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It is difficult to comprehend the tragedy and devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. So much of what we take for granted in our lives was lost by so many living in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Much of what was lost will never be restored. It is not my purpose here to recount what we watched day after day on our televisions or read in the papers, but I do want to take a moment to talk about the kindness and generosity of those in the criminal defense community who came together in response to this disaster.
In the first few days after Katrina hit the gulf coast, NACDL members immediately began to offer assistance in any way they could. Many opened their homes and their offices to attorneys and their families who needed a place to live and/or work. Executive Director Ralph Grunewald, Steven Frazier, Alison Sterling, and others on the NACDL staff quickly created a Katrina Disaster Bulletin Board on the NACDL Web site to provide a way for those who needed help to connect with those who were in a position to offer assistance. Go online to that Bulletin Board, and you can see the wonderful outpouring of offers from NACDL members around the country.During that first week after Katrina struck the gulf coast, NACDL’s Executive Committee authorized a donation of $5,000 as seed money to create a Katrina Disaster Relief Fund.
The Foundation for Criminal Justice accepted the donation and set up a fund to accept additional donations. As I write this column, NACDL’s Katrina Disaster Relief Fund has more than $120,000 in gifts and pledges. This includes matching funds contributed by the Foundation, whose Trustees established a challenge grant of up to $50,000 to match individual member contributions dollar-for-dollar. Many individual members have contributed to the fund as have the Tarrant County (Texas) Criminal Defense Lawyer Association, the Texas Lawyers Educational Institute of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Wisconsin Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and the Miami Chapter of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. In addition, Irwin Schwartz and Jeff Robinson organized a barbecue/fund-raising event in Seattle resulting in another substantial contribution to the Fund. I also received an e-mail from Li Xiaolin, one of six members of the Beijing Lawyers’ Association who had joined us in February of last year for our mid-winter meeting in New Orleans. He wrote after receiving news in Beijing of the Katrina disaster and described how impressed the Beijing delegation had been by NACDL and New Orleans during that visit. He ended his message with a pledge of $600 that he and the five other NACDL members in Beijing were contributing to the relief fund to help their fellow criminal defense lawyers in the United States. My thanks to all of you who have given so generously.
Jim Boren, Phyllis Mann, Elton B. Richey, Jr., and so many others have been working tirelessly to help criminal defense attorneys and defense organizations in the area affected by Katrina. NACDL has taken an active role in this process as well. We hired Keith Nordyke, a criminal defense lawyer in Baton Rouge, as our interim Katrina Disaster Relief Liaison until Julie Kilborn was able to take over the position. Julie is now coordinating efforts to assist lawyers in rebuilding their lives and practices. She will also be working with a team of volunteers from the Loyola University School of Law to develop databases of information about the prisoners and their lawyers in an effort to bring a semblance of order to the chaos created by Katrina.
As a practical matter, the criminal justice system in New Orleans and other badly damaged areas shut down in the aftermath of Katrina. Approximately 8,000 prisoners were moved from the New Orleans area to 35 different locations. Locating individuals and reconnecting them with attorneys still able to practice in Louisiana was one of the first tasks undertaken. Malia Brink, NACDL’s Indigent Defense Counsel, helped with the massive effort of coordinating dozens of volunteers to go into the prisons to identify who was being held where and the status of their cases. In addition, evidence and records in many pending cases have been damaged or lost. It will likely take months to fully evaluate the impact of Katrina on the court system.
While the problems facing Louisiana’s criminal justice system after Katrina are enormous, this was a criminal justice system that was badly broken long before Katrina. NACDL’s Indigent Defense Committee had targeted Louisiana as one of the states in which NACDL would challenge the abysmal funding provided for indigent defense. And on April 1, 2005, the Louisiana Supreme Court in State v. Citizen, 898 So.2d 325, 335 (La. 2005), had held that “the constitution explicitly places the duty of providing a working system for securing the representation of indigent defendants on the shoulders of the legislature” and provided for the halting of a capital prosecution if adequate funding was not available. When Katrina hit, indigent defense in New Orleans Parish was funded primarily by traffic ticket revenue — not a particularly reliable revenue source at any time — and certainly virtually nonexistent now.
As the criminal justice system is rebuilt, the State of Louisiana should take a hard look at how that rebuilding ought to be accomplished. One of the problems with fixing a broken system is that the daily operational demands overwhelm the ability of the participants even to conceptualize, much less successfully implement, a comprehensive overhaul. Here, because the system has essentially been shut down, New Orleans and other areas in Louisiana have been presented with an unparalleled opportunity for system-wide reform. I hope that they seize this opportunity and create a system of justice that works for all.
