Chasing Gideon (20 page)

Adjacent to the jail itself, the courthouse had also flooded, water gushing into basement evidence rooms and scattering and destroying years of evidence. Photographs stuck together, guns rusted, mold ate through fabrics, confiscated marijuana rotted, new DNA evidence went unrefrigerated for weeks, and, according to the
New York Times
, a non-English-speaking cleanup crew hired to try and salvage evidence relied on guesswork to figure out which collections of evidence belonged to which cardboard box of crime investigations.
¹⁵
Meanwhile, with the city emptied of residents, witnesses to crimes had fled the storm—some never to return. Juries, of course, were nonexistent. Even the public defenders were AWOL, only seven of them remaining to try and sort through the chaos.

Criminal justice in New Orleans ground to a complete stop.

Judge Calvin Johnson, who was
trying
to run a court out of a spare classroom at a college in Baton Rouge, knew those inmates' constitutional rights were likely being violated. Folks picked up for misdemeanors like DUIs or shoplifting were lost in the system, still in jail somewhere in the state where they were languishing for longer than any sentence that would have been meted out. Those charged with felonies, 90 percent of whom relied on public defenders, had no lawyers to press their cases. Some, picked up by cops in the hectic days before Katrina hit, had no official paperwork affirming their existence in custody.

Judge Johnson, then chief judge of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, appointed Steve Singer's Loyola University School of Law clinic and Pamela Metzger's Tulane Law School's clinic to represent the interests of all of the city's indigent defendants, which amounted to just about everyone in jail at the time (some 6,500 to 8,000 people), excluding the small fraction of folks who had private
lawyers. The two of them, on the ground immediately in the days after Katrina hit, helped spearhead the myriad reforms to indigent defense that were subsequently put in place over the years since the storm. Today, Metzger serves on the Louisiana Public Defender Board, and remains immersed in the struggles indigent defendants face in the city. Metzger says New Orleans has made “extraordinary strides” since Katrina. But understanding what happened during the storm is essential to understanding why the city is having such a difficult time maintaining its progress.

As she sits in her office one bright, sunny day in April 2012, in a vintage-style dress, cherry-red pumps, and a cardigan, Metzger explains she is dressed up because she is heading over to the courthouse later; she was tapped to be an expert witness in a lawsuit against the jail in which public defenders were demanding proper, timely access to their imprisoned clients. It is hard to imagine the legal and administrative chaos she describes in the aftermath of Katrina, but her office hints at it. The room is piled high with boxes and papers and books in stacks that have swelled beyond the confines of the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookshelves to spew out into columns on the floor—many of the file boxes containing inmate files from the days after Katrina. She is still holding on to these files, hoping they can be archived someday, testament to a level of disorder, disarray, and tumult that the criminal justice system was plunged into on the heels of the storm.

“Katrina laid bare just how bad the public defender system was in New Orleans,” she says. After the hurricane hit and the levees broke and everyone who could fled, the city was deserted. No people, no functioning traffic lights, no functioning parking meters, no meter maids, no courthouse, no traffic court, nothing. “It wiped out all the money,” says Singer, explaining that for three, four, five months, this income stream that had been used to pay for public defenders was completely decimated. The forty-two part-time public defenders couldn't be paid and stopped working.
¹⁶
The office was reduced to five part-time attorneys, a chief public defender, and one administrator.

At the same time, Singer's and Metzger's own lives were chaotic. Metzger had evacuated to Atlanta, where her parents lived, with her
two kids and her dog, was in the midst of separating from her husband, and had a set of clients from Tulane's law clinic whose cases she was supervising. She began commuting, leaving Atlanta on a 6
A.M.
flight Monday mornings, catching a flight back on Thursday nights. As she and Singer began to assess the situation, they realized that the troubles with indigent defense were even deeper than they had anticipated. Metzger got on the phone with Singer. “Do we have a list of clients?” she wanted to know. There was no list. They couldn't find a list of these 6,500 to 8,000 prisoners they were supposed to represent. No one seemed to know who the public defenders' clients were. This was shocking. Could it be that
no one
in the public defender's office kept such a list? Singer and Metzger discovered that not only had individual public defenders routinely failed to keep a list of who they represented, but that no office-wide list existed either. There wasn't even a record of which clients were in jail or to which jails inmates spread out across the state had been moved.

Eventually, the sheriff provided a list of who was in each of the jails scattered around the South. “We began to try and systematize who was in jail that shouldn't be. Who was in jail and needed a lawyer right away,” Metzger says. They divided the court sections, Metzger's law clinic taking two sections, Singer's law clinic taking another two, and another attorney, Meghan Garvey, taking one. They quickly discovered, however, that not all of the clients on the sheriff's list were showing up with any kind of case record in the courts. “There were eight thousand clients, three lawyers, and twenty students,” Metzger says. “It couldn't be done. It was very surreal.”

The federal government gave a grant of $2.8 million, which helped, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the $10 million estimated by a federal Justice Department study to be necessary for getting the public defender system up and running properly. The Louisiana State Bar Association commissioned a study and kicked in for the salaries of three lawyers for a year, but clearly many more were needed.

Metzger says lawyers around the country offered to volunteer and help represent clients, but they had so many strings. They were available only during a certain two-week stretch one month from
now and they did this particular kind of case. Metzger says no one realized the level they were working on. “When all these law firms said, ‘What can we do?' I said, ‘I need file folders. If you could have someone type up labels and put them on folders, etc.' Or, if you could go into the computers and have someone print the criminal history and put it in the folders for us, that would be miraculous—because we had eight thousand of them and could not do the physical labor. But they don't want to do that, they want to be heroes in court.”

Metzger and Singer and their law school students were reduced to traveling personally to jails around the state to interview inmates, asking for basic information: Did they have an attorney? How long had they been incarcerated? What was bail set at? What had they been charged with (although some had not even been formally charged)? Did their family know where they were? Did they know where their family was? “Steve and I used to have these conversations during those first months,” Metzger recalls, bemoaning the fact that they were so completely overwhelmed with the scope of the problem, so desperately in need of more hands and yet “nobody is coming.” Then, in the winter of 2006–2007, help came from an unexpected place: young people.

The Student Hurricane Network, an outreach effort run by college students to facilitate bringing volunteers to New Orleans, put out word about the dire state of indigent defense. Calling their effort Project Gideon, Metzger and Singer sought students to help them with all the unglamorous but essential grunt work. They were still trying to collect information on five hundred of the most difficult cases, cases that were confusing in terms of where these inmates actually were, what their record was, what had been done on their behalf thus far. They needed someone to physically travel to each of the prisons, talk to the prisoners, get statements from them, get police reports, create a file. When their plea went up on the Student Hurricane Network, they asked other law clinics to send a supervisor for every eight students and the plan was for student volunteers to spend their winter break helping. “We have seventeen students and fifteen supervisors,” a professor from the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in California told Metzger over the phone one day. “I said, ‘That's great, maybe we should find
something for those other supervisors to do,'” Metzger said. But she had misunderstood. “‘No,' they said, ‘We have
seventy
students and fifteen supervisors.' And I sat down on the floor of my office and I cried.” Her eyes fill with tears as she recounts this moment, some six years ago. On the scheduled date of December 14, three hundred student volunteers showed up to help for three weeks. “We never anticipated the response we received,” she says. Some arrived having driven for a day and a night to get here and then happily jumped in their cars for another seven-hour drive to a remote jail to interview one person. They were spread out, crashing and working in every available space at the school, with paperwork and files everywhere as they handwrote all their notes and collected information in files (there were not enough working computers, and those that existed were used to search the criminal justice databases). “We cleared the backlog and it was incredible. Here we had been all this time, with these major organizations saying they would send someone as a fellow or for a trial the second week in November and we kept waiting for all these lawyers to come, but we were asking the wrong people. We should have been asking the students. We got more work done with student volunteers and supervisors than we did from any single law firm or public interest firm. Period.”

“We started filing habeas cases,” Metzger says, explaining that this was a collective strategy where she petitioned the court saying the prisoners had been wrongly held. She went into Judge Arthur Hunter's courtroom, listed a group of people by name, pointed out they had not seen a lawyer, there were no lawyers in sight, there were no juries, and they ought to be released. “Suddenly, all these fabulous plea bargains were made available [by the DA],” Metzger says. That was troubling, Metzger says, because she often had no idea whether that was a good deal for them or not, having no idea of the history, their criminal history, the facts of the case. “This was triage,” she says. “There was no individual representation, this was mass representation. So we had hearings. And the testimony was heartbreaking.”

Metzger wrote about one man, Pedro Parra-Sanchez, one of the eight thousand detainees hurled into the post-Katrina chaos, in her
Tulane Law Review
article: