|
 |
 |
 |
Poor Suspects Lost in Katrina's Chaos;
Defender's Office Was in Trouble Long Before the Storm Washed Data Away
Dec. 12, 2006
Los Angeles Times
By Ann M. Simmons
NEW ORLEANS — In October 2005, less than two months after Hurricane Katrina struck, Pedro Parra-Sanchez was arrested, accused of stabbing a man with a broken bottle during a fight. With the city's prison damaged by flooding, he was taken to a makeshift jail at the Greyhound bus station, then transferred to a correctional facility some 70 miles away, and later to a prison in southwest Louisiana.
That's where Parra-Sanchez sat for more than a year — never seeing a lawyer or setting foot in a courtroom. At the time of the fight, he had been in New Orleans six days: he had left his family in Bakersfield, Calif., to help with the storm cleanup.
By law, the district attorney should have brought Parra-Sanchez to court to formally charge him within 60 days. Instead, "he disappeared," said Pamela Metzger, director of Tulane University's Criminal Law Clinic. "The system failed."
Parra-Sanchez's case is not unique in post-Katrina New Orleans. An untold number of people got "lost" in the prison system in the weeks immediately after the storm, Metzger said. Many are still among the 3,000 active criminal court cases. At least 85 percent of them qualify for representation by a public defender from the Orleans Parish Indigent Defender program.
The city's indigent defense system has long been plagued by negligent attorneys providing haphazard and deficient representation. In the months after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the program spiraled into chaos: Funding plummeted; 15 lawyers quit the already thin legal staff; documents and evidence were lost or destroyed.
"None of the functioning institutions of government were there," Metzger said. Now, "the public defenders office is dealing with a massive influx of new arrests and cannot go back to other cases."
She has helped to form the Katrina-Gideon Interview Project, a national coalition of law students and law professors. The project aims to free indigent "Katrina prisoners" — people who have served time but remain in jail because they haven't had legal representation.
The students and lawyers are reviewing about 1,800 pre- and post-Katrina cases. They include people who have been imprisoned well beyond any sentence they might receive for such charges as probation violation, failure to pay a fine or prostitution.
They learned of Parra-Sanchez's case from other inmates: His name didn't appear on the sheriff's list of prisoners in custody because of a booking error.
The first time Parra-Sanchez, a legal U.S. resident from Mexico, spoke with a lawyer was Nov. 17, when Metzger interviewed him in jail.
Assistant District Attorney Greg Thompson called the Parra-Sanchez case "a snafu" and, during the defendant's Nov. 28 arraignment, apologized on behalf of the state for his "prolonged incarceration."
A judge freed Parra-Sanchez the Friday before Thanksgiving. A local synagogue paid for Parra-Sanchez's train journey home to Bakersfield on Nov. 29. He since has consulted Bakersfield attorney Daniel Rodriguez about possible civil-rights litigation against law-enforcement agencies in New Orleans.
Later this month, Judge Darryl Derbigny will hear a defense motion to drop Parra-Sanchez's case, on the grounds that his constitutional right to a speedy trial was violated.
|
 |
National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)
1660 L St., NW, 12th Floor, Washington, DC 20036
(202) 872-8600 • Fax (202) 872-8690 •
assist@nacdl.org
| |