I'm spending the summer working in criminal defense. Criminal law has never really interested me, I took the job because I was told it would be research-intensive and after an eon of filling out immigration forms I was desperate to use my brain.
I spend most of my days staring, shocked, at the docket master (database of what goes on in court on every case). I don't know how to adequately describe the trainwreck that is the New Orleans criminal system. Men and women are lost, LOST, within the system. There are people accounted for on jail lists that have never seen the inside of a courtroom. Many people who were arrested pre-Katrina on small charges are sitting in a jail cell right now, having never seen or spoken to a lawyer. The prisons are so overcrowded, and the courthouses so incapacitated, that inmates are lodged hours away, sometimes in other states, and "brought it" for their court dates. And really, "brought in," is a relative term. I have been in courtrooms with exasperated judges, watched them call inmates who are listed on the docket but who were never brought in from their facility. Their case is pushed back AGAIN, they sit in their cell a little longer, and many times the inmate doesn't even know he's been called to court half a dozen times. He's just sitting there with his fingers crossed, hoping the situation improves. Months, nearly a year, lost without their day in court. Yes. This really happens. In America. You should be angry.
