Louisiana’s overdetention practice includes OPSO, recent court filings reveal
17th February 2020 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
A week after media reports brought to light a pattern of delayed release from incarceration of numerous state prison or jail inmates by the Louisiana Department of Corrections, court filings seem to reveal that the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Department also directly and deliberately added to the chronic overdetention by allowing such delays to occur in violation of the law.
As part of an ongoing federal lawsuit filed by Rodney Grant, a former prisoner who asserts that he was held an extra 27 days beyond his scheduled release date, a representative of the OPSO admitted that the department’s written policy of driving the paperwork for scheduled prisoner releases to DOC offices is only once a week, on Thursdays.
In a Feb. 10 memorandum in Grant’s case supporting summary judgment against the OPSO, the plaintiff’s attorneys added that the OPSO’s unjust, illegal policy extended even further due to additional bureaucratic processes.
“Then, after sending the paperwork to the DOC, OPSO holds the sentenced people in jail indefinitely until the DOC sends for them,” the memorandum stated. “This sequence can take weeks or more, causing further overdetention for any person eligible for immediate release upon sentencing.”
The Feb. 10 memorandum states that, according to testimony, the entire bureaucratic process – physically driving hard copies of a judge’s release order from the OPSO to the DOC in Baton Rouge, then wait “indefinitely” to receive a transfer document from the DOC, then transport the detainee to DOC custody – took about two weeks, a length of time practically guaranteeing that the inmate would be detained beyond his or her court-ordered release date.
The memorandum called the process inefficient in addition to unjust and illegal.
“OPSO knows that there are some persons sentenced to DOC time eligible for immediate release when those persons have been given credit for time served, and they have already served that time,” the filing said. “It knows that some of these people may be in its jail.147 And yet it doesn’t do anything to figure out whether these people are in its jail.148 This is true even though OPSO concedes it is its ‘responsibility to make sure there aren’t any people in the jail that should be free.’ Sheriff Gusman also testified that ‘no individual can be held in jail in absence of legal authority to keep them there.’”
Grant’s case is pending in U.S. District Court’s Eastern District of Louisiana in front of Chief Judge Nanette Jolivette Brown.
William Most, an attorney representing Grant in the latter’s federal lawsuit against the DOC, the OPSO and other defendants, said the discovery of the OPSO’s policy of lax administrative processing of releases reflects a casual disregard for fairness and justice toward detainees who have served their debt to society and deserve to be released as planned and expected.
He said that the OPSO, state DOC and others involved in the criminal justice system must be held accountable – just as the system expects inmates to be held accountable.
“Our criminal justice system is based on the idea that if you are convicted, you do your time and then you are released,” he said. “In Louisiana, the state has completely failed to release people on time.”
He added that the sheer magnitude of chronic overdetention came as a shock, even to him.
“I was staggered when I realized the scope of Louisiana’s overdetention,” he told The Louisiana Weekly. “I have not found any city, county or state anywhere in the United States that has a problem of overdetention even close to Louisiana’s.”
In addition to the denial of fairness to inmates who are due for release, Most said, the problem has cost “tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to illegally hold people past the end of their sentence – for a total of more than 3,000 years.”
Specifically regarding the discovery of the OPSO’s apparently illegal delay of prisoner release, Most harshly rapped the OPSO, and Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman in particular, for the situation by adding that Gusman’s office also benefited financially for the pattern of overdetention. Most noted that the OPSO received $24.39 per day per inmate from the state as reimbursement for the expense of holding a prisoner, a fact that Most asserted landed a great deal of extra money into OPSO coffers. Such financial compensation, Most said, gives Gusman and his department personal motive for overdetention.
“Sheriff Gusman chose a policy of driving paperwork to the DOC only once a week – even though he knew some people could be released right away,” Most stated. “In doing so, he took away people’s freedom – and turned it into money for his office.”
The OPSO did not return multiple inquiries for comment from The Louisiana Weekly.
One former inmate, Johnny Traweek, who suffered additional jail time because of the state justice system’s acute overdetention problem, said that the 20 additional days he was held in prison beyond his court-ordered release date severely and negatively impacted his health.
“It kept me from sleeping, eating, and drained me of energy, because all I could do is worry about it,” Traweek told The Louisiana Weekly.
Traweek added that he was blindsided by his unexpected additional time in prison. “I was very surprised, because the judge told me that I would get out ‘today,’ and that didn’t happen,” he said.
A week before the revelations of the OPSO’s illegal pattern of delayed prisoner release, a Feb. 6 memorandum filed on behalf of Grant requesting summary judgment against the DOC and department secretary James M. LeBlanc placed the state DOC in the crosshairs. The memorandum asserted that LeBlanc learned after a 2012 internal investigation that at the time, his department was holding more than 2,200 inmates per year past their scheduled release, at an average of nearly 72 days per detainee.
In addition to the apparent lack of fairness of the situation, Most estimated that, like the illegal policy at the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Department, the DOC’s pattern of overdetention was likewise costing taxpayers millions of dollars in additional, unjustified expenses for holding inmates after they were supposed to be released.
The Feb. 6 court filing further charged that even though the DOC’s internal investigation revealed the depth of the overdetention problem, LeBlanc and the department dragged its feet when addressing the untenable situation.
“The DOC did not fix the overdetention problem,” it stated. “It did not even set for itself a goal of fixing the problem. The goal the DOC set for itself was to overdetain only 450 persons per year by an average of 31 days per person. The [DOC] team estimated that if it could hit that self-set goal, it would save the state $3.7 million per year.”
The memorandum further asserted that the DOC did enact several measures that partially curbed the level of overdetention, but that those solutions remain inadequate to completely address the problem.
“Instead of continuing to try to find a solution, the DOC… accepted and institutionalized the problem into its public-facing identity,” the filing stated.
“That this is deliberate indifference is not a hard question,” the memorandum then stated in conclusion. “The DOC here usurps the role assigned to judges. It rejects the black-letter law that a judge decides the length of an inmate’s sentence. It has decided, under Secretary LeBlanc, that an inmate’s sentence continues until the DOC gets around to performing his time computation.”
However, Ken Pastorick, communications director for the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections, said in a statement to The Louisiana Weekly last week that although the DOC can’t comment extensively on pending litigation, the department requested that the state Legislature establish a joint study committee under legislation written by state Sen. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe.
Pastorick said the DOC’s overture to the legislature reflects the department’s commitment to addressing the overdetention problem. He also said the ongoing reform efforts are open to suggestions and input from a variety of sources, including the general public.
“The purpose of this joint committee study is to allow for DOC to work with its partners, including the sheriffs, clerks, district attorneys, district judges and public defenders, to identify opportunities to improve the process,” Pastorick said in a statement to The Louisiana Weekly. “We would encourage anyone who has ideas or input to improve the process, to provide that information to the joint committee.”
Orleans Parish chief public defender Derwyn Bunton told The Louisiana Weekly last week that his office has had to spend taxpayer money to fight on behalf of overdetained inmates and combat the costly injustices that have been revealed as part of the Rodney Grant lawsuit.
“This is not only a waste of money that could be spent [on] meaningful services and programming to help people returning home to their communities, it is inefficient and bad policy,” Bunton said. “The fact that this remains an issue is indicative of the injustices poor people across Louisiana face. It is time to fix this problem.
“These are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers that remain jailed long after they should be free,” Bunton added. “It’s not your car you dropped off and simply forgot to pick up.”
“Louisiana needs to arrive at the 21st century. Every other state has figured out how to do this; Louisiana can too,” added attorney Most.
This article originally published in the February 17, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
