(The following article by David Heinzmann was posted on the Chicago Tribune website on October 12.)
NEW ORLEANS — On the second floor of the shabby Amtrak station, in a cavernous old room with missing ceiling tiles and dingy green paint, a handful of tired but well-humored people in jeans and T-shirts sat around folding tables piled with scrounged office equipment.
The recent scene was like any number of makeshift relief operations that have been set up in unlikely places all over New Orleans.
But then the doors at the rear of the room swung open and two guards herded 21 men in plastic handcuffs into the back corner. A few minutes later, the doors swung again, and a burly man with unkempt gray hair and a black robe draped over his arm strode in, bear-hugged a woman he hadn’t seen since before Hurricane Katrina hit and called to order the 11:30 a.m. session of bond hearings for the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.
The real courthouse, a few blocks away, was flooded during the hurricane, and engineers say it won’t reopen for as many as five months. The Amtrak station has been a godsend – prisoners are jailed on the first floor and court is held on the second floor.
Monday, the courtroom got its first high-profile defendants – three New Orleans police officers charged in the televised, bloody beating of 64-year-old man they were trying to arrest for drunkenness in the French Quarter.
But making do in a train station will not be easy, especially for the prisoners.
The 21 men in handcuffs last week were mostly arrested for curfew violations and the small amounts of drugs they were carrying when police stopped them. In the pre-Katrina world, the busts would have been little more than a nuisance – a night in jail and then finding someone to go downtown to the courthouse to bail them out in the morning.
But all the men given cash bonds these days face a much more arduous path. Once bond is set, the prisoners are bused to Hunt Correctional Center outside Baton Rouge. And because the Orleans Parish court clerk’s office has moved to temporary offices in Baton Rouge, the money to get individuals out of jail must be posted there – a 90-minute drive north from New Orleans.
When assistant public defender Wayne Fontenelle explained the bond complications to the prisoners, there were moans and twisted expressions of confusion.
Prisoners could end up stuck in jail on minor charges for a long time, Fontenelle said. But at the moment, there’s no other way to do it. With the courthouse closed, the only facilities that can handle the bulk of the court’s business are in Baton Rouge.
When called up by the district attorney, each prisoner clearly hoped Judge Gerard Hansen would be lenient and let him go without bond. But of the 21, only four or five got to go free.
The first man up had been arrested for looting, possessing drug paraphernalia and resisting arrest. The man said he was retrieving items from his own home, but the prosecutor said it was a neighbor’s home. The assistant district attorney reeled off a list of things the man was caught taking: Several electric drills, packs of batteries, beer and 53 bottles of alcohol.
“I can understand the alcohol,” Hansen said, drawing a chuckle from the court workers in the room. “But you weren’t taking all that out of your own house.”
Hansen set $1,000 bond for possession of drug paraphernalia, $1,000 for resisting arrest. And in a gesture demonstrating what the law thinks of looting five weeks after the storm had passed, he set bond for the looting charge at $25,000.
In the few cases in which the judge let people go free, he made a point of telling them how lucky they were and that they’d better not blow it. When he released a man who had no criminal past who had been arrested only for violating curfew, Hansen bellowed, “I’m giving you a free bond to stay out of jail! Stay inside, there’s a curfew.”
The man smiled sheepishly and nodded.
Others faced a great deal of uncertainty. Four Mexican immigrants who were brought to New Orleans from Texas to work on cleanup crews were headed to Hunt Correctional Center, and it was unclear how they might post bond for their curfew violations. Hansen asked a sheriff’s deputy to run down to the makeshift property room to fetch one of the prisoner’s cell phones so he could retrieve the contractor’s phone number.
“If you’re in town and working for a contractor, we’ll try to contact them for you,” Hansen said. “If you’re here to work, we want you to work.”
But the prosecutor said that another group of men working for the same contractor had been arrested the day before, and the contractor had refused to post their bond.
“We called the boss yesterday, with people here, and he has not agreed to get them out,” said Assistant District Atty. Aaron Rives.
Everybody agrees that the system is going to be a mess for a long time. But the judges and lawyers are trying to look on the bright side. Hansen, the judge, pointed out that none of the cases before him last week were for violence, and he expected that to be the case for a long time as New Orleans’ population remains a fraction of what it was.
For Fontenelle, who has been a public defender for 15 years, getting back into court – even if it is in the Amtrak station – has helped him cope with the aftermath of the disaster.
“You just want to do something. You just want to stand up in a courtroom, even if it’s this room, whatever this room used to be,” Fontenelle said, waving at the missing ceiling tiles and peeling paint. “As a public defender, you’re in court every day, going to trial every day. You miss that.”