Crime Thrives Under 60-Day Rule;
    Blown Deadline Frees Hundreds of Suspects

    Feb. 12, 2007
    The Times Picayune
    By Gwen Filosa

    On recent FBI wiretaps, agents can hear criminal suspects muttering about "misdemeanor murders," code for doing hardly any time at all for the worst crime on the books.

    On street corners and in the grungy holding tanks at parish prison, they have another name for it: "701," shorthand for Article 701 of the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure. It states that no one can be held longer than 60 days on a felony arrest without an indictment.

    Sometimes a 701 release merely eliminates a bond posted by a suspect in order to remain at liberty pending a trial. But in other cases, the 701 springs a murder suspect from jail because prosecutors have failed to meet the 60-day deadline, and that's been happening with astonishing frequency -- a tenfold increase -- in the widely criticized New Orleans criminal justice system since Hurricane Katrina.

    The 701 list for 2005 includes Dquane Morgan, 20, booked with the second-degree murder of Ryan Crooks, 17, shot down in a hallway at the St. Bernard public housing complex June 2, 2005.

    Three days later, Morgan was arrested. Sixty days after that, he walked free on a 701 release, leaving the case cold and now closed. The reason, prosecutors noted for the record, was that they never received a police report within the 60-day period. That's the same reason the other seven murder cases from the same seven-month stretch in 2005 tanked.

    Jump to July 2006. The two men accused of trying to kill police officer Kevin Thomas in Algiers during a post-Katrina looting spree were released from jail after almost 10 months in jail. Prosecutors say they knew about the case all along but couldn't make a case given the deficiencies of the post-Katrina era.

    But by the time District Attorney Eddie Jordan's office finally charged Vincent Walker, 44, and Jimil Joyner, 24, with attempted first-degree murder -- a week ago -- both suspects were on the loose.

    Get-out-of-jail-free card

    Prosecutors may refile charges against 701'd suspects if they get complete police reports, but often a 701 amounts to the writing on the wall, and cases fall by the wayside.

    Conceived as insurance against lethargic prosecutors and detention without due process, a 701 can also be a get-out-of-jail-free card for criminals -- murderers included. And never has the city seen so many of them as in the post-Katrina era.

    In the eight months before the hurricane, the city released 187 people on a 701, including eight murder suspects, prosecutors' records show. In 2006, the number of releases soared to about 3,000. And last month alone, 580 people escaped legal custody of either jail or a bond obligation only because prosecutors couldn't pull together a case ahead of the deadline imposed by law.

    "That's 580 people," said Dalton Savwoir, spokesman for Jordan's office, when asked to repeat the figure for clarity.

    Charges against the 580 included 457 felony charges. Of the felony lot, 220 people physically walked out of jail, while the rest were out on bond. Savwoir estimated that "90 percent" of the 701 releases are related to narcotics, but he said he didn't have a list of names of the defendants.

    Cops, DA trade blame

    Most 701 releases happen for one of two reasons: A police report hasn't been turned in to the district attorney's office, or the district attorney's office hasn't reviewed it in time.

    Once the high-profile cases are revealed, prosecutors blame police for not turning in a report while police seethe over taking the hit for working the deadly streets of New Orleans. Probable cause is enough for an arrest, but not even close to the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard prosecutors must rise to in court to win a conviction.

    The escalation of 701 releases is symptomatic of a criminal justice system that has teetered on the verge of collapse since Katrina. As big as any problem is the lack of a crime lab -- 17 months after the rickety, antiquated lab on Tulane Avenue was inundated.

    Instead of having its own home base to test narcotics and bag evidence, New Orleans police borrow time at neighboring parish crime labs. The result is a staggering backlog of arrests that never evolve into court cases.

    For weeks, the New Orleans Police Department has appeared poised to strike a deal to open a new 10,000-square-foot crime lab on the lakefront campus of the University of New Orleans. NOPD has received $5 million in federal money to replace its flooded-out lab.

    But as of late Friday, the lab is still an unsigned promise.

    "We're still working out the details," said Sgt. Joe Narcisse, spokesman for NOPD. "Nothing is finalized."

    'The old-fashioned way'

    In the meantime, three police districts still work out of trailers. And the criminal justice system's lack of technology in record-keeping and case-tracking is only further stymied by the storm's lingering damage.

    "What we're up against in the post-Katrina world is we're doing things the old-fashioned way," said attorney Henri Wolbrette of the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation, a nonprofit working to get the crime lab up and running. "We're dealing with huge volumes of paper. The DA's computer system is down, they have to do everything manually. The foundation is working with them to get it back online. On the other side, the lack of a crime lab has created an enormous problem. The DA can't review something that's not there."

    The foundation is also trying to secure federal money to install a universal computer system for the six elements of the local law enforcement: prosecutors, cops, the sheriff, the public defenders, the clerk's office and the courthouse. At present, the six entities don't always have the same information in the same databases, making well-coordinated prosecution nearly impossible.

    Today, both Jordan and Police Superintendent Warren Riley are due to appear before the City Council to address issues surrounding the city's alarming crime rate. The questions include what can be done to avoid 701 releases.

    About 60 percent of all arrests in New Orleans are tied to the drug trade, said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a watchdog group. Two-thirds of those arrests are for simple possession.

    The lack of a local crime lab is taking a toll on the system and the crime rate, he said.

    "If you don't have lab analysis proving that it's drugs, you might be able to charge but you can't begin to convict anyone," Goyeneche said. "No defense attorney in his right mind is going to let a client plead guilty before they see that lab report. The system gets bottlenecked up."

    Witness woes

    A missed legal deadline isn't the only problem plaguing Orleans Parish's criminal justice system.

    Prosecutors and police blame a lack of witness cooperation for derailed murder cases, and Criminal District Court is littered with files that are dead on arrival when a witness backs out or disappears.

    That's why perennial murder suspect Garelle Smith was out on the streets of New Orleans in December, said Craig Famularo, the district attorney's chief of homicide division. Smith, 25, was arrested on suspicion of gunning down rapper Soulja Slim, aka James Tapp, in 2003, but was sprung on a 701 release when no charges had been brought within 60 days.

    Both of Smith's prior murder raps disintegrated because witnesses wouldn't come forward, said Famularo, a former officer and longtime prosecutor. "These were not cases of a lack of cooperation between police and prosecutors," he said.

    Smith, who escaped another murder case in 2004, was arrested last month in the murder of 24-year-old Mandell Duplessis, gunned down Aug. 4 outside a FEMA trailer.



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