New Orleans' Indigent Defender Board Drops Suit Against Judges

August 31, 2007
The Times-Picayune
By The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS -- New Orleans' Indigent Defender Board has dropped a lawsuit against the city's Criminal District Court judges, now that the Legislature has overhauled the state's system for defending people who cannot pay attorneys.

The new state law makes the lawsuit moot, says a two-paragraph motion filed in federal court on Wednesday and approved the same day by U.S. District Judge Lance Africk.

"The Legislature's newly passed legislation creating a statewide system overseeing indigent defense made local boards optional," the board's attorney, Herbert Larson, said Thursday. "There no longer is a local board for the Orleans public defender system. So continuing a lawsuit against a board that no longer exists and no longer can take action would be pointless."

The lawsuit was an outgrowth of long-standing problems with indigent defense programs in New Orleans. Those problems were made worse when Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city in August 2005, shutting down the city for weeks, diminishing its population and cutting deeply into Indigent Defender Board revenue derived from traffic fines.

Earlier this year, the New Orleans criminal judges removed four of the board's eight members. Chief deputy judge Arthur Hunter complained that the board was unable to adequately represent the city's hundreds of poor defendants. Hunter considered the problem so bad that he suspended prosecution of 98 defendants in May.

The lawsuit, filed in May, accused the judges of unconstitutional intervention.

The issue was rendered moot by a new law that creates a state board to oversee local indigent defender offices, which have been run by 41 independent boards around the state.

"That bill is going to have the effect of disbanding the local boards. Whatever local boards will remain will serve as advisory boards but they won't have the kind of statutory authority we had," Denise LeBoeuf, the board's chairman, said Thursday.


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