Consider This from NPR - Hurricane Katrina helped change New Orleans' public defender system

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

In 2006, Ari Shapiro reported on how Hurricane Katrina made an already broken public defender system in New Orleans worse. The court system collapsed in the aftermath of the storm.Katrina caused horrific destruction in New Orleans. It threw incarcerated people into a sort of purgatory - some were lost in prisons for more than a year. But the storm also cleared the way for changes that the city's public defender system had needed for decades. Two decades later, Shapiro returns to New Orleans and finds a system vastly improved.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is a turnaround story about a broken system in New Orleans and the people who work to fix it. When Ronald Marshall turned 31, he was behind bars at the Orleans Parish prison. It's a day he'll always remember because it's when Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Oh, my birthday. It was your birthday. August 29. 20 years ago this month, Marshall and the others in the jail were plunged into darkness. The agonition went off. Everything was all, completely shut down.

No air conditioning. lights, no water. This is a centralized building. So once the heat and air go up, it gets extremely hot now. So you have no light? No light, no food, no air, no water. The water was off, too, because the water is electricity. He'd been brought to New Orleans from upstate Louisiana for a court appointment. He was challenging his conviction and sentence of 50 years for armed robbery. Ultimately, a judge vacated his sentence, and he was released, but that didn't happen until 2021. These days, he works for a nonprofit that advocates for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Twenty years ago, in the Orleans Parish prison, nearly a week went by in the dark and heat before help came.

Finally, Marshall and the other inmates were loaded onto rescue boats in handcuffs and chains and taken to a highway overpass. It was like a scene out of a sci-fi movie. It had bodies that was like floating in the water, and people was like tying them to. to the post. So they wouldn't float away? They wouldn't float away, man. It was horrible, man. At one point they had, you can see alligators in the water.

Eventually, he was taken to a prison in Florida. His lawyers and his family had no idea where he was. Four months past, if I heard from anybody, my family, anything, man. Some of the other incarcerated people were driven to Alexandria, Louisiana, where Ross Foote was a retired judge. No paperwork, no status, no. identification. We didn't know what they were charged with. We didn't know really who they were. We didn't know if they were pretrial or serving time. In a functioning criminal justice system,

public defenders should have been representing most of these thousands of people. Legal defense is a constitutional right. But nothing about the New Orleans criminal justice system was working the way it was supposed to. The entire court system had collapsed. The files and all the evidence were under four feet of water. There were upwards of 8,000 people incarcerated with no records of why they were there. That's Professor Ron Sullivan. He was appointed by the city of New Orleans to revamp the public defender system after the storm.

Back then, he was at Yale. These days, he teaches at Harvard. The speculation was, and it turned out to be true, that most of them were there for quality of life crimes, open containers of alcohol, loitering, you know, those sorts of Consider this. Hurricane Katrina caused horrific destruction in New Orleans. It threw incarcerated people into a sort of purgatory. Some were lost in prisons for more than a year. But the storm also cleared the way for changes that the city's public defender system had needed for decades. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.

It's Consider This from NPR. In New Orleans, I recently met up with someone I hadn't seen in almost 20 years. Hi. Hi. You look exactly the same. Megan Garvey is a public defense lawyer. And over her career, she has seen New Orleans transform the way it represents people accused of crimes. I mean, I really do think that I became a public defender.

because of Katrina. Today, Megan Garvey lives near Bywater Bakery, where we met up. Try their breakfast gumbo if you're ever in the neighborhood. The last time we talked, Garvey was fresh out of law school, not even certified to work as a lawyer yet, and she was helping a team find incarcerated people who were still lost in the prison system for months after Katrina. When I spoke to her back in 2006, she was in the thick of it. We just had this moment, like, we realized, oh my God, there's thousands. of people in this situation. Today, she can look back at the 20-year project

to fix what was broken. I didn't have any fancy tools, right? What I had was other people who saw things the way that I saw them and a lot of energy and a lot of motivation. How does what the situation looks like today compared to what it looked like the last time you and I were sitting here in New Orleans talking?

Oh my gosh. the system is really night and day. You know, at that time, there wasn't really a central office where the public defenders worked. The public defenders were part-time, and they usually met the clients at arraignment. In Louisiana, people are often in jail for several months prior to arraignment.

So now we are there representing people seven days a week, even on holidays. We have investigators, we have social workers, and we get to work right away. At the Public Defender's Office in central New Orleans, you can see the change firsthand. Before Katrina, there weren't enough phones or computers to go around. Now, the staff fills three floors of a building. My name is Santiago Ramos. I am the bilingual investigator. The team includes investigators who speak Spanish.

I've noticed that when I speak with someone in their native language, they're more willing to talk and give me more information. There are people in the public defender's office whose job it is to build trust with the community. My name is Robert Jones. I'm the director of the community outreach. He connects clients with organizations that can help with housing, mental health, or addiction.

So when the client have those issues, then we have got the direct resources for them. Yeah. They're kind of like assessing to help them. Danny Engelberg runs the office as chief public defender. He arrived in 2007, when it looked like the system had to be rebuilt from the ground up. So it was a sort of living, breathing, you know, experiment, start-up,

a scrappy group of folks trying to do what seemed at that point insurmountable. From the start, he had a chicken egg problem. To do good work, the office needed funding, and to get funding he needed to show that the office could do good work. So we just did it incrementally. For instance, our client service division, we got a few client advocates and a, social worker on a grant. And that scrappy group of first client advocates and social workers

from our client service division really did amazing work. And then we were able to get a little local funding. And with that, we invested in some more lawyers and investigators. He worked to convince the city that public defense was more than a constitutional guarantee. It was also a good investment because locking people up is expensive. And New Orleans used to have the dubious distinction of being the incarceration capital of the world. That's mind-boggling and really was one of the biggest drivers of instability and I think a sense of often crisis in our community. What's more, New Orleans used to lead the country in exonerations,

meaning the city was locking up lots of innocent people. Engleberg says before Katrina, New Orleans had more than 7,000 people in the local jail. Today, that number is about 1,400. In 2020, the city of New Orleans, relative to public defense funding. In 2020, the city took another huge step towards fixing the problems at the public defender's office. Seven years, no nays, and the consent agenda is adopted. The city council voted unanimously to give the public defender's office funding parity with the district attorney's office, 85% since the DA handle some cases that don't involve public defenders.

Jason Williams was city council president when the law passed, and he told me it took some work to convince taxpayers that their money should be spent on defending poor people accused of crimes. It was asking a lot of the public to look at the nuances of what we were talking about. This was not about taking a pile of cash and giving it to criminal defendants. This was about making sure that we had fair courts and safe streets. I met Williams at his current office, and here's the plot twist. He's no longer on the city council. Since 2021, Williams has been the Orleans Parish district attorney.

You know, we cannot have a criminal justice and that says, where there is smoke, there must be fire. There must be due process. There must be proof beyond a reasonable doubt. All of the evidence must be obtained constitutionally. These shouldn't be political things. Is there any part of you as the city's chief prosecutor, who looks at the money going to defense attorneys and thinks, that's making my life a lot harder.

Yeah, we talked about this when we were doing it, but it's not supposed to be easy. It's an adversarial process. It's not a good thing for one side to be engaged in this endeavor with one hand tied behind their back or without proper resources. I asked New Orleans Chief Public Defender Danny Engelberg about that. Do you see any irony in the fact that, the person who was president of the city council when that passed is now the district attorney?

Honestly, it shouldn't be. If you're in the legal system at all, you want the legal system to function on all legs of the stool. There's the prosecutor, there's us public defenders and defense, and then there's the judges. And if one leg of the stool is poorly resourced or not functioning, then it doesn't function. The stool doesn't hold up. Today, Megan Garvey is the only full-time public defense lawyer in New Orleans who was there in the days just after Katrina. But she says the storm instilled an ethos in the office that remains

to this day. Meaning, it's up to us, that the buck stops with us, that we can't just trust the system to write itself, that the Constitution doesn't enforce itself. I mean, I know I sound like I'm flag waving. It's the Fourth of July, but this is absolutely 100 percent. I believe. She says there's still more work to do. But her experience helping to rebuild the New Orleans criminal justice system in the last 20 years has taught her a valuable lesson that the system is just people. This episode was produced by Alejandra Marcus Hansi with audio engineering by David Greenberg. It was edited by Sarah Handel and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigin. It's Consider This from an

NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro.