Day One - Hitting the Ground Running
The Orleans Public Defenders' office is located in downtown New Orleans, on the seventh floor of an office building a few steps from the Magistrate Court and the House of Detention. The offices take up the entire floor, and quotations in gothic capital letters are the primary decorations in the public spaces: from Nietzsche ("Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.") to Theodore Roosevelt ("Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.") The office is bright and spacious, with windows with 360 degree views, but there are still no nameplates on the doors. The office tower in which the defenders office is in an area where the effects of Katrina are still very visible: the views from the windows include houses that look abandoned with torn roofs. The nearby House of Detention has a rust colored stain on its doors and walls at chest-height, marking the flood water line. The House of Detention's capacity has also never recovered its capacity since Hurricane Katrina, so tents have appeared behind it to accommodate the jail population. More recent hurricanes are also making an impact:after a courthouse flooded with three inches of water last week, it was closed and other courtrooms are picking up the slack.
If anything, public defenders are busy. We walked in at ten past nine (late because we couldn't find Tulane Avenue, where the office is located), and before we could get comfortable in the conference room, we were grabbed by various attorneys and given assignments. Choya went off to help a staff attorney in court with a trial (the client was acquitted!); another staff attorney grabbed Mike and took him off to do some research on the public records hearsay exception; Kathy began to research a memo on eyewitness identification; and Adam and I helped out at arraignments and bond hearings.
Adam assists OPD lawyer Matt Robnett with research.
Mike drafts a memo.
Arraignments were an opportunity to view the Louisiana criminal justice system from the very beginning of the process. Just insisde the "House of D" (the rest of the word "detention" had fallen off the entrance's sign), in the old line-up identification room, thirty defendants in neon orange shirts emblazoned "OPP" for "Orleans Parish Prison" sat in folding chairs, each one shackled to a fellow defendant at his ankles. A large flat screen television stood at the elevated space at the head of the room. Arraignments were held via webcam. At the appointed time, the judge appeared on the screen. Via the screen, he would call a name, and that person would stand, along with his shackled compatriot, and they would both shuffle to the front so the judge could see them on his screen. Both the client and the judge had a public defender on their side: one helped the clients, and the other argued for bond amounts before the judge. The webcam only had a microphone for the judge, so defendants could not hear the arguments of the prosecutor, or the responses of the public defender. The crimes I observed being arraigned ranged from marijuana possession to one case of aggravated rape (bail set at $200,000). Most were crack/cocaine possession, and the judge generally set bail at around $20,000 (of which the defendant would have to post thirteen percent, or about $2,000). I couldn't hear what the public defender was arguing, but the lack of variation in bail amounts for particular charges suggested that the individual variables, like flight risk and ties to the community, were given marginal weight by the court. In a too-classic example of the race distinctions in the criminal justice system, the only person whose case was dismissed was white. Every other defendant was black, with the exception of one latino man, and they all went back to the pen.
To summarize, the first day on the job was both an eye-opening experience, as well as a welcome opportunity for us to apply our legal training in concrete ways. Tomorrow promises to be equally exciting.
