Greetings From the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center ("LCAC")! Today we finished up our fifth and final day of work at the LCAC in
New Orleans. Our crew consisted of Fordham students Anamaria, Phil, Jeremy and Deana, as well as two students from George Mason, Andrea and Stefan. Our project has been loosely named the "Fourth Amendment Project." In the words of our supervising attorney on the project Richard Burke, the Fourth Amendment has gone out the window in New Orleans post-Katrina. Not that it meant all that much beforehand, but with the rising rates of violent incidents after the storms, police misconduct seems to have increased to levels above what already existed.
To give some background, every month there are roughly 1,100 arrests in this city. After each arrest, a suspect is given a bond hearing and is detained for up to sixty days if they can't pay. The costs of each arrest are substantial. For taxpayers, the costs are obvious -- something on the order of $23 per day per prisoner. But the real costs are paid by the people picked up in the dragnet. On our first day we were told the story of a wheelchair-bound client who required catheters to use the bathroom, and needed to change them multiple times a day. He was picked up for assault (figure that out?!) and dropped into Orleans Parish Prison ("OPP"), where he couldn't get the medical attention he needed. Eventually he developed a serious urinary tract infection, aggravated by the amount of time he was neglected in the system.
The postscript to that story is not unfamiliar: he was never charged and ultimately was released after suffering pain and humiliation to the benefit of no-one but the sheriff's office. It's a pattern that marks the NOPD's response to the rising crime rate throughout the city: target minor crimes, mostly petty drug possession, to get at the major offenders. Many of the arrests were improper in the first place, and 65% of the cases are never prosecuted. Aside from being an apalling waste of resources, the result is program that overwhelmingly sweeps up young African-American men in the poorest neighborhoods in the city, processing them through a system that produces more offending behavior than it reduces.
The Fourth Amendment Project was really designed to illuminate the costs of this approach by showing how NOPD officers disregard the Fourth Amendment when they arrest people for these minor offenses, and ho
w magistrates reviewing those arrests have abdicated their duty to ensure probable cause existed for the arrests in the first place. Preliminary indications made the attorneys down here at LCAC suspect that some percentage of these arrests were unsupported by probable cause and were not caught by the magistrates, unecessarily increasing the human costs of processing people through the system. Right now in the beginning stages, the project is something of a triage exercise. We have looked through all the arrest reports made available to us for January 2007 to gauge the sufficiency of the arresting officers' affidavits. We've found some pretty obvious deficiencies and, without spoiling the surprise, can pretty safely say that the results have been unsettling so far. Hopefully, the data will prod the NOPD and the Orleans Parish magistrates into changing the way things work down here to the benefit of the entire community -- rich or poor, black or white.
New Orleans. Our crew consisted of Fordham students Anamaria, Phil, Jeremy and Deana, as well as two students from George Mason, Andrea and Stefan. Our project has been loosely named the "Fourth Amendment Project." In the words of our supervising attorney on the project Richard Burke, the Fourth Amendment has gone out the window in New Orleans post-Katrina. Not that it meant all that much beforehand, but with the rising rates of violent incidents after the storms, police misconduct seems to have increased to levels above what already existed.To give some background, every month there are roughly 1,100 arrests in this city. After each arrest, a suspect is given a bond hearing and is detained for up to sixty days if they can't pay. The costs of each arrest are substantial. For taxpayers, the costs are obvious -- something on the order of $23 per day per prisoner. But the real costs are paid by the people picked up in the dragnet. On our first day we were told the story of a wheelchair-bound client who required catheters to use the bathroom, and needed to change them multiple times a day. He was picked up for assault (figure that out?!) and dropped into Orleans Parish Prison ("OPP"), where he couldn't get the medical attention he needed. Eventually he developed a serious urinary tract infection, aggravated by the amount of time he was neglected in the system.
The postscript to that story is not unfamiliar: he was never charged and ultimately was released after suffering pain and humiliation to the benefit of no-one but the sheriff's office. It's a pattern that marks the NOPD's response to the rising crime rate throughout the city: target minor crimes, mostly petty drug possession, to get at the major offenders. Many of the arrests were improper in the first place, and 65% of the cases are never prosecuted. Aside from being an apalling waste of resources, the result is program that overwhelmingly sweeps up young African-American men in the poorest neighborhoods in the city, processing them through a system that produces more offending behavior than it reduces.
The Fourth Amendment Project was really designed to illuminate the costs of this approach by showing how NOPD officers disregard the Fourth Amendment when they arrest people for these minor offenses, and ho
w magistrates reviewing those arrests have abdicated their duty to ensure probable cause existed for the arrests in the first place. Preliminary indications made the attorneys down here at LCAC suspect that some percentage of these arrests were unsupported by probable cause and were not caught by the magistrates, unecessarily increasing the human costs of processing people through the system. Right now in the beginning stages, the project is something of a triage exercise. We have looked through all the arrest reports made available to us for January 2007 to gauge the sufficiency of the arresting officers' affidavits. We've found some pretty obvious deficiencies and, without spoiling the surprise, can pretty safely say that the results have been unsettling so far. Hopefully, the data will prod the NOPD and the Orleans Parish magistrates into changing the way things work down here to the benefit of the entire community -- rich or poor, black or white.As an endnote, we all feel really lucky to have had the opportunity to get involved in this project and extend the most sincere expressions of thanks and gratitude to the LCAC attorneys both for taking up such a worthy cause, and for letting us participate in it.
--Fordham SHN LCAC Contingent
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Greetings From the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center Today we finished up our fifth and final day of work at the LCAC in New Orleans. Our crew consisted of Fordham students Anamaria, Phil, Jeremy and Deana, as well as two students from George Mason, Andrea and Stefan. Our project has been loosely named the "Fourth Amendment Project." In the words of our supervising attorney on the project Richard Burke, the Fourth Amendment has gone out the window in New Orleans post-Katrina. Not that it meant all that much beforehand, but with the rising rates of violent incidents after the storms, police misconduct seems to have increased to levels above what already existed.To give some background, every month there are roughly 1,100 arrests in this city. After each arrest, a suspect is given a bond hearing and is detained for up to sixty days if they can't pay. On our first day we were told the story of a wheelchair-bound client who required catheters to use the bathroom, and needed to change them multiple times a day. He was picked up for assault (figure that out?!) and dropped into Orleans Parish Prison ("OPP"), where he couldn't get the medical attention he needed. Eventually he developed a serious urinary tract infection, aggravated by the amount of time he was neglected in the system.
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