The Trials and Travails of a New Orleans Public Defender
Years of state budget cuts to the Louisiana Public Defender Board, coupled with an unstable local funding system reliant on New Orleans court fines and fees, have reduced the number of staff attorneys at the Orleans public defender’s office from 78 in 2009 to 42 today. Young felony defenders like Anderson have found themselves juggling 300 or more cases at once, twice the number recommended by the American Bar Association.
Faced with such crushing caseloads, New Orleans’ chief defender, Derwyn Bunton, announced in January that his office would refuse certain felony cases where defendants faced lengthy sentences. With a shortage of attorneys qualified to provide competent defense for those cases, Bunton said, the office would focus instead on lesser felonies. As a result, around 110 indigent people accused of crimes in New Orleans have had their cases wait-listed or refused in recent months. More than 60 of them still sit in jail awaiting a lawyer.
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The American Civil Liberties Union responded to Bunton’s announcement by suing his office, alleging that the lack of legal representation violated indigent defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights. Bunton said the Orleans Public Defender cannot afford to represent itself in the suit. Mark Surprenant of the Adams and Reese law firm has agreed to represent it for free.
In her almost three years as a public defender, Anderson, a petite former ballerina, has seen up close how compassionate legal counsel can change the lives of poor people accused of crimes in New Orleans. Watching her office turn down cases has been hard to bear.
While clients await the appointment of a lawyer, valuable time is lost that could be spent investigating a case, she said. As days pass, memories fade, surveillance recordings disappear and witnesses change their minds about talking to lawyers.
The New Orleans City Council, reacting to what Bunton called a “constitutional crisis,” appropriated $200,000 for the public defender’s office in January, according to the spokesman for the office. The money has allowed the office to stave off furloughs, but a hiring freeze remains in place.
As the state public defender board awaits what could be another sizable cut to its budget by the Legislature, Anderson and her colleagues have become the last line of defense for 80 percent of criminal defendants in New Orleans. Their days consist of hectic mornings in court, hours-long waits in jail visiting rooms to meet with clients and the pervading sense that they can never do enough.
“I tell aspiring public defenders, ‘You will fall asleep in a panic that you forgot to do something, and you will wake up thinking the same thing,” she said. “You’re always aware that any mistake you make could cost someone months or years in jail.”
On a recent morning, Anderson left the public defender’s office on Tulane Avenue and headed to Criminal District Court half-a-block away. She was spending the day as a section attorney, a common assignment that requires moving cases for some clients while keeping track of proceedings in other parts of the courthouse. For the next three hours, she shuttled back and forth between courtrooms, carrying a stack of case files and texting constantly with other attorneys.
Lauren Anderson is a staff attorney at the Orleans Parish Public Defenders Office. Due to staff cuts, attrition and low funding she is overwhelmed with clients and has little time to prepare for cases.
In Section C, for example, she requested a set of police reports for three upcoming hearings. Then she hustled to Section L, where she persuaded a prosecutor to re-enroll her client in a diversion program, which allows non-violent offenders to avoid prosecution by taking counseling classes or doing community service.
Minutes later she was in Section K, where a cherubic 18-year-old client sat waiting for her. He had been arrested at 17 on a charge of simple burglary of an inhabited dwelling, a felony, and she hoped to get his case dismissed.
“He was living on the street when I first met him,” Anderson said as she walked back to Section C. Abandoned by his foster mother, he had no birth certificate or state identification, so he couldn’t enroll in school. Over the past few months, however, Anderson had connected him with a social worker, procured a school uniform from the Urban League and gotten him enrolled at Joseph S. Clark High School in Treme.
“The odds are already stacked against this kid,” she said. “Having a felony on his record at this age is only going to make his life more difficult.”
Growing up in Asheville, N.C., Anderson had harbored dreams of dancing for the Alvin Ailey Dance Co. in New York City. At 4 feet, 11 inches tall, however, she was too small to be a professional ballerina. She double-majored in dance and political science at Tulane University, but developed a parallel interest in public service work. A summer abroad program spent teaching at an orphanage in Uganda persuaded her to go to law school.
“People at the orphanage would tell me, ‘The only way to fix things in this country is to change the laws, and to do that you have to be a lawyer,'” she said. “After that I sort of knew what I had to do.”
At LSU Law Center, she enrolled in the Juvenile Justice Clinic and clerked for a summer at the Orleans public defender’s office, where the staff attorneys’ commitment to their clients amazed her. Less than year out of law school, she sent her resume to Bunton.
“I basically begged him to hire me,” she said.
Like a number of attorneys at the office, Anderson said some of her relatives had been caught up in the criminal justice system. In choosing public defense work, she said, “I wanted to provide the kind of support and attention people in my family didn’t get from their attorneys.”
For her first two years, Anderson covered misdemeanor cases at Municipal Court, regularly juggling more than 2,000 cases a year. She began taking felonies in May, and now makes $55,000 a year.
Though she handles far fewer cases than she did as a misdemeanor attorney, each one comes with higher stakes. Much of her time in court is spent helping clients understand the reality of their situation.
“Someone could have a minor case – possession of a single crack rock, say – but because they have three prior felonies, they’re automatically looking at 20 years to life,” she said. “Many people have no idea what they’re up against.”
She is haunted by the thought that someone she represents has been wrongfully imprisoned because of a processing error she failed to catch. Once, she discovered a defendant was being held in jail for his father’s probation violation, because the two shared the same name.
Another time, a judge ordered that a mentally ill client of hers be released from jail, but the Sheriff’s Office failed to honor the order for a week, she said. The extra jail time exacerbated her client’s medical symptoms, and he attempted suicide in his cell. The client’s sister broke the news to Anderson in a late-night phone call.
The frantic pace of Anderson’s life in Criminal District Court finds its counterpoint in Orleans Parish jail, where she spends most afternoons. Five visitation booths serve an inmate population of 1,200. She said she and other public defenders regularly wait as long as two hours to visit a single defendant.
Until recently, the jail barred women inmates from receiving visitors at the same time as men, worsening the delays. Anderson dealt with it by scheduling additional client visits at night and on weekends.
Visiting clients is not always possible, however. Last year, Sheriff Marlin Gusman began transferring hundreds of pre-trial detainees to jails in Franklin and East Carroll parishes, both around four hours away. Gusman claimed he didn’t have enough beds at his jail, though Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin argued that a surplus of state prisoners accounted for the shortage.
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For Anderson, the transfers mean 250 miles or more stand between her and many of her clients. This all but prevents her from meeting them face-to-face to discuss evidence, police reports and other important information. Such meetings not only improve an attorney’s understanding of a case, she said, they also help to establish a client’s trust.
“If someone I’m representing doesn’t trust me, he or she is more likely to act against their own self-interest,” Anderson said. “They might plead guilty just because they want to get out of jail, when I think they should fight it and go to trial.”
In some cases, shuffling clients around the state causes Anderson to lose track of them entirely. The Orleans Sheriff’s Office database labels inmates who are not in East Carroll or Franklin parishes as “TOC,” or temporarily out of custody, without providing an actual location, she said.
“I definitely won’t be meeting with them,” she said, “because I have no idea where they are.”
Anderson is quick to point out that more senior public defenders, some of whom work at least one murder or rape trial a week, face greater stress than she does. Most of her cases involve lesser crimes like drug possession, aggravated battery and home invasions.
Still, she said, the pressure would overwhelm her if she didn’t engage in certain outside activities. Those include exercising every day at a local barre studio and taking part in Gideon’s Promise, a national public defender training program that can resemble group therapy.
Working with Municipal Court at the New Orleans Mission, a project she helped launch in September, has helped her get through the last six months, she said. Developed with Judge Sean Early and another attorney, the program lets poor people who are charged with “homeless crimes,” such as public intoxication and sleeping on the sidewalk, clear their outstanding warrants through payment plans or community service.
Anderson said worrying about whether her job will exist the next day has made it even more difficult. Over the past year, she has watched burned out colleagues leave for larger paychecks and less demanding caseloads. She has been offered such jobs herself, and so far she has turned them all down.
“People have asked me about my 10-year plan, and I say I still want to be working here,” she said. “If the office ceased to exist tomorrow, I’d try to find a way to rebuild it. And I know a lot of people would help me.”