Progressive New Orleans DA wants to address “sins of the past.” Republicans are trying to stop him

Republican state lawmakers in Louisiana have launched an investigation into the New Orleans district attorney over concerns that he’s abusing his power by making use of criminal justice reform policies intended to address prosecutorial and police misconduct. But legal experts warn that the pushback against the D.A. threatens to undermine the results of those efforts. 

Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams, a Democrat whose office serves the blue city-parish of the otherwise red state, has focused his work since being elected in 2020 on addressing what he terms “sins of the past” in the city’s history of prosecutorial and police misconduct as the state grapples with high incarceration rates, according to the Associated Press. Conservative officials and legislators, however, have raised concerns that Williams’ work amounts to arbitrarily allowing people convicted of violent crimes to reenter the public amid comparatively high homicide rates. 

Williams is one of more than 50 progressive prosecutors who have sought to reduce incarceration rates over the last decade and reexamine cases for potential constitutional violations or excessive sentences. He’s also one of a handful who have received considerable blowback over their approaches to reforming the criminal legal system in their districts and counties. Criminal law experts argue that such pushback against elected prosecutors’ criminal justice reform efforts threaten to strip the voters who elected them of their voice while steamrolling those attorneys’ efforts to remedy past harms.

Maybell Romero, a professor of law at Tulane University in New Orleans, told Salon that she views this heightened scrutiny as a largely “political pushback” against district attorneys who challenge the “hard on crime, very pro-police officer, very pro- ‘Let’s convict as much as we can and as many people as we can, and never shall we reconsider whether this was fair or not'” approach to prosecution. Looking at the breakdown nationwide, she argued, “it’s mostly Democratic, elected district attorneys who are getting this pushback from largely right-leaning Republican legislatures.”

“What you see here is really potentially very dangerous in that [the] electorate in counties who want to see this kind of work happening end up having their votes — they end up having their voices — completely silenced by people who don’t even live here because they insist on trying to figure out how to control these progressive prosecutors and reformist prosecutors for all manner of political reasons, which have nothing to do with safety, they have nothing to do with justice, they have nothing to do with ethical conduct, and those are the things that people are concerned about here,” she added.

Williams’ office over the last three years voided convictions or reduced sentences in several hundred cases through post-conviction relief, a process that allows the court to examine new evidence after other efforts to appeal have failed. The office’s civil rights division’s review of old cases has led to a number of exonerations and plea-deal releases hinged on legal practices it finds unjust or unconstitutional.

He has placed particular focus on reviewing non-unanimous jury convictions, which a 2020 Supreme Court ruling had declared unconstitutional. While that ruling did not automatically apply to convictions prior to it, Williams has not prevented people convicted before 2020 by non-unanimous juries from applying for post-conviction relief on these grounds.

Conservative lawmakers, according to the AP, have voiced concern that Williams’ office isn’t being transparent about its actions. Attorney General Liz Murrill told the outlet that she is taking a “close look” at the cases and argued against convictions being amended “simply because the district attorney has a difference of opinion” from the courts and the state Legislature.

That pushback has, in part, arisen from a social media campaign spearheaded by advocacy group Bayou Mama Bears, which is led by former prosecutor Laura Rodrigue, the daughter of the previous district attorney. In a series of posts, the group claims that Williams’ work threatens public safety and highlights instances where his office resentenced or released people convicted of violent crimes. 

Romero, who previously served as a county prosecutor in Utah, said that the notion that Williams is arbitrarily releasing people convicted of violent crimes falls on a “presumption of guilt” that ignores the legal process that grants someone convicted of a crime post-conviction relief. In these instances, prosecutors and courts have found new evidence that indicate the circumstances under which someone was convicted or the facts once used to prove their guilt “might not actually have been factual at all” or that the person, perhaps, “shouldn’t have been convicted at all.”  

“It’s not like people are getting released en masse just when they ask for it, and nothing happens, and no one’s deliberating over this,” she said. “The vast majority, if not virtually all, of these post-conviction relief efforts start with motions by defense counsel, and they end up relying on different legal arguments, and they have to be able to show that there’s new evidence that might be really relevant that wasn’t considered.”

Critics of post-conviction relief also note that Williams’ predecessors engaged the process sparingly. Will Snowden, a professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans, argued, however, that that point is “a faulty comparison” given that Williams ran for office “on a platform largely critical of his predecessors and their misuse of their discretion.” 

Williams, he said, is engaging post-conviction relief on the backdrop of Louisiana’s history of non-unanimous jury verdicts, which allowed jurors to split 10-2 on a vote to convict a defendant. According to the Innocence Project New Orleans, that policy arose in 1898 during the post-Reconstruction era as an effort to limit the political power of Black Americans by diluting their dissent on juries. 

Snowden also noted the role played by the state’s habitual offender statute, which allows individuals charged with nonviolent and violent offenses to receive “an exasperated sentence based on prior felony conviction,” such as a life sentence for drug possession as a former client of his faced when he was a public defender. 

“That practice of using the habitual offenders statute in that manner was a practice of DA Williams’ predecessors, and people are aware of that,” Snowden told Salon. “So I think he is reevaluating some of those decisions, some of those indications of the habitual offender statute, to right some of those wrongs because he does not agree with those policies of incarcerating people for decades at a time for simple possession or substance use crimes.” 

The state Senate Judiciary C Committee, with support from Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, earlier this month announced it would hold an oversight hearing on the post-conviction relief employed by the district attorney’s office. Williams has agreed to testify before the committee during the meeting, slated for Thursday.

Williams has also denied accusations of misconduct and defended his office’s use of post-conviction relief, arguing instead that he is following through on his campaign processes. 

“This is not just waking up and saying, ‘Hey, let’s try something new,” Williams said, per the AP. “This is listening to the community and answering and trying to deliver.”

The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office and the Louisiana Senate Judiciary C Committee did not respond to emailed requests for comment. 

Romero said that, historically, prosecutors nationwide have enjoyed a “very wide latitude” to decide their caseloads and “a great amount of discretion” to determine whether to move forward with cases, pursue charges and offer plea deals — a broad discretion that has also largely “gone unquestioned.”

While prosecutors past have used that discretion to “overcharge” or “follow tough-on-crime agendas,” she said, “what you see now is that we have this new generation of prosecutors who are bringing in new agendas and new perspectives with regard to fundamental fairness, with regard to exactly what a prosecutor should be doing and what makes for a good prosecutor.”

Those heavily scrutinized prosecutors — which she said include Williams, ousted ex-San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Cook County, Ill. State Attorney Kim Foxx — Romero explained, would review cases to see if there were any instances of overcharging, new evidence or new alibi witnesses that could possibly exonerate someone or lead to their sentence being reduced. 

A new law passed by the Republican-dominated legislature earlier this year that took effect last month effectively barred Williams from engaging in post-conviction relief without approval from the attorney general. State lawmakers, however, had passed a law in 2021 that did grant district attorneys authority to amend sentences, even in cases without clear errors, through post-conviction relief approved by judges.

After holding a special session on crime earlier this year, the state legislature has also enacted a slate of other new laws addressing the criminal legal system, including those that expanded death penalty execution methods and eliminated discretionary parole. 

As of late May, Williams’ office reported voiding more than 140 convictions and reducing sentences in at least 180 cases, which often took the form of re-sentencing those convicted to lesser charges, since 2021, according to the AP.

Those numbers, however, don’t amount to much in the grand scheme, given the rate at which Louisiana “incarcerates and prosecutes and entangles people in the criminal legal system left and right every day,” Romero said. 

Louisiana has one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation, with 1,067 people imprisoned per 100,000 residents, according to a recent Prison Policy Initiative report. The violent crime rate in New Orleans, however, has seen a dramatic decline in recent years.

Snowden argued that the pushback against Williams’ work around post-conviction relief does a disservice to the D.A.’s efforts to redress past misconduct in the forms of “invalid and and unconstitutional verdicts,” remedy “outsized sentences that were not necessarily the most appropriate for the case” and recognize that addressing contributors to crime “doesn’t have to solely rely on incarceration.”

“I often describe the criminal legal system as the catch basin for the failures of the other systems. So when our education systems fail, or when our access to housing fails, or when our access to jobs fail, those systems’ failures can direct more people to have contact with the criminal legal system,” Snowden said. “And I think D.A. Williams is aware of that relationship. And so not only is he laser-focused on prosecuting people for committing violent crimes, but he’s also aware that there needs to be more advocacy and investment at the front end of the system to prevent people from coming to his office in the first place.”