Law Students to Help Clear Backlog of Court Cases in New Orleans

Dec. 15, 2006
The Associated Press
By Cain Burdau


NEW ORLEANS (AP) — About 150 law students from around the country are being brought to New Orleans over their winter break to interview inmates and defendants who have languished in jail and legal limbo since Hurricane Katrina hit nearly 16 months ago.

The students will interview people too poor to pay for lawyers and whose cases have yet to be taken up by the personnel-strapped public defender's office. They will go behind bars to talk to inmates at Orleans Parish Prison.

"I've never even been inside a jail, or prison, before," said TwaLea Randolph, a student at the McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific in Sacramento, Calif.

The students' trips are being paid for by their schools and out of their own pockets. They got an orientation Friday. The Student Hurricane Network, which contacted the volunteers, has limited funds and is looking for sponsors to get more students to help in the hurricane-hit region.

Morgan Williams, a Tulane University student who helped organize the program, said the students may interview as many as 600 inmates by Jan. 14.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan, one of several officials who spoke to the students, said there is a backlog of about 2,000 cases that date to before Katrina. Of that number, Jordan said, about 400 people are still in jail awaiting resolutions to their cases.

The students, who signed confidentiality agreements regarding cases they will work on, will hand their case work over to the public defender's office.
"Justice will be served by having these cases disposed of," Jordan said.

The New Orleans justice system has struggled to get the courts flowing again after Katrina's flood waters and winds destroyed evidence and prosecutors' offices, scattered witnesses and flooded jails.

Making sure poor people do not get rammed through the broken system unfairly has been a priority and there is a move to double the number of public defenders from the 12 that are handling hundreds of cases now.

Friday's event featured Jordan, Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman and public defenders together in a show of unity after months of wrangling.
These three branches — the prosecutor, the defense lawyer and the jailer — have been protagonists in a blame game that unfolded after the justice system was unraveled by Katrina.

At moments, though, the tension was palpable as they shared a stage at an arts school on the Mississippi River. The setting was oddly suggestive, even theatrical, as the district attorney, sheriff and public defenders sat on folding chairs next to each other and squirmed in front of the students.

When Gusman introduced himself, he quipped, "I was told I would have a hostile crowd here today," prompting Pamela Metzger, director of the Tulane Criminal Law Clinic and a critic of the way the public defender program has been handled, to pipe up good naturedly: "I'm here!"

In a session with the students after Jordan and Gusman left, Metzger told the volunteers how important the event and the program were in healing old wounds.
"There was a time not very long ago when some of us would not have been on this stage without a referee throwing ropes around it and keeping time on the rounds," she said.


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