**This article was in Saturday's Times-Picayune (local New Orleans newspaper) specifically about the legal work my group did for the Right to Counsel Project this week!
http://www.nola.com/search/index.ssf?/base/library-98/114266812231840.xml?nola
Katrina leaves inmates in limbo
Many still jailed are 'doing Katrina time'
Saturday, March 18, 2006
By Gwen FilosaStaff writer
Jamario Alexander Jr., a 19-year-old from New Orleans busted long before Hurricane Katrina on a Hollygrove street corner, might as well have pleaded guilty to a first-time possession of marijuana charge when he had the chance in April 2005.
Alexander already has served more than a calendar year -- twice the time of the maximum six-month sentence that the conviction carries, court records show. These days, he continues to rack up time served behind bars without ever having been tried, let alone convicted, of any crime.
The young man is one of thousands whose cases essentially froze when the floodwaters of Aug. 29 forced a massive evacuation from the 7,000-inmate parish prison.
In a borrowed federal courtroom this week, law students from across the country volunteered to sift through the parish's criminal docket system, a job likened to an archaeological dig, to not only create a post-Katrina database of pending cases, but also free defendants who already have served their time but remain trapped in the chaotic system where the few public defenders still on the job carry caseloads bordering 1,000 each.
The law students have seen cases in which people have been held after their release dates, some of whom should have been out before Katrina. Some have been held seven months longer than what the law allows.
'Clearly illegal'
"Others would have been released in a moment if they saw a judge," said Luke Sisak, 24, a third-year law student at the University of Southern California, on a recent afternoon as dozens of her colleagues painstakingly pored over records and laptops on the fourth floor of U.S. District Court. "They're doing Katrina time. It's pretty clearly illegal for the state to hold them longer."
"The most pressing need is to get people out of jail," said Sarah Thompson, a second-year law student at Suffolk University in Boston. "Because they're indigent, they don't know who to get a hold of when they're in jail."
Thompson, 22, made her first-ever visit to New Orleans this week for this project. The various inequities in criminal cases that she has seen since have made her gasp.
"Does the Constitution apply in Louisiana?" Thompson said. "I really had that thought. Not that I have a better system, but Katrina is not the problem. These problems were here long before. Katrina aggravated it."
Sisak and Thompson are part of the "Student Hurricane Network" of college volunteers destined for the battered region during this season of spring breaks. But instead of tearing out moldy, ruined Sheetrock, these law students are helping the law clinics of Tulane and Loyola universities comply with the criminal court's request to help sort out the population of defendants serving Katrina time.
"There was a time when we thought the cavalry was coming," said Pamela Metzger, a Tulane law professor advising the students on the database project, sparked by a court order from Chief Judge Calvin Johnson in an attempt to sort out the current docket. "Now we realize, we're the cavalry. In a post-Katrina world, there is no excuse for someone sitting in jail on a marijuana first or for public drunkenness or failure to pay child support."
Push for reforms
In spite of the disastrous state of the criminal docket, Metzger said Louisiana's top judges are poised to support making sweeping improvements in the criminal court system here, such as the Southeast Louisiana Criminal Justice Task Force, formed at the request of state Supreme Court Justice Catherine Kimball and state Attorney General Charles Foti.
Metzger and other New Orleans lawyers, such as Meghan Garvey, also have traveled to various Louisiana prisons, including Concordia and Avoyelles, in search of Orleans inmates shipped out of the flooded jail almost a week after Aug. 29.
'We were the first lawyers they had seen since weeks before the evacuation," Metzger said. "I talked to guys who didn't know why they were in jail. Some people had serious psychiatric problems."
Jamario Alexander, 18 when arrested on a Tuesday night by two officers patrolling his neighborhood, was among the mug shots and docket sheets the students catalogued this week.
As a teenager, Alexander fell into trouble before. He pleaded guilty in January 2005 for dealing cocaine in Orleans, a conviction in which he received five years -- all suspended -- and ordered to seek drug counseling. Police seized $11 from him at the time of his arrest and $217 from his cohort.
Alexander's was the type of case that Orleans Parish Criminal District Court dealt with in high volume, handing out suspended sentences and sending convicts to drug court instead of prison, before the floodwaters drowned 80 percent of the city and forced the court to relocate from its damaged building at Tulane and Broad.
In a separate case, from the same arrest, Alexander is charged with possession of cocaine, allegedly having a plastic baggie of rock-like powder in his pocket. He has a trial date set for later this month.
Alexander was locked up after two cops saw him throw down a plastic soda bottle, along with a plastic baggie, just after 8 p.m. on March 1, 2005, having spotted the police presence, court records show. During a search, police said they found the rocked-up cocaine in another baggie.
Alexander, held on a combined $16,000 bond for both drug charges, has had several scheduled court dates earlier this year, but hasn't made it in yet.
"Defendant is in custody of sheriff and was not brought into open court. He is in DOC (state) custody," a January minute entry explains.
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Gwen Filosa can be reached at gfilosa@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3304.
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