosecutors make investigation and enforcement of the law “the lowest priority.” 

Landry responded by urging the commission to “use the tools at our disposal to bring them to heel.” Initially, his fellow commissioners seemed to agree, voting twice to stop the funding from moving forward. But their support crumbled, culminating in a tense, at times openly hostile meeting in September in which the board ultimately voted to approve the funding. “To use this commission as a political maneuver is not our position—shouldn’t be our position, I feel,” said Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser, claiming he hadn’t realized how the representative he had sent to previous meetings had voted.

“We’re talking about someone whose job it is to sit on the bond commission withholding vital infrastructure funds to punish any democratically elected local government,” said Monika Gerhart, an energy consultant and the former director of intergovernmental relations for the city of New Orleans. Gerhart is currently consulting on policy for Shawn Wilson, one of Landry’s chief opponents.

Gerhart believes that Landry’s ultimate goal wasn’t even to punish New Orleans, but rather to force his fellow commissioners, several of whom were also considering a run for governor, to vote to signal their anti-abortion bona fides, inevitably angering a large municipality whose residents would soon go to the polls to choose whether to elect them as governor. He has since announced that he will not run, but at the time, Nungesser was considered Landry’s most viable Republican opponent in the gubernatorial race; another commissioner, State Treasurer John Schroeder, is a more centrist Republican whom Gerhart believes will likely seek to court New Orleans Voters, especially if the race were to come down to a run-off between him and Landry.

“It was a completely manufactured crisis,” she added. “I think it’s a really dangerous way to prioritize politics over governance.” 

Landry is, of course, running to be governor of the entire state. But Reilly believes Landry sees it as more advantageous to scapegoat New Orleans in order to rally his base than he does to seek out its residents’ votes. In Louisiana, he said, “you can win an election on all rural votes. You can win an election on all white votes.” 

And so far, those are the very voters Landry seems to be courting with his campaign. He aligned himself with Trump early on and received his endorsement, and he has woven his critiques of New Orleans into a larger “tough on crime” platform. His main Democratic opponent, Wilson, meanwhile, is charting a moderate approach, emphasizing his statewide leadership experience and credentials; his slogan is “We need leaders who will build bridges, not burn them.” 

If Landry wins control of Louisiana’s executive branch, he would have the power to staff many of Louisiana’s more than 500 boards and commissions, including a number with direct power over the state’s criminal legal system, such as the Committee on Parole, the State Police Commission, the Police Officer Standards and Training (POST) council, and the Louisiana Sentencing Commission. Landry would also have ultimate say over the state’s budget;. the office’s line-item-veto power means that Landry would have the ability to, with the stroke of a pen, edit the state’s budget in order to divert resources away from New Orleans and other cities when they adopt policies he doesn’t like. 

Critics of Laundry’s who spoke to Bolts fear he would go even further in inserting the state into New Orleans politics on issues like crime, homelessness, and social and cultural issues—much like Governor Ron DeSantis has done in Florida. 

“There’s this incredibly complicated relationship between the remainder of our state and New Orleans,” said Montagnes. New Orleans is the center of business and tourism in Louisiana, she said, “but I think it becomes a bogeyman on cultural, social issues, and I think that Jeff Landry is really particularly interested in dividing people of Louisiana based along those issues. And so we’d be an easy target.” 

The post Jeff Landry’s Bid for Louisiana Governor Has Been a Crusade Against Its Cities appeared first on Bolts.

In recent years, prosecutors on a mission to challenge mass incarceration have been using their power to keep people out of prison, but now they’re beginning to turn their attention to those who are already locked up. Few have pursued this as promptly and publicly as Jason Williams, the new district attorney of New Orleans, who may be setting the bar for DAs nationwide. And this focus could be transformative in New Orleans, the largest city in a state known as the nation’s incarceration capital.

Since he entered office in January, Williams has rolled out sweeping changes. He has granted new trials to nearly two dozen people convicted by split juries, announced he would no longer oppose parole applications, dropped his predecessor’s efforts to maintain life without parole sentences for people convicted when they were minors, and moved to secure the release of multiple wrongfully convicted people.

“There are innocent people in jail,” said Williams, who was elected in 2020 on a progressive platform. “There are people in jail for sentences that are far longer than they should be. … There are people who got convicted without a fair trial.”

This retrospective approach to addressing injustice is taking shape beyond Louisiana too; prosecutors like George Gascón in Los Angeles County and Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore have established resentencing units that have reviewed lengthy sentences and released those serving them. 

This is a big departure from what has been the norm for decades. The traditional focal point of conviction integrity units has been innocence claims. But the post-conviction reviews that are springing up, in certain places thanks to legislative changes in state law, are taking a broader look at redressing excessive sentencing and other drivers of mass incarceration. 

“[Prosecutors] can have an enormous impact for post-conviction review because it’s not limited to people who are factually innocent,” said Lara Bazelon, a law professor and the director of the criminal juvenile justice and racial justice clinical programs at the University of San Francisco School of Law. “They can work backward and try to rectify really draconian sentences, and I feel like Orleans Parish is kind of ground zero for that.”

Williams has also taken steps to prevent people from going to jail in the first place by directing his staff not to prosecute for possession of personal amounts of most drugs.

One driver of mass incarceration in Louisiana is the “multiple-bill” statute, an “habitual offender” sentence enhancement. The statute enables prosecutors to use prior convictions as leverage to force longer sentences.

While campaigning last year, Williams pledged never to use the multi-bill statute. That commitment has expanded as his office now also reviews multi-bill cases handled by previous DAs. In Louisiana, nearly 40 percent of those imprisoned are serving maximum sentences that exceed 20 years.

“The fact that they are looking at these cases is really unprecedented,” said Norris Henderson, founder and executive director of VOTE, an organization of formerly incarcerated people who work to end mass incarceration. “The ‘long-timers’ are there [in prison] because they got these habitual sentences … And what we found out during our research was that it wasn’t really but three or four parishes using the multi-bill exclusively, [including] Orleans Parish.”

Emily Maw, the Civil Rights Division chief under Williams, estimates that nearly 700 people are in prison from Orleans Parish because of excessive sentences imposed by  prosecutors who used the multi-bill statute. 

In her first weeks on the job, Maw joined with a group of defense attorneys to motion for a “negotiated settlement” in court which enabled Herbert Estes, a New Orleans man with leukemia, to be released from prison. Estes had been serving a life without parole sentence after former DA Harry Connick Sr. used the multi-bill statute to compel the sentence. This month, the office supported the release of Guy Frank, who received a multi-bill sentence during Connick’s tenure and was in prison for 20 years for stealing two shirts.

“We know that Orleans Parish is mass producing often-inaccurate convictions and certainly excessive sentences,” Maw said. “We have to try to remedy those cases by category, because there’s just so many of them—more so than any other district attorney’s office in the country.”

Maw, a former director of the Innocence Project New Orleans, which advocated for Frank’s release, says that in addition to tackling multi-bill cases, her division is identifying who is in prison because of nonunanimous juries. 

In Louisiana, nonunanimous, or split, jury convictions were written into the state constitution in 1898 as a defense by white lawmakers eager to quell the influence of Black jurors. This law disadvantaged Black people, according to The New Orleans Advocate, by acting “as a capstone to trial system that becomes more titled against black defendants at each stage: when jurors are summoned, when they’re picked for juries, and in deliberation rooms, where voices of dissent can be ignored.” 

According to Maw, approximately 340 New Orleanians are in state prison based on a conviction by a split jury.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that guilty verdicts for criminal trials must be unanimous. The Court’s decision in Ramos vs. Louisiana affected cases still in the appeals process, but doesn’t apply to old cases. However, Williams’s office has decided to waive objections to new trials for those convicted by split juries even if those cases are no longer pending appeal. Already, two dozen new trials are underway.

Ben Cohen, one of the lawyers who led the Ramos lawsuit, now serves as chief of the Appeals Division under Williams.  

“Our job is to do justice, not to defend convictions or secure convictions,” Cohen said. “We would be avoiding our legal and moral responsibility if we didn’t look backward, and we only looked forward.”

There are numerous ways to do that, Cohen told the Appeal: Political Report. Prosecutors have the discretion to permit opportunities for commutations, clemency, or parole. These can be avenues to remedy cases where the factors working against defendants aren’t as cut and dry. “[Nonunanimous juries and the habitual offender statute] are the most obvious catalysts for injustice, but they are not the only ones,” Cohen said. He noted that shoddy police work, speedy courtroom trials, and broader conditions of poverty have also stacked the deck against people accused of crimes.

Cohen added that the office will no longer use procedural barriers to slow down appeals or motions for post-conviction relief. This is part of a broader policy of the office to stop creating obstacles to release by default.

“One of the first policies that [Williams’s office] produced was that they were no longer going to send [prosecutors] to parole hearings and contest everything,” Henderson said. “That was the first thing that gave me an indicator that promises made were going to be promises kept.”

Williams announced in January that his office would no longer oppose any parole or pardon application. This is a major departure from his predecessor’s policy of routinely opposing applications.

Williams’s office has also withdrawn his predecessor’s bids to maintain life without parole sentences for people convicted as children, enabling them to apply for parole. 

In 2012 and 2016, the Supreme Court ended mandatory juvenile life without parole sentences, and applied this ruling retroactively. In response, Louisiana made people sentenced while minors automatically eligible for parole unless DAs filed notices in court objecting to this. Williams’s predecessor Leon Cannizaro was doing just that in many cases. But Williams’s decision to withdraw those motions means that a dozen people will now be newly eligible to apply for parole.

Throughout the state, approximately 300 people are serving life without parole sentences for crimes that they committed while children. 

“I know all 300 of them,” Henderson said. “Other people just see something abstract. But I see an individual who I know personally who is serving life without parole because he was a kid. … To see, one day, there’s no hope of you ever getting out of prison, and the next day you’re walking out the gate—that speaks volumes.”

Besides expanding the scope of post-conviction review, Williams’s office is still intent on rooting out wrongful convictions and freeing innocent people. In March, prosecutors worked with Bazelon to secure the release of one of her clients, Yutico Briley, who was serving a 60-year sentence for an armed robbery he didn’t commit.

Bazelon said the weighty sentence was handed down in a process that “probably lasted five minutes. It took less than five minutes to just throw him away. And I don’t think people understand that that is routine.”

Williams and his team have faced obstacles to their efforts: Not only is the new approach a vast culture change for many of the staff, but the processes for post-conviction review also have to be developed in an office with limited capacities and poor paperwork. 

“This is extremely painstaking and difficult work,” Williams told the Political Report. “Our file clerks literally had to find these records that are all over the place and not in good working order. … They’re not well organized. They’re not electronically available. So, this review involves moving boxes in and out of the office.”

Williams hopes that all of these changes will improve the reputation of the office and encourage community members to want to work with prosecutors when they experience crime.

“We are repairing that breach of trust with our community,” said Williams. “I believe that we will find more robust participation in the process going forward in terms of new and existing cases if we can show that we are willing to do the hard work of confronting the sins of past administrations.”

The post In Nation’s Incarceration Capital, a New D.A. Is Freeing People From Prison appeared first on Bolts.

Death penalty opponents have made great strides over the last decade, getting states to outlaw the sentence or at least reduce its use. Now they’re gaining allies from local officials with direct power to shut down capital punishment: prosecutors. 

Last week, Deborah Gonzalez and Jason Williams became the latest candidates to win elections for district attorney after pledging to never seek the death penalty once in office.

Their runoff wins in Athens, Georgia, and New Orleans add to a string of similar results this year in Los Angeles County, Arizona’s Pima County (Tucson), Georgia’s Fulton County (Atlanta), Oregon’s Multnomah County (Portland), and Texas’s Travis County (Austin). Incoming prosecutors largely echoed advocates’ longtime claims, emphasizing that the death penalty is applied very unequally and that its use is inhumane and costly.

Their wins are poised to upend the culture of capital punishment in places that have been prolific in handing out death sentences, and advocates are preparing to press them to overturn these past sentences.

There are more than 200 people on death row from Los Angeles, where the DA election in November saw George Gascón defeat an incumbent who over the course of her tenure secured the death penalty nearly exclusively against people of color. Gascón took office this week and promptly repeated his campaign pledge to not just drop the death penalty in future cases but also review past death sentences, a step few prosecutors have taken.

“The death penalty does not make us safer,” Gascón tweeted on Monday. “It’s racist, morally untenable, irreversible, and expensive. And today, it’s off the table.”

Pima County has also been a death penalty hotspot. It leads Arizona counties in number of executions since the penalty was reinstated in 1976. But this fall voters elected as their chief prosecutor a former public defender, Laura Conover, who highlighted her past advocacy with the Coalition of Arizonans to Abolish the Death Penalty. Conover is not the first candidate with such experience to be elected. Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, who was the legal director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, won a prosecutor’s race in northern Virginia last year on a similar platform.

“It’s absolutely tremendous and exciting that this is taking place in Louisiana, and in Georgia, and in Virginia, states that have a long history with the death penalty, and of course Los Angeles County, one of the biggest contributors to the enormous Californian death row,” said Laura Porter, executive director of the 8th Amendment Project. “It’s supportive of the trend of the country overall moving away from the death penalty.”

These seven newly elected prosecutors who said they would never seek a death sentence are Democrats, even though Republicans haven’t been absent from the anti-death penalty movement. Support from some Republican lawmakers proved decisive in 2019 and 2020 when Colorado and New Hampshire’s legislatures repealed the death penalty. (The Political Report only analyzed candidate positions in the 28 states where the death penalty is still legal.)

Elsewhere, longtime prosecutors who have repeatedly used the death penalty lost re-election bids. Most notably, Ron O’Brien is on his way out in Franklin County, Ohio, after decades of zealously championing capital punishment. The incoming prosecutor, Democrat Gary Tyack, told the Political Report via a spokesperson during his campaign that he would support legislation to ban the death penalty but also that he would consider seeking it as long as it is permitted by the state. Patsy Austin-Gatson, the incoming Democratic DA in Gwinnett County, Georgia, told the Political Report the same thing this week. 

Advocates hope that more DAs will draw strong lines in the sand and rule out adding people to death row. 

But they also stress that, even with those who make such forward-looking commitments, more is needed. Prosecutors who oppose the death penalty should also use all legal and political means at their disposal to resentence people who are already on death row and to fight their executions.

“It’s really important … to push prosecutors not just to say, ‘I’ll refrain from using this harsh practice in the future,’ but to refuse to preside over it in the present,” said Ben Cohen, an attorney who works against the death penalty in Louisiana. “It’s barbaric to allow death sentences from the 1980’s and 1990’s to be executed on your watch.”

“A progressive prosecutor has to do more than sit on their hands,” he added.

Defense attorneys have had some success in recent years overturning sentences in Louisiana, but Cohen said he has not seen cooperation from the outgoing DA’s office in New Orleans, where there are five people on death row. DA Leon Cannizzaro did not seek re-election this year, and he will be replaced by Williams, who won in a landslide on Saturday after embracing a reform platform put forth by local organizers that included opposition to the death penalty. He did not answer a request for comment this week about how he will address people already on death row.

In Los Angeles, though, Gascón released a plan early in his campaign outlining how he would aim to get people off of death row “utilizing every legal avenue available to me.” 

“It’s completely transformative,” said Natasha Minsker, an attorney who is part of Gascón’s transition team on the death penalty. “The fact that Los Angeles County is now, as of today, going to stop pursuing death sentences and going to shift in a different direction … is a complete game changer.” No county in the nation has more people on death row than Los Angeles; Angelenos approved abolishing capital punishment in a 2016 referendum but the initiative failed statewide. 

Minsker outlined the range of tools that Gascón can use. Where there is active litigation over a specific legal or factual issue, he could concede arguments made by defense attorneys “and no longer fight for [death sentences] to be in place,” she said. Many appeals are handled by the attorney general rather than the DA, but Gascón could still file amicus briefs to assist people contesting their sentences.

Gascón could also request a resentencing hearing for someone on death row, Minsker said. DAs don’t necessarily have this power nationally; here it stems from California’s relatively new Section 1170(d), a statute that adopted in 2018 that expanded DAs’ powers to revisit old cases.

Minsker warned that courts retain ultimate say in whether to remove people from death row. “The real unknown here is the judges,” she said. “I’m concerned that we may end up in a situation where we have disparities based on who the judge is.”

It is usually prosecutors who are the greatest hurdle to ending or curtailing the death penalty. They routinely work to derail legislative proposals, including in Ohio, Oregon, and Wyoming over the last few years. Even DAs who campaigned on their discomfort with capital punishment have gone on to fight efforts to stop executions, such as Kim Ogg in Harris County (Houston). But Ogg had not outright ruled out seeking the death penalty during her 2016 campaign, a far cry from the stronger positions staked by the latest wave of winners.

One of those winners is, like Ogg, in Texas. In Travis County, which has executed eight people since 1976, José Garza ousted the incumbent DA after promising to not seek the death penalty and to review past sentences for legal or factual errors. He has also vowed to stand up to potential pushback from statewide officials. 

“We have an obligation and a responsibility to show people a different way of governing in the state of Texas,” Garza told the Political Report in June. 

In breaking their profession’s usual mold, prosecutors like Conover, Garza, or Gascón could indeed do more than affect the cases immediately before them. 

They may be able to make it harder for prosecutors’ powerful statewide associations to keep up their lobbying for the death penalty. And they can be influential allies for activists and lawmakers who are seeking to advance legislation or lawsuits against capital punishment. Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner has joined legal efforts to overturn the death penalty in Pennsylvania, for instance, and this month, dozens of reform-minded prosecutors signed on to a letter spearheaded by the organization Fair and Just Prosecution that opposed the resumption of federal executions.

“We’re trying to have this conversation about [prosecutors’ role] in creating effective responses to reduce violence,” said Porter of the 8th Amendment Project, “rather than just getting caught up in fear-based politics.”

The post Newly Elected Prosecutors Are Challenging the Death Penalty appeared first on Bolts.

For advocates of criminal justice reform in New Orleans, the Dec. 5 district attorney runoff election holds an opportunity to upend policies that funnel people into jails and prisons in the incarceration capital of the United States. 

“We are at a crossroads in our community,” said Gregory Manning, a pastor in the Broadmoor neighborhood. “It cannot be simply that we continue to lock people up and allow the criminal justice system and the jail system and the bail bondsman to benefit financially off of the incarceration of our people, especially African American people, people of color.”

Manning is a member of The People’s DA Coalition, a joint effort of more than two dozen criminal justice reform groups in the city. 

Throughout the primary campaign, four DA candidates felt the heat from local organizers. They faced demands to appear at forums and commit to a wide set of decarceral measures put forth by the coalition. And they broadly responded by expressing sympathies for the group’s goals, a rupture from the rhetoric of the departing DA, Leon Cannizzaro. 

On Election Day, none of the candidates garnered more than 50 percent of the vote. Now, Keva Landrum, a former criminal court judge who led with 35 percent of the vote, and Jason Williams, a member of the City Council who received 29 percent, are running head to head. 

Both have talked about advancing reforms, but their positions and records reveal a divide in how they would likely approach being a DA. Williams has promised more of a clean break with the office’s punitive past and embraced the People’s DA platform enthusiastically. 

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Earlier this year, Cannizzaro announced he would not run for re-election, throwing open the race for one of the most powerful public offices in New Orleans. 

During his tenure, Cannizzaro relentlessly reinforced the state’s carceral norms. He attacked efforts to bail people out of jail pretrial, fought to retain nonunanimous jury convictions, vowed to put more children in jail, and used habitual offender laws to increase sentencing. He is also facing a lawsuit that alleges his office issued fake subpoenas to jail crime victims and to pressure witnesses to cooperate.

“Louisiana and New Orleans, in particular, have been such an epicenter of draconian sentencing, racially disparate conviction rates and indictment rates for drug charges, for juvenile prosecutions, for life without parole, for habitual offender enhancements,” said Chris Kaiser, advocacy director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “All of these are things that a DA can unilaterally choose to reform on their own without the need to wait for broader policy reform from the legislature or city council.” 

Williams has worked as a criminal defense attorney with the Innocence Project New Orleans and championed criminal justice reforms as a City Council member. He pushed for a bail reform measure to lower the jail’s pretrial population, led the charge on reducing penalties for marijuana possession, and sponsored a successful ordinance to bring funding for the public defender’s office closer to parity with the DA’s office.This month, the City Council passed a 2021 budget that falls short of the funding requirements, but still gives a major boost to the public defender’s office.

However, Williams is facing a serious hurdle. This year, he came under a federal indictment for tax fraud. The trial date for the case is Jan. 11, 2021.

Williams has pleaded not guilty and he dismisses the charge as politically motivated. In October, he told The Appeal: Political Report that voters view the indictment as “an old-school political tactic” and that “I paid my taxes for all of those years that they’re talking about.” 

Landrum briefly served as DA from 2007 to 2008 before running for criminal court judge. Cannizzaro succeeded her in 2008. 

Last year, when Landrum was chief judge of the criminal court, she criticized Cannizzaro for blocking efforts to reduce the jail population through pretrial services. But at other times she has played a role in Cannizzaro’s agenda. The Lens found that she signed off on prosecutors’ controversial material witness warrants in at least 14 cases. And now Landrum shares some of the same campaign donors and endorsements as the retiring DA. 

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During her campaign this year, Landrum said she would never seek the death penalty, one of the tenets of the People’s DA platform. Williams has also vowed to not seek death sentences, closing the door to capital punishment in New Orleans no matter the outcome of the runoff. 

But on other important issues, Landrum has pushed back against reform policies and warned that her opponent would not be harsh enough in some cases. She also promised to be “tough on violent crime,” a continuation of the DA office’s highly punitive status quo.

This messaging matches parts of Landrum’s record. During her time as DA, she drew fire for coming down hard on marijuana possession. She prosecuted repeat offenses as felonies, charges that could result in five to 20 years in prison. Before her term, the office routinely treated such cases as misdemeanors, which carry much lower penalties. Critics accused her of racking up felony convictions to make it appear that the DA’s office was tackling violent crime after New Orleans was declared a “murder capital.” 

Landrum turned down an interview request by the Political Report for this story and did not submit responses to questions via email in time for publication. In October, Landrum told the Political Report that she disagreed that she had a punitive record. 

Her platform this year does not detail what she would do regarding drug-related offenses. In 2019, drug charges made up over 30 percent of all new prison admissions in Louisiana. 

On marijuana specifically, she said she would send cases to municipal court or else decline to charge them, a commitment that still fell a step short of several of her rivals’ commitments to drop all marijuana possession charges.

Williams, unlike Landrum, has run on dropping all marijuana possession cases. 

When it comes to other drugs, Williams told the Political Report that he would prioritize diversion and treatment options over imposing incarceration. (Some prosecutors around the country have run on ending charges for drug possession altogether.)

“I don’t believe that courts and jails have ever provided any real intervention as it relates to addiction,” Williams said in a Zoom interview. “My goal is going to be to find ways to have these cases diverted from court to a diversion program that would have robust Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, therapy, other community service measures.”

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Another contributor to mass incarceration is excessive sentencing. In Louisiana, nearly 40 percent of those imprisoned are serving maximum sentences that exceeded 20 years. However, there is little proof that lengthy sentences meaningfully prevent crime. 

“All the evidence for several decades points to the fact that people, even for violent offenses, age out of crime, so there is no reason that we need to be sending people to prison for life,” Kaiser, of the ACLU of Louisiana, said. 

Prosecutorial decisions by the district attorney fuel these long sentences. If the district attorney chooses to use the “multi-bill” statute, Louisiana’s habitual offender sentence enhancement, then minimum sentences would be increased for people with past convictions. And in Louisiana, charges like second-degree murder carry a mandatory minimum sentence of life without the possiblity of parole. 

“In our state, [life without parole] means you literally get carried out in a pine box,” Williams said. He said his office would be more stringent about bringing second-degree murder charges, which historically have been used very broadly to lock up people who are accused of being accomplices. 

“We want to have that conversation long before the case is set for trial, so you can make sure that you’re using a charge that takes into consideration the harm caused to the victim, but also takes into consideration that a person who makes a poor decision at 21 probably is going to be a very different human being by the time they are 60 or 50,” Williams said.  

Williams has said he would never use the habitual offender statute.

Landrum, by contrast, told The Political Report in October that she would still make use of the habitual offender statute, though she added she wishes to limit its use to “exceptional circumstances with supervisory approval.” 

According to the magazine Antigravity, lawyers familiar with her practices told the magazine that Landrum regularly inflicted high bonds and long sentences as a criminal court judge. 

Although the effect of harsh sentencing can be measured by the number of incarcerated people serving maximum or life sentences, it is not possible to measure its effect as a prosecutorial tool to compel plea deals. 

“The statistics don’t show you the number of people who maybe had a habitual offender enhancement hanging over their head when they decided to agree to apply for a lesser charge,” Kaiser said. “We have every reason to believe that’s a lot of folks.”

As a result, Kaiser says, many people get stuck in the legal system rather than fighting their charges—another factor that contributes to the wide reach of Louisiana’s prison industrial complex.

This disproportionately impacts Black Louisianans who are incarcerated at four times the rate of white people in the state.

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In New Orleans, the starkest racial divides in incarceration show up in the juvenile criminal legal system: 97 percent of juvenile arrests in New Orleans are of Black youth.

As with adults, the DA decides how to charge these arrested youth. Cannizzarro sent hundreds of children to adult court; between 2011 and 2015 he transferred over 80 percent of eligible cases involving 15- and 16-year-olds. As a City Council member, Williams criticized this practice. 

During the primary, Williams committed to not transferring minors to adult courts even when they were charged with serious crimes. Landrum told the Louisiana ACLU that she would only charge youth as adults “in extreme circumstances” but did not elaborate on what that would entail. 

Chief Public Defender Derwyn Bunton represented minors when Landrum was in charge of the DA’s juvenile division, as well as when she was interim DA. He said Landrum transferred youth to adult court in nearly all eligible cases.

“When, as a prosecutor, she has the advantage, she uses that advantage for conviction,” Bunton said in an interview with The Political Report. “She’s a prosecutor’s prosecutor.”

One particular case that stuck out to him was that of Travan Jones. In 2007, 15-year-old Jones was implicated in a murder. Bunton thought juvenile court could have been rehabilitative for Jones, but Landrum transferred his case to adult court where he was charged with second-degree murder, which carried a mandatory life without parole sentence. Jones eventually plead guilty to manslaughter. 

“[There needs to be] a real holistic approach,” said Ernest Johnson, director and co-founder of Ubuntu Village which works with youth affected by the criminal legal system. Poverty, trauma, and other factors need to be taken into consideration when looking at the criminal activity of children, he said.

Johnson helped co-write the Platform for Youth Justice which provides guidelines for reforming the juvenile justice system through the district attorney’s office. The platform calls for not transferring minors into adult courts and prisons, and recommends developmentally appropriate ways to hold them accountable. 

Manning, the pastor and member of The People’s DA Coalition, echoed Johnson’s view that the next New Orleans DA should address the factors underlying crime.

“Where do we begin to look at those factors and say, OK, what’s the root cause? Why is this happening?” he asked. Manning said poverty was among the root causes of violence, which means there is a need for more investment into community initiatives as opposed to harsher prosecution.

The People’s DA Coalition and other local groups have made these issues central to the DA election and have mobilized communities to get involved. Grassroots organizing has also shaped local judicial elections that delivered two public defenders to the bench in November, and an ongoing battle over jail expansion.

Kaiser said this kind of organizing is necessary to counter the powerful influence of the bail industry and others that stand to profit from tough-on-crime policies.

“For our part, what we can do is to elevate the power of people who are affected by these policies … and try to build political power as a counterweight to that,” he said. 

“We need folks in office who are going to go above and beyond what the minimum requirements are in law, and think really boldly about how to end mass incarceration in this state.”

The post A D.A. Runoff Will Decide New Orleans’ Criminal Justice Future appeared first on Bolts.

In New Orleans, two public defenders were elected to become judges, marking a significant opportunity for criminal justice reform.

On Nov. 3, Angel Harris upset incumbent Franz Zibilich to win a seat as a judge on Orleans Criminal District Court. No judge on the criminal court has lost a bid for re-election in over 40 years.

Nandi Campbell also won a seat on the criminal court, beating her opponent, Lionel Burns, in a landslide.

In a victory speech, Harris said her win shows that voters believe “it is time to reimagine our criminal court system. We aren’t going to stand by and allow our communities to be treated with disrespect.”

Harris and Campbell were part of a slate of seven current and former public defenders running for judicial offices across the criminal, municipal, and juvenile courts in Orleans Parish. Their platforms included challenging the cash bail system and seeking alternatives to incarceration in a state often called the “incarceration capital” of the United States. 

Though five of the candidates lost their races, their campaigns—and the victories of Harris and Campbell—are remarkable because, across the country, there’s a lack of judges with experience representing marginalized communities. In federal and state courts, judges are far more likely to have worked as prosecutors than public defenders. 

In an October interview with The Appeal: Political Report, Harris talked about the challenge she faced.

“I am absolutely going up against the political machine,” Harris said. “I’m talking about bucking a system, so, of course, the establishment folks aren’t going to jump on board with me.” 

Money was a key struggle for first-time candidates like Harris. As of their September filings, Zibilich had over $150,000 in campaign funds. Harris had under $14,000. Zibilich was endorsed by powerful local political groups like the Black Organization for Leadership Development (BOLD) and the Algiers Political Action Committee (APAC), which have endorsed and supported establishment figures within the criminal justice system.

Harris’s resume includes working as a public defender in both Orleans and Calcasieu parishes, a staff attorney with the Capital Punishment Project at the ACLU, and an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. (Harris also used to work for The Justice Collaborative, of which The Appeal is a project.)

Like others who made up the public defender slate of judicial candidates, Harris ran on a platform critiquing the cash bail system and advocating for criminal justice reform. 

Zibilich, who has served as a criminal court judge for nearly nine years, touted his efficiency in addressing the cases in his docket. Though Zibilich has earned awards for efficiency, he has been accused of disproportionately favoring prosecution at the expense of defendants. Zibilich has also faced criticism for comments he made during a 2016 sexual battery case. After a jury acquitted a 35-year-old man of rape but convicted him of stalking and illegally entering the home of a former girlfriend, Zibilich said he was considering vacating the conviction entirely because he thought the victim had sent “mixed messages” to the defendant.

Unlike some of the other progressive public defender candidates, Campbell managed to earn the endorsements of powerful political organizations like BOLD, the Community Organization of Urban Politics, and Voters Organized to Educate (VOTE), some of which endorsed candidates running against the other public defender candidates. 

Campbell joined the Orleans Public Defenders office in 2008 and, the following year, she launched her own firm and worked as counsel with a leading criminal defense firm. She is an associate professor at Tulane Law School while still working as a contract public defender. 

Burns, who has been both a prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney, previously ran for district attorney in 2014 against incumbent Leon Cannizzaro, but was disqualified.

These elections could serve to transform the local criminal legal system because judges exercise considerable discretion. In earlier elections this year, New Orleans advocates put the spotlight on judges’ roles in overseeing evictions. Advocates emphasize that there are many other ways a different type of judge could challenge the status quo in New Orleans. Judges could be more aggressive in challenging evidence presented by police officers, or in holding prosecutors accountable if they fail to disclose favorable evidence to the defense team, as they are constitutionally required to do. Judges could also choose not to impose high bail amounts or long sentences.

NOLA Defenders for Equal Justice, a group of former and current public defenders, came together earlier this year to advocate for the progressive slate of judge candidates. Jared Miller, a member of the group and a staff attorney at Orleans Public Defenders, told the Political Report in October that “people accused of crime who are Black or brown are people who the [criminal legal] system treats with a lot less humanity. … But these candidates have the experience of knowing these clients at a personal level.”

“To have these candidates who stand for our values come together and try to make change is really uplifting,” Miller said.

The post Two New Orleans Public Defenders Elected Judge in a Push to “Flip the Bench” appeared first on Bolts.

In July, during a three-day period when candidates for elected office in Orleans Parish had to file their paperwork, court clerk Arthur Morrell set up a Facebook Live video feed in his office.

As each candidate ambled in, masked and holding documents, Morrell greeted them, “Hello, you are on Facebook Live, can you please introduce yourself?”

Familiar faces appeared, like an incumbent judge who was filing for re-election and an ambitious New Orleans City Council member who was running to be district attorney.

But then, a series of unexpected candidate hopefuls showed up: seven current and former public defenders who were seeking election as judges, including Derwyn Bunton, chief of the Orleans Public Defenders. 

Jared Miller, a staff attorney at Orleans Public Defenders, told The Appeal: Political Report that some of his colleagues were stationed at the courthouse to watch the filings and send text updates to a group of other public defenders.

“There was huge excitement about what was going on,” Miller said.

Their candidacies stood out because, across the country, there’s a startling lack of judges with experience representing marginalized communities. In federal and state courts, judges are far more likely to have worked as prosecutors than public defenders. Graham Bosworth told the Political Report that in Orleans Parish’s last regular judicial election six years ago, he was the only person with experience as a public defender who ran for a seat at the courthouse. 

Bosworth is running again this year, along with Bunton, Teneé Felix, Angel Harris, Meg Garvey, Steve Singer, and Nandi Campbell. Most have worked at the Orleans Parish defender’s office, while others have contracted as legal aid attorneys for indigent defendants. 

NOLA Defenders for Equal Justice, a group of former and current public defenders, including Miller, has formed to advocate for this slate of candidates, who are running for criminal, juvenile, and municipal courts. 

They say that electing judges with legal aid experience and progressive platforms could transform the city’s legal system, for instance by diminishing the reliance on cash bail. 

Judges exercise considerable discretion. In earlier elections this year, New Orleans advocates put the spotlight on their role in overseeing evictions. Advocates stress that there are many other ways a different type of judge could challenge the status quo in New Orleans. Judges could be more aggressive in challenging evidence presented by police officers, or in holding prosecutors accountable if they fail to disclose favorable evidence to the defense team, as they are constitutionally required to do. Judges could also choose not to impose high bail amounts or long sentences.

“Being a good judge is more than just knowing the law,” said Bosworth, who is running to be a criminal court judge. “It’s being willing to step in and do what is right when the system fails. And that’s where you’re not just calling balls and strikes, you are making sure that due process and equal protection actually occur.” 

This slate of candidates represents the latest success in the renaissance of the Orleans Public Defenders office. 

Before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a robust public defenders office didn’t exist in New Orleans. There was only the Orleans Indigent Defenders program, started in the 1970s. It was chronically underfunded and did not have any full-time attorneys on staff. In the wake of Katrina, the program effectively collapsed. 

Judge Calvin Johnson, who was the first elected African American judge in the Orleans criminal court and chief judge at that time, enlisted attorneys to shape a new public defender’s office with the influx of recovery money coming into the city. They recruited recent graduates of top law schools across the country to join the office. 

Bunton, the chief public defender since 2009, told the Political Report he was inspired to run by watching younger attorneys he had mentored take the plunge.

“I was looking around and I’m like, how are they more courageous than me?” he said. “[Public defenders] come from a different pedigree than what we’re used to on the bench. Most of the [judges] come from prosecutorial backgrounds or law enforcement backgrounds.” Bunton is running to be a criminal court judge and is facing off against Rhonda Goode-Douglas, a trial attorney and former prosecutor.

Bunton said there are a handful of things that he can do as a judge to use the sensibility he honed as a public defender and enact procedural reforms. If elected, he wants to incorporate technology into the courtroom and make its workings more transparent. He also plans to schedule his dockets with consideration for the plaintiffs and defendants who may not be able to easily take time off work to be present for their case. 

Bunton and the other candidates have been particularly critical of the cash bail system. 

Bosworth told the Political Report that “there are far more effective ways to ensure people appear in court that don’t create disparities based on economic means.” His opponent, Kimya Holmes, a staff attorney for the Capital Defense Project of Southeast Louisiana, told Nola.com that the cash bail system shouldn’t be overhauled, it just needs “tweaking.”

Louisiana’s pretrial detention rates are the highest in the country. Studies show that money bail can reinforce social inequities as it forces low-income people to choose between taking on debt to get out of jail or staying locked up and risk losing their work and housing. 

Judges can use alternative pretrial services to compel court appearances like check-in calls and texts, as well as arranging for transportation. The City Council has passed an ordinance disallowing bail on most municipal charges. But Louisiana law mandates that a judge sets money bail for every charge a person faces. And judges have wide discretion over the amount; one New Orleans judge, Harry Cantrell, routinely set bond amounts so high—effectively trapping poor people in jail—that a federal court ruled his practices unconstitutional.

The bail system funds judges, sheriffs, prosecutors, and public defenders in New Orleans, while enriching bail bond agents who post bail for people who can’t afford it while charging exorbitant fees. In 2015, 97 percent of the people who posted bond in the Criminal District Court of Orleans Parish did so through a bail bond agent.

Agents like Blair Boutte wield political influence by helping recruit candidates for local campaigns, racking up financial contributions, and wrangling endorsements. Some say Boutte uses aggressive tactics against rivals. 

Angel Harris has come up against this opposition in her race against incumbent Franz Zibilich for a criminal court judgeship. She is the only public defender candidate running against an incumbent in criminal court. (Harris used to work for The Justice Collaborative, of which The Appeal is a project.)

“I am absolutely going up against the political machine,” Harris said. “I’m talking about bucking a system, so, of course, the establishment folks aren’t going to jump on board with me.” 

Money is a key struggle for first-time candidates like Harris. As of their September filings, Zibilich has over $150,000 in campaign funds. Harris has under $14,000.

“But to even start pushing back on how we are doing things and talking about bond and talking about bail reform and pointing out racial disparities, people are like, ‘Oh no,’” Harris said. “Voters need to really recognize the power that they have in this moment. … I want people to know that they have the power to determine who’s going to be sitting on that bench.” 

NOLA Defenders for Equal Justice has helped raise the profile of local judicial elections through social media and candidate forums that have tied into broader public conversations around criminal justice reform.

“These systems have operated over many decades to make sure that Black lives don’t matter,” Miller of Orleans Public Defenders said. “People accused of crime who are Black or brown are people who the system treats with a lot less humanity. … But these candidates have the experience of knowing these clients at a personal level.”

 Miller said this experience is what shapes the values that public defenders share.

“The thing about being a public defender is that it is a very hard job in which you’re dealing with a lot of pain and misery and trauma, to be honest, and you don’t often win,” Miller said. “To have these candidates who stand for our values come together and try to make change is really uplifting.”

He hopes that if the public defender candidates are elected, they will not only exercise meaningful discretion with individual cases in their own courtrooms, but also become role models and leaders in criminal justice reform citywide. 

Bunton agrees that judges can be powerfully influential.   

“There’s a lot of things that judges can do, there’s a lot of momentum they can create,” Bunton said. “Every big Supreme Court case we’ve ever had started with the little ol’ judge making a call.”

The post New Orleans Public Defenders Are Mobilizing to “Flip the Bench” appeared first on Bolts.

In New Orleans, the office of the district attorney has a fraught reputation. Former prosecutor Jim Williams, while photographed for Esquire in 1995, showed off a model electric chair he kept on his desk with the photos of men he had placed on death row. Longtime District Attorney Harry Connick was criticized by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for displaying indifference to the rights of defendants. And the office is broadly known for its aggressive prosecution tactics. 

Current District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who was first elected in 2008, has followed suit. He has attacked efforts to bail people out of jail pretrial, fought to retain nonunanimous jury convictions, vowed to put more children in jail, and used habitual offender laws to increase sentencing. He is also facing an ongoing lawsuit that alleges his office issued fake subpoenas to jail crime victims and to pressure witnesses to cooperate. 

When Cannizzaro announced he would not run for re-election this year, it threw open the city’s DA race. Criminal justice reform advocates see it as a golden opportunity to bring change to New Orleans and its pervasive reliance on incarceration.

The race has come to be defined less by the four candidates who are running, and more by a group of criminal justice reform organizations that joined to form the People’s DA Coalition, driven by the diagnosis that this prosecutor’s office has been pivotal in fueling Louisiana’s record-high incarceration rate. 

“Those of us who work in the criminal justice system are keenly aware of the outsized power of the District Attorney,” said retired judge Calvin Johnson, a key leader in the coalition, which represents more than 30 organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, Court Watch, and the Innocence Project New Orleans. The coalition also includes formerly incarcerated people, public defenders, crime survivors, and others affected by the criminal legal system. 

According to Johnson, the organizers behind the coalition started talking over a year ago about the upcoming election. At the time, they didn’t know whether Cannizzaro would choose to run again. But they did know that in the six years since he had been re-elected, there had been a sea change of criminal justice reform work in Louisiana. In 2017, Governor John Bel Edwards signed a bipartisan law that reformed sentencing statutes and made a considerable dent in the state’s prison population; Edwards won re-election last year in the face of attacks on this record. In 2018, voters passed a constitutional amendment to end nonunanimous juries, which tended to silence Black jurors.  

In New Orleans, these statewide successes for criminal justice reform have contradicted Cannizzaro and his policies. 

“In every case, the district attorney defines who, what, why, how, and, importantly, whether to prosecute,” Johnson said. “This fundamentally shapes our system of mass incarceration.” 

Four candidates are vying to take charge of the office—and potentially to change its practices—in the November election. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote on Nov. 3, the race will head to a December runoff.

The candidates are Keva Landrum, Cannizzaro’s predecessor; Arthur Hunter, a former criminal court judge; Jason Williams, a City Council member; and Morris Reed, a former criminal court judge. Reed has been largely absent from candidate forums and doesn’t appear to be mounting an active campaign. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Landrum became acting DA in 2007 when Eddie Jordan resigned. She held office for only a year because she won a seat as a criminal court judge in 2008. But in that short time she drew national attention for coming down hard on marijuana possession by prosecuting repeat offenses as felonies, charges that could result in five to 20 years in prison. 

“I would disagree that I had a punitive record,” Landrum told The Appeal: Political Report, noting that filing felony charges matched state law. Before her term, the office routinely treated such cases as misdemeanors, which carry much lower penalties. Critics accused her of racking up felony convictions to make it appear that the DA’s office was tackling violent crime after New Orleans was declared a “murder capital.”

Hunter and Williams have both said they would drop all marijuana possession cases if elected. Landrum told The Lens she would either drop those cases or transfer them to a lower municipal court. Since her earlier term, New Orleans has adopted policies to encourage police to issue summons for marijuana, which are prosecuted in municipal court.

The platform of the People’s DA Coalition goes far beyond asking candidates to decline to prosecute marijuana cases, though. It calls for the next DA to commit to other robust reforms, including refusing to seek the death penalty, not prosecuting minors as adults, adopting full data transparency, and no longer using a multi-bill, habitual offender statute that considerably increases minimum sentences for people with past convictions. 

On the campaign trail, all the candidates are vowing to break with the office’s status quo of harsh practices with policies more aligned with a reform approach. But contrasts are apparent.

Williams is the only candidate who committed to the platform in its entirety during a Sept. 23 candidate forum the coalition hosted. 

“I could have written [the platform], or they could have written mine,” Williams said in a follow-up interview with the Political Report. “I think this coalition helps the people of the city who don’t have as much time and who may not have this level of education to really start to understand how some of these things [in the DA’s office] impact them.”

In particular, Williams is the only one of the three leading candidates to pledge to never make use of the habitual offender statute to enhance defendants’ sentences. 

He is also the only candidate who said during the forum that he would not prosecute minors as adults when they were charged with serious offenses. The City Council and Cannizzaro have in the past clashed over the incumbent DA’s practice of transferring nearly all armed robbery cases committed by 15- and 16-year-olds to adult court.

Williams cites his record as proof that his commitment to the coalition’s platform is genuine. He previously worked as a criminal defense attorney, including with the Innocence Project New Orleans. In 2008, Williams ran for DA on a reform-minded platform against Cannizzaro but lost. He has served on the City Council since 2014. On the council, he has worked on bail reform meant to lower the jail’s pretrial population, sponsored a city ordinance to reduce penalties for marijuana possession, and established public databases tracking the criminal justice system in the city. And this summer, Williams sponsored a successful ordinance to bring funding for the public defenders’ office closer to parity with the DA’s office. 

However, Williams is facing a serious hurdle. This year, he came under a federal indictment for tax fraud. The trial date for the case is set as Jan. 11, 2021. 

Williams has pleaded not guilty and he dismisses the charge as politically motivated. “I paid my taxes for all of those years that they’re talking about.” he said. “[Voters see this] an old-school political tactic.” 

Hunter is also pointing to his record as evidence that he would bring reform to New Orleans. A former police officer and attorney, he became a judge in 1996. In that role, he notes that he has advocated for indigent defendants and helped found a re-entry program.   

“Every lawyer who has ever stepped foot in [Hunter’s] courtroom has nothing but the best to say about him,” Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voters Organized to Educate, a local advocacy group that has endorsed Hunter, told the Political Report. He added, in reference to Hunter’s response to the group’s questionnaire, “Hunter also said that he would be willing to spend a night in jail in order to know what it is like for people who are arrested. That really speaks to his empathy.”

Hunter has expressed reservations about the coalition’s platform on some key issues, resisting its call for candidates to draw lines in the sand against punitive practices that fall within a DA’s discretion. He indicated he remains open to prosecuting minors as adults. He similarly told the Political Report that he would continue using the habitual offender statute; but he added he would lobby the legislature to repeal Louisiana’s habitual offender laws and abolish capital punishment.

And at the Sept. 23 forum, Hunter was the only candidate to indicate he may still seek the death penalty, a position he confirmed to the Political Report. Landrum and Williams both indicated they would not do so, a stark break with the office legacy. 

Supporters argue that Hunter may not be willing to rule out using some statutes, but that his record shows him exercising his discretion well: As a judge, Hunter ruled that the state should pay $180,000 to a man who was wrongfully convicted and threw out the conviction of a domestic violence survivor who murdered her abusive husband.

“I believe in rehabilitation, redemption, and second chances,” Hunter said. “I will take care to only bring charges of second-degree murder, which carries an automatic life sentence, in extraordinary circumstances.” Louisiana has the nation’s highest share of people serving a life without the possibility of parole sentence; it is one of two states that imposes an automatic life sentence for second-degree murder. 

Reilly expects that whoever comes out ahead between Williams and Hunter on Nov. 3 will draw more support from reform-minded advocates, should only one make it to a runoff.

“The conservatives and bail bondsmen and maybe some other people will vote for Landrum, but I doubt it will be enough to stop the possibility of a run-off,” Reilly said. “I know the troops will rally behind whoever is more successful [between Williams and Hunter] if there is a runoff.” 

Landrum has made the case that she is the only candidate with the necessary experience to be DA. She points to her prosecutorial experience, and to her work as chief judge of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court until early this year. 

“The best way to change a system is to work within it and learn that system,” Landrum told The Political Report. She added that the criticisms that she isn’t reform-minded enough are an effort to distract from the fact that she is the most qualified candidate running in the race. “It is an affront to women, as if we could not stand on our own skills and leadership to run this office.”

During the Sept. 23 forum, Landrum would also not commit to some of the key tenets of the coalition’s platform, like whether she would prosecute a child in adult court. Unlike Hunter and Williams, she did not indicate that she would oppose arresting defendants on grounds relating to their immigration status. Elsewhere, again unlike her rivals, she did not express support for the summer’s ordinance advancing funding parity for the public defender’s office.

She has also said she would still make use of the habitual offender statute, though she wishes to limit its use.  

“The multi-bill statute was enacted to protect citizens and shield our community from violent offenders who continue to engage in that activity,” Landrum told the Political Report. “It’s become a sword instead of a shield in order to coerce plea bargains, even in nonviolent cases. … My policy is going to be that we will not utilize the multiple bill except for in exceptional circumstances with supervisory approval.”

When pressed, Landrum did not specify what circumstances would justify its use. 

The People’s DA Coalition will not endorse a candidate, but individuals and organizations within the coalition are excited to talk about what needs to change.

Jerome Morgan, an advocate with the coalition who was convicted of murder and later exonerated, says he was wronged by Canizzaro who sought to reinstate his conviction even after evidence proved Morgan not guilty. Morgan, who is supporting Williams in the election in his personal capacity, told the Political Report that he cares about the next DA having a clear commitment to reform and a moral compass, even when it is difficult or against the status quo. 

Morgan stressed that he is most hopeful about the prospect of the coalition holding the next DA accountable, whomever it might be. The coalition plans to continue as a watchdog group after the election and host yearly forums with whoever is elected.  

“For a long time, it was a norm [for the DA] to support unjust practices and racist ideologies,” Morgan said. “I am excited to be a part of the coalition, because we are setting a new norm. No longer will the DA have so much unchecked power.”

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Local civil court judges may not typically draw widespread attention, but that could change as the U.S. faces an unprecedented eviction crisis.

In New Orleans, a city that already had housing challenges, voters recently elected a new First City Court judge in an Aug. 15 runoff that became heated, inspiring a 2,000-word analysis in a local magazine, a reddit ask-me-anything, and accusatory campaign mailers. Public concern largely hinged on the issue of evictions and whether the candidates, Marissa Hutabarat and Sara Lewis, would commit to using judicial discretion to limit the number of people who lose their homes.

“We believe legally that a judge has discretion, especially in extraordinary circumstances, to do any number of things,” said Hannah Adams, a staff attorney at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services. 

Adams, who advises and represents tenants in eviction cases, argues that judges are able to use judicial discretion to chart alternatives within the courtroom, especially during emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Adams, judges can “order additional time to move based on disability or health issues,” for example. Adams also contends that judges can require landlords to attempt a repayment plan. 

“The law does also entitle tenants to a reduction in rent in special circumstances if all or a portion of a home is not usable or livable to them, so a judge could rule in a tenant’s favor given that,” Adams added.

Additionally, tenant lawyers like Adams say judges can oversee consent judgments or defer cases to mediation. This can prevent an eviction, which would immediately displace a tenant and show up on their record.

But neither Hutabarat, who won with 60 percent of the vote, nor Lewis took a stance on discretion that reflected these possibilities. Still, the election helped local advocates draw new attention to judicial powers.

Lewis, an environmental lawyer, garnered the most support from progressive communities in New Orleans. Before the pandemic and recession hit, Lewis was highlighting the already existing eviction crisis within the city and she earned the endorsement of the progressive New Orleans Coalition. 

“When I filed to run in January, 50 percent of what the First City Court did was evictions and most people represented themselves, so I knew even then that would be a huge part of my work as a judge,” Lewis said.

In her campaign, Lewis proposed implementing a new pro bono mediation program, advocated for a Tenants’ Bill of Rights, and emphasized that she would make sure all people who came to her court would be informed of their rights and the court’s procedures. 

Over 90 percent of tenants are not represented by a lawyer in eviction proceedings, meaning that they don’t always have the full legal and procedural knowledge of their rights. Civil courts are often more conversational than criminal ones, so judges have more informal interaction with tenants and can play an important role in explaining their rights.

When asked about the eviction crisis in a July housing justice forum, Lewis emphasized that judges are required to follow the letter of the law and do not have the power to close eviction court, as some housing advocates have called for. Hutabarat, a personal injury lawyer, echoed that stance.

Hutabarat and her campaign did not respond to requests for an interview by The Appeal: Political Report. But she told VAYLA New Orleans, a nonprofit focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, that she would ask landlords to “compromise and work with these family members,” to come up with a payment plan or allow more time to move. She made similar statements to NOLA.com.

Some New Orleans judges are already making such requests. In June, Judge Monique Morial of the First City Court asked that landlords give tenants more time than the typical 24 to 48 hours to move out. But Morial said she is not able to enforce these longer timeframes without the landlords’ consent. 

In the weeks leading up to the election, Hutabarat’s campaign faced scrutiny for the fact that her live-in partner, Mark El-Amm, owns short-term rental properties in New Orleans. Short-term rentals, like those listed by the companies Airbnb and Vrbo, intensify housing insecurity and gentrification in New Orleans. When asked about this by local magazine Antigravity, a Hutabarat campaign representative called the question sexist, though Hutabarat herself did eventually confirm that a member of her household is involved in the short-term rental market. 

Now that Hutabarat is elected, housing justice advocates hope that she will cultivate a tenant-friendly culture in her courthouse as a new wave of eviction cases comes in.

Prior to the pandemic, New Orleans had nearly twice the eviction rate of the national average; in some Black neighborhoods, that multiplied to nearly four times the average. According to a report from Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, a local housing justice organization, 62 percent of cases in Orleans Parish resulted in a court-ordered eviction with a 24-hour notice to vacate. In the majority of these cases, the tenant owed no more than one month’s rent.

“The people who go to [First City Court] are usually lower-income and lack legal representation, so a judge can have a really big impact,” said Frank Southall, lead organizer at Jane Place.

The pandemic has only exacerbated these already exigent circumstances as more people are unemployed and struggling to afford rent. In Louisiana, one in five renters are at risk of being evicted by the end of the year. At the time of publication, neither the state legislature nor Congress had extended an eviction moratorium or offered further protections to renters. 

The city has offered rental assistance programs, but thousands of residents applied and the funds were quickly exhausted. Mayor LaToya Cantrell is now asking New Orleanians to donate to a rental assistance fund to help housing insecure residents. 

Absent further state and federal support for renters, judges could be what stands between some renters and homelessness.

“If there isn’t any relief by the end of this month, I just don’t know how the city is going to handle the volume of people who are going to get evicted,” said Adams. According to a report this week from WWNO, the city’s NPR station, nearly 30,000 households are at risk of being evicted in Orleans Parish. There are about 150,000 households in the parish. 

Even beyond elections, civil courts may continue to be a focus as evictions continue this month. 

On July 30, the New Orleans Renters Rights Assembly shut down the First City Court by blocking all entrances, preventing multiple eviction hearings from occurring that day. The group asked the court to stop evictions and the government to provide better rental assistance. 

Tenants rights organizing has become a key fight in the city as the pandemic lockdown enters its sixth month. The Renters Rights Assembly has set up tables outside apartment complexes to recruit tenants to the fight, as well as hosted weekly public Zoom calls. 

“Housing and the way that people relate to things like housing justice is so particular to the laws and policies and even judges of a city. So the local fights are really important,” said Southall, who is part of the Renters Rights Assembly. 

Southall emphasized that unlike some states, Louisiana does not have robust tenants rights written into the law. 

Princeton’s Eviction Lab gave Louisiana zero out of five stars on its COVID Housing Policy Scorecard which measured court processes, short-term support, and tenancy protection efforts, among other aspects. At least 20 states scored one star or above. These differences in policies across cities and states may prove particularly meaningful as 17 million to 23 million Americans face evictions in the coming months. 

Los Angeles County has extended its eviction moratorium through the end of September. But in Detroit and San Antonio, Texas, eviction moratoriums have ended, sparking protests at courts where eviction hearings have resumed. 

To Southall, this makes local organizing all the more important. 

“People recognize that there are solutions and are willing to push for a future that is rooted in revolutionary thinking while also knowing there are actionable reforms we can take now,” he said. “Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in some of these [policy] positions, but it’s important to see that people are just like, ‘Give me decent housing.’”

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