Judge Orders Blanco to Come to Court
He Seeks Answers as Poor Sit in Limbo

July 1, 2006
Times Picayune
By Gwen Filosa

The governor is wanted for questioning at Tulane and Broad.

An Orleans Parish judge Friday issued a subpoena for Gov. Kathleen Blanco to appear in his court in late July to discuss the struggling public defender system which, 10 months after levee failures drowned most of New Orleans, has yet to regain enough strength to adequately represent poor suspects.

Judge Arthur Hunter politely ordered Blanco to appear after holding a fact-finding hearing Friday morning over how the cash-strapped and understaffed public defender office in Orleans will manage to represent poor defendants in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Pre-Katrina, the Orleans Parish Indigent Defender program had 70 attorneys, but now has fewer than 30 on board, said Chief Public Defender Tilden Greenbaum. The public defender office in New Orleans runs on a $2.5 million annual budget, of which almost 80 percent came from court fees, a financing formula that Hunter and fellow Judge Calvin Johnson have both ruled is unconstitutional.

Hunter said the problem is so serious that he wants Blanco to appear at a hearing later this month.

Blanco's press office didn't return a call for comment on Friday.

Big gap faced

Blanco persuaded the Legislature to double the money allotted to the statewide Indigent Defender program, to $20 million, but it still must be shared among 41 districts. But officials Friday told Hunter that Orleans isn't likely to receive the $10 million that a federal study said it needs to represent the poor in criminal cases for one year.

"We couldn't give half of our budget to one parish," said Edward Greenlee, director of the Louisiana Indigent Defense Assistance Board.

The public defenders' office in Orleans recently won a $2.8 million federal grant, but the program is still hiring lawyers a few at a time.

A U.S. Department of Justice study recently concluded that the public defender's office in New Orleans needs at least $10 million to operate for a year, hiring 70 full-time attorneys, along with support staff, and getting a computer system to track cases. It also needs a more reliable source of money, the study found.

Hunter and Johnson have argued the way the indigent defender program is financed forces the poor to essentially pay for it.

Almost three-quarters of the Orleans Parish public defender program is paid for by traffic fines and fees, which before the storm amounted to an average of $110,000 a month. In September, the program received nothing, Greenbaum said. Between October and December, the traffic court fines yielded about $10,000 a month, while in January and February, the monthly take was about $50,000.

Trying to regroup

At Friday's hearing, attorney Phil Wittmann said the newly appointed Orleans Parish Indigent Defender Board, of which he is a member, is making strides to repair the public defense program in Orleans.

The board has just hired Ronald Sullivan, a Yale Law School professor and a former director of the Washington, D.C., public defender program, to help organize Orleans' indigent defender office, Wittmann said.

The criminal justice system also now has air conditioning on the first and second floors of the aging House of Detention so that the workspace "is no longer intolerable for public defenders and prosecutors," Wittmann said.

While Orleans Parish Prison remains flood-damaged from the Aug. 29 disaster, the House of Detention is housing most of the 1,600 inmates that Sheriff Marlin Gusman watches over in the 2700 block of Perdido Street.

The criminal courts at Tulane Avenue and South Broad Street reopened June 1 for the first time since Katrina, having worked out of borrowed courtrooms at U.S. District Court for months with no jury trials since August.

The city's first murder trial took place this week, with a jury finding Twdarryl Toney, 23, guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter for a 2004 gunfight at the Guste public housing complex.

Lost in the system

Public defenders on Friday also helped free a New Orleans man trapped in the system without a lawyer or a formal charge for eight months -- more than the maximum jail sentence for one of the misdemeanors he was booked with in October.

Chaka Davis was arrested in mid-October for misdemeanors of carrying a concealed weapon and aggravated assault, Greenbaum said. But his case was never given a number or a folder, and instead he remained locked up until his mother reached the public defender's office Thursday night.

Judge Terry Alarcon on Friday morning freed Davis, who has been at the St. Charles Parish Prison since the days after his October arrest. Davis was one of many detainees at the makeshift jail set up at the Greyhound station off Loyola Avenue in the days after Katrina.

"It's as if he didn't exist," Greenbaum said.

Louisiana law requires that suspects not formally charged within 30 days be released from custody. In felony cases, prosecutors have 60 days in which to charge while a suspect waits in jail.

Alarcon said that Davis is the fifth case he has handled this year of someone arrested post-Katrina and then lost in the system.

"I hope the numbers are dwindling," said Alarcon, who like other judges at Tulane and Broad have searched their dockets for such cases. Alarcon agreed to review Davis' case on Greenbaum's request.

Alarcon said he doesn't know who is to blame for Davis' plight, but wants the system to right itself.

"We have got to quit using Katrina as an excuse," he said.


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