Two veteran New Orleans criminal court judges have launched investigations of the besieged city's crumbling criminal justice system -- probes that could lead to major changes in how poor defendants are represented.
That system, on the verge of collapse for years, has been further imperiled by Hurricane Katrina's consequences\o7.
\f7In the public defender's office, so few lawyers are available for more than 4,000 cases that defense for the indigent is almost nonexistent. And the office has no investigators.
That disarray has caused Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter to summon key players in the system to a hearing that will be held Friday.
The chief judge of the court, Calvin Johnson, also believes the system is in crisis and has launched an investigation, asking Tulane and Loyola law professors to assist him.
In calling his Friday hearing, Hunter said there might be prima facie evidence that indigent defendants in Orleans Parish "are not and cannot receive the effective assistance of counsel to which they are constitutionally entitled."
The judges' moves follow decades of reports describing Louisiana's system of indigent representation as one of the worst in the country. Several court decisions, including one by the Louisiana Supreme Court last year, have lambasted the system, but those rulings have not generated meaningful reforms.
One symbol of the precarious situation in the public defender's office can be found on the website of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. It lists pertinent court information but does not even have a telephone number for the city's indigent defender.
The office's few remaining lawyers are each responsible for an estimated 1,000 felony cases, dramatically exceeding American Bar Assn. guidelines for how many cases a lawyer can handle effectively and responsibly.
"It's impossible, not to mention unethical," for a defense lawyer to be responsible for so many cases, said Phyllis E. Mann, a longtime leader of the Louisiana Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who has played a key role in recruiting volunteer lawyers to help out after Katrina.
Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Catherine D. Kimball, who has been spearheading efforts to get the state's court system back to normal, said she expected Louisiana to receive at least $60 million in federal aid from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. But in a telephone interview Wednesday she said she expected little of that money to go to indigent defense, with "the lion's share" earmarked for law enforcement agencies to defray hurricane costs.
