Orleans Parish prosecutors grilled over high rate of post-conviction relief

(BATON ROUGE, La.) — The Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office is under scrutiny for what is alleged as a "rush" to undo convictions before a law took effect that would make it harder to grant lighter sentences to already convicted criminals.

That law, which took effect on Aug. 1, made it more difficult to acquire post-conviction relief, which functions as a last-resort process by which convicted and imprisoned persons may appeal their sentence.

After securing post-conviction relief, the claimant is resentenced according to a lesser charge or released altogether, having already served time. The civil rights division of the DA's office has increasingly defended post-conviction relief claims.

"We would see 10, 12 (resentencings) in the weeks leading up to the Aug. 1 deadline," said Laura Rodrigue, a former prosecutor in the Orleans Parish's District Attorney's office. "In many cases, the state was joining in on the defendant's request to get post-conviction relief."

A Senate committee scrutinized Orleans Parish's disproportionately high number of granted post-conviction relief claims, questioning the merit of many cases.

Many of the claims that are granted often rely on procedural loopholes like inadequate counsel, allowing guilty criminals to go free, even if they were originally convicted of serious violent crimes.

"The state's own pleadings admit that the guilt of the defendant is clear, but that maybe [their] role was less, more of an accomplice," Rodrigue said.

Factual innocence was rarely asserted as justification for relief, according to Sen. Jay Morris, R-Monroe, and Murrill. In other words, almost no cases speak to the merit of the individual asking for post-conviction relief.

Rodrigue says that the DA's office made many motions to have prior convictions not taken into account in the resentencing process.

"Several of the people who were released went on to immediately reoffend, committing murder, picking up gun charges," Rodrigue testified.

"The numbers in New Orleans are substantially different than in other DA's around the state by a matter of hundreds," Murrill said.

According to Murrill, there is no limit to how many claims an individual can make, so taxpayer costs to rectify sentences deemed by the DA's civil rights division as harsh may be abnormally high in Orleans Parish.

According to testimony, the prosecutor's office is ignoring Supreme Court rulings that prohibit the retroactive application of a landmark case that ruled a criminal conviction requires a unanimous jury.

In cases where the individual asking for post-conviction relief was convicted without a unanimous decision, the prosecutor's office is using this as justification to grant new trials or overturn convictions.

Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams testified before the committee, claiming that the testimony from the prosecutors was "misleading."

"Once there has been a showing to a court that a conviction was defective, either because someone cheated or withheld evidence, whether that person is guilty or innocent, that is not something that can be swept under the rug," Williams said.

In his campaign for district attorney, Williams ran on a platform promising to rectify the state's high number of wrongful convictions and promote civil rights.

"Potential jurors cannot sit in judgment because of the number of times the Orleans Parish district attorney's office has gotten it wrong. They don't believe they can convict because of the errors that have been made in the past," Williams said.

"My jurisdiction is an outlier in past defective convictions," Williams continued. "That has sunk public trust in our system, which has made it harder to prosecute violent crime, and that has made our parish less safe."