Guest Editorial
Our Own Guantanamo Bay
By Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.
Thursday, May 18, 2006

Thousands of citizens – mostly young Black men with no money or resources – are languishing away in Louisiana prisons. Significantly, public outcry for the unconstitutional treatment of non-citizens illegally held at Guantanamo Bay is more robust than protestations on behalf of the thousands of indigent American citizens illegally held in Louisiana jails.

Several days after Hurricane Katrina hit, approximately 9,000 prisoners in the greater-New Orleans area were evacuated. Six thousand prisoners came from the Orleans city jail alone. Many of these prisoners, accused but not convicted of any crime, remain in jail today with no lawyer to represent them and no judge to review their case. The majority were arrested and held on misdemeanor or other minor chargers because they were too poor to afford a bond. Since no lawyers were made available and many New Orleans courts were not processing pending matters, the poorest citizens sat in jail for months longer than a conviction and maximum sentence would have allowed.

Regrettably, Hurricane Katrina is only partially at fault for this state of affairs. The Louisiana public defender system failed to protect basic constitutional rights of its clients even pre-Katrina. Before Katrina, Louisiana was the only state in the country that funded indigent defense primarily through traffic tickets. The indigent defense budget, therefore, was constantly in flux and inadequate. Public defenders were employed only on a part-time basis and paid an unreasonably low wage. The result was that poor Louisianans did not even receive the quality of representation minimally required under the Constitution.

Just two years ago, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association evaluated the indigent defense system in Louisiana and concluded, “In direct violation of the state and federal constitutions, Louisiana government . . . has constructed a disparate system that fosters systemic ineffective assistance of counsel due primarily to inadequate funding and a lack of independence from undue political interference.” Louisiana already was failing miserably in providing its citizens constitutionally adequate indigent defense representation pre-Katrina. Hurricane Katrina simply exposed these structural deficiencies for the world to see.

After Katrina, an already bad system got even worse. Because of the traffic ticket funding scheme, the New Orleans chief public defender was forced to fire 36 of the 42 staff attorneys. The combination of no traffic and few police officers resulted in just about the entire indigent defense budget drying up. These remaining six public defenders were left with approximately 4,000 clients in Orleans Parish alone, far more than the small office could competently handle.

Indeed, the utter lack of resources directed toward indigent defense was so dire that Judge Arthur Hunter of the Louisiana District Court suspended all publicly defended trials in his court because the remaining public defender office could not provide effective assistance of counsel as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Today, many improperly jailed Louisiana citizens have been released due to the courageous lawyering of many inside and outside of Louisiana. Thousands, however, remain unjustly, illegally, and unconstitutionally jailed.

Notions of due process of law are the very pillars that support our democracy. Nothing is more basic in the American imagination than the notion that the government cannot imprison its citizens without a fair and transparent judicial hearing. Thousands of Americans, right in our own backyard, are receiving less judicial process and less critical media attention than alleged enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay.

America is, and must be, better than that.

 

Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. is a professor at YaleSchool of Law.