Coronavirus emergency order could keep people in prison longer than expected
30th March 2020 · 0 Comments
By Emeka Dibia
Contributing Writer
The ACLU sent a letter to the governor’s office expressing serious concerns about an executive order that would suspend legal deadlines for district attorneys to file charges against people who are held in jail. That means people being held could stay behind bars longer than anticipated.
The organization fears history repeating itself.
The governor’s executive order, JBE 2020-30, Section 5 states “legal deadlines, including liberative prescription and preemptive periods applicable to legal proceeding in all courts, administrative agencies and boards are hereby suspended until at least Monday, April 13, 2020.”
The ACLU noted that when similar measures were put in place following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it resulted in “widespread unlawful detention” and “widespread over-incarceration.”
“We understand the need to protect the public from this unprecedented pandemic, but these curbs on due process would leave thousands of presumably innocent Louisianans to languish in legal limbo while doing nothing to advance public health,” said Alanah Odoms Hebert, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana.
“Far from stemming the spread of this virus, these moves will result in more people confined in squalid conditions where they are at substantially greater risk of infection. It is critical that the governor and the Louisiana Supreme Court instruct courts to continue to conduct daily bail hearings and release from custody everyone who is not a danger to our community,” Odoms Hebert said.
The letter was also signed by Lindsey Hortenstine, president of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; Meghan Garvey Legislative, chair of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; Katherine M. Mattes, director of the Criminal Justice Clinic and Senior Professor of the Practice Tulane Law School; and Pamela R. Metzger, director of the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center and Professor of Law Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.
The Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition drew up a similar letter which it sent to the City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana. The coalition demanded humane treatment of community members inside the jail and highlighted the impact the quality of health inside Orleans Parish Prison will have on the entire city. That letter was also signed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the ACLU of Louisiana, and dozens of other organizations.
“Carceral facilities are incubators for infectious diseases,” OPPRC’s letter reads, “and the situation inside OPP will affect our community’s health on both sides of the jail’s walls.”
That letter urged elected officials to use their authority to immediately release from the city’s jail people who are being held pre-trial who are at high risk to COVID-19 as defined by the CDC. Also, it called for others who are being held for low-level, nonviolent, or probationary offenses to be released.
Last week, the Criminal District Court of Orleans Parish ordered the release of prisoners being held pre-trial for misdemeanors or low-level offenses from the city’s jail. The en banc order was signed by Deputy Judge Robin Pittman on behalf of the court.
The judge’s order came in response to a letter campaign organized by the OPPRC and involving several advocates members of the community expressing concerns about the spread of COVID-19 and the impacts it would have on those inside the jail and the community at large.
The OPPRC began the letter campaign after an Orleans Parish Prison medical staffer tested positive for the coronavirus.
“A mere 15 years after Hurricane Katrina, when the city left people for dead inside OPP as the waters rose, our leaders are still hesitating to act,” said OPPRC Executive Director Sade Dumas in a press release. “OPP is a public health catastrophe waiting to happen. While it is heartening that the judges recognize the need to lower the jail population during this emergency, this order does not go far enough. We need to release all people who are being held pre-trial who are at high risk to COVID-19 as defined by the CDC, in addition to others who are being held for low-level, nonviolent, or probationary offenses.”
The en banc order from the court ordered the release of people with arrests for failure to appear on probation status; misdemeanor pre-trials; contempt of court; and defendants remanded for positive drug tests with a bond in effect. The order does not apply to those jailed with violations related to domestic violence and weapons charges.
Other organizations have also taken action or called for the city to lower the jail population as quickly as possible, including a group of 20 professors from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, who urged the city’s criminal justice community in an open letter to lower the jail’s population or face an epidemic inside the facility.
An emergency motion petitioning for the release of vulnerable and low-risk inmates was also filed last week by the Orleans Public Defenders, calling for the immediate release of all inmates who have risk factors such as age or underlying health conditions that make them more susceptible to serious health consequences from COVID-19; all inmates presently held on misdemeanor charges; all inmates presently held on felony charges that are not crimes of violence or sex charges; all inmates held on just probation or parole detainers, or probation or parole detainers related to minor, nonviolent charges; and all inmates serving a sentence who are within 30 days of their release dates.
This article originally published in the March 30, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
