Hurricane Katrina helped change New Orleans' public defender system

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Hurricane Katrina Helped Change New Orleans' Public Defender System"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Consider This from NPR
• Host/Author: NPR
• Episode: Hurricane Katrina helped change New Orleans' public defender system
• Release Date: August 6, 2025
• Description: The hosts of NPR's All Things Considered help you make sense of a major news story and its implications in 15 minutes. New episodes air six days a week, Sunday through Friday.

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Introduction: A Story of Systemic Failure and Renewal

Ari Shapiro opens the episode by recounting the harrowing experience of Ronald Marshall during Hurricane Katrina. Marshall, then incarcerated at Orleans Parish Prison, was caught in the chaos as the hurricane made landfall on his birthday, August 29th, two decades ago.

Ari Shapiro [00:00]: "This is a turnaround story about a broken system in New Orleans and the people who work to fix it."

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Chaos Within the Prison During Katrina

As Hurricane Katrina struck, the prison infrastructure in New Orleans failed catastrophically. Marshall describes the dire conditions inmates faced:

Ronald Marshall [00:25]: "The air condition went off. Everything was off, completely shut down."

Without power, inmates endured oppressive heat, lack of light, food, water, and proper ventilation. The situation escalated to the point where inmates were left in darkness and extreme conditions for nearly a week.

Ronald Marshall [00:44]: "No lights, no walls... it gets extremely hot there."

Eventually, Marshall and other inmates were rescued, but the aftermath left them displaced and uncertain.

Ronald Marshall [01:21]: "It was like a scene out of a sci-fi movie."

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Systemic Collapse: Thousands Without Representation

The storm didn't just devastate the city physically; it crippled the criminal justice system. With the courthouse destroyed and records submerged, approximately 8,000 inmates were left without proper documentation of their charges or legal status.

Ross Foote [02:10]: "We didn't know what they were charged with. We didn't know really who they were."

In a functioning system, public defenders would represent the majority of these individuals, but the collapse left a significant gap in legal representation.

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Rebuilding the Public Defender System

Professor Ron Sullivan, appointed by the city to revamp the public defender system, spearheaded efforts to address the crisis. Initially at Yale and later at Harvard, Sullivan emphasized the constitutional right to legal defense.

Professor Ron Sullivan [02:39]: "Most of them were there for quality of life crimes... open containers of alcohol, loitering, you know, those sorts of things."

The rebuilding process was multifaceted, involving increased funding, better infrastructure, and comprehensive support services within the public defender's office.

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Key Figures in the Transformation

Danny Engelberg, the chief public defender, arrived in 2007 during the nascent stages of the system's overhaul. He reflects on the grassroots efforts and incremental progress made to secure funding and expand services.

Danny Engelberg [05:44]: "We just did it incrementally... they really did amazing work."

Megan Garvey, a public defense lawyer, highlights the persistent ethos instilled post-Katrina, emphasizing accountability and constitutional enforcement.

Danny Engelberg [11:20]: "It's up to us that the buck stops with us... the Constitution doesn't enforce itself."

Jason Williams, former City Council president and current Orleans Parish District Attorney, discusses the importance of balanced funding and resources for all facets of the criminal justice system.

Jason Williams [10:24]: "We cannot have a criminal justice system that says, where there is smoke, there must be fire."

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Implemented Changes and Improvements

Post-Katrina reforms led to significant improvements:

• Funding Parity: In 2020, the City Council unanimously voted to provide the public defender's office funding on par with the district attorney's office, recognizing the essential role of defense in fair trials.

  Professor Ron Sullivan [08:53]: "It was about making sure that we had fair courts and safe streets."

• Infrastructure Expansion: The public defender's office expanded its physical space, now occupying three floors and incorporating advanced resources like multiple phones and computers.

  Ari Shapiro [06:25]: "Before Katrina, there weren't enough phones or computers to go around."

• Comprehensive Support Services: The office now includes investigators, social workers, and bilingual staff to better serve a diverse population.

  Santi Ramos [06:44]: "When I speak with someone in their native language, they're more willing to talk and give me more information."

• Reduction in Incarceration Rates: The number of inmates decreased from over 7,000 to approximately 1,400, addressing both overcrowding and wrongful incarcerations.

  Danny Engelberg [08:33]: "Before Katrina, New Orleans had more than 7,000 people in the local jail. Today, that number's about 1,400."

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Challenges and Reflections

Despite the progress, challenges remain. The transformation required persistent advocacy, public support, and continuous efforts to maintain and enhance the system.

Ari Shapiro [07:44]: "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."

Professor Ron Sullivan underscores the necessity of a balanced and well-resourced legal system to ensure justice and safety.

Professor Ron Sullivan [09:55]: "There must be due process. There must be proof beyond reasonable doubt."

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Conclusion: A Testament to Resilience and Reform

The episode concludes by highlighting the enduring commitment of individuals like Megan Garvey and Danny Engelberg, who continue to uphold the principles of fairness and justice within the public defender system. Their efforts over the past two decades serve as a powerful example of how systemic failures can be addressed through dedicated action and community support.

Danny Engelberg [11:32]: "This is absolutely 100% what I believe."

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Ari Shapiro [00:00]: "This is a turnaround story about a broken system in New Orleans and the people who work to fix it."
• Ronald Marshall [01:21]: "It was like a scene out of a sci-fi movie."
• Danny Engelberg [05:44]: "We just did it incrementally... they really did amazing work."
• Professor Ron Sullivan [08:53]: "It was about making sure that we had fair courts and safe streets."
• Santi Ramos [06:44]: "When I speak with someone in their native language, they're more willing to talk and give me more information."
• Jason Williams [10:24]: "We cannot have a criminal justice system that says, where there is smoke, there must be fire."
• Danny Engelberg [11:32]: "This is absolutely 100% what I believe."

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Final Thoughts

Hurricane Katrina was a devastating event for New Orleans, but it also served as a catalyst for substantial reforms within the city's public defender system. Through the dedication and resilience of key individuals and the community, a previously broken system was transformed into one that better serves justice and protects the rights of the accused. This episode of Consider This not only chronicles this transformation but also underscores the ongoing need for commitment to fairness and equity in the criminal justice system.

Transcript

[Ari Shapiro]

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 on my birthday. It was your birthday.

[Ronald Marshall]

August 29th.

[Ari Shapiro]

20 years ago this month. Marshall and the others in the jail were plunged into darkness.

[Ronald Marshall]

The air condition went off. Everything was off, completely shut down.

[Ari Shapiro]

Lights, no air conditioning.

[Ronald Marshall]

No lights, no walls. This is a central building, so once the heat and air go up, it gets extremely hot there.

[Ari Shapiro]

So you have no light, no food. No food, no air, no water.

[Ronald Marshall]

The water was off too, because the water is electricity.

[Ari Shapiro]

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.

[Ronald Marshall]

It was like a scene out of a sci fi movie. They had bodies that was like, floating in the water and people was like tying them to the post. Cause people had.

[Ari Shapiro]

So they wouldn't float away.

[Ronald Marshall]

They wouldn't float away, man. It was horrible, man. One point, you could see alligators in the water.

[Ari Shapiro]

Eventually, he was taken to a prison in Florida. His lawyers and his family had no idea where he was.

[Ronald Marshall]

Four months passed. If I heard from anybody, my family, anything, man.

[Ari Shapiro]

Some of the other incarcerated people were driven to Alexandria, Louisiana, where Ross Foote was a retired judge.

[Ross Foote]

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.

[Ari Shapiro]

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.

[Ross Foote]

The entire court system had collapsed. The files and all the evidence were under 4ft of water. There were upwards of 8,000 people incarcerated with no records of why they were there.

[Ari Shapiro]

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.

[Ross Foote]

Speculation was, and it turned out to be true, that most of them were there for quality of life crimes. Open containers of alcohol, alcohol loitering, you know, those sorts of things.

[Ari Shapiro]

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, hi, I'm Ari Shapiro.

[Megan Garvey]

This message comes from Ollie. Dedicated to helping you prioritize your wellness with solutions that fit seamlessly into your routine. Ollie knows that keeping your immune system healthy is key, which is why they offer women's multi and probiotic mango. And for those occasional nights when sleep is hard to find, Ollie's sleep Gummies are available. Shop these products and [e-mail] or retailers nationwide. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

[Santi Ramos]

Federal funding for public media has been eliminated, which means decades of support for public radio and television from both political parties is ending. To be clear, NPR isn't going anywhere, but we do need your support. We hope you'll give today to keep rigorous, independent and irreplaceable news coverage available to everyone free of charge. Make your [e-mail] and thank you.

[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. How are y'?

[Ronald Marshall]

All?

[Ari Shapiro]

You look exactly the same. I do. Megan Garvey is a public defense lawyer, and over her career, she has seen New Orleans training transform the way it represents people accused of crimes.

[Danny Engelberg]

I mean, I really do think that I became a public defender because of Katrina.

[Ari Shapiro]

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.

[Danny Engelberg]

We just had this moment, like we realized, oh, my God, there's thousands of people in this situation today.

[Ari Shapiro]

She can look back at the 20 year project to fix what was broken.

[Danny Engelberg]

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.

[Ari Shapiro]

How does what the situation looks like today compare to what it looked like the last time you and I were sitting here in New Orleans talking, oh.

[Danny Engelberg]

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.

[Ari Shapiro]

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.

[Santi Ramos]

My name is Santi Ramos. I am the bilingual investigator.

[Ari Shapiro]

The team includes investigators who speak Spanish.

[Santi Ramos]

I've noticed that when I speak with someone in their native language, they're more willing to talk and give me more information.

[Ari Shapiro]

There are people in the public defender's office whose job it is to build trust with the community.

[Ronald Marshall]

My name is Robert Jones. I'm the director of community outreach.

[Ari Shapiro]

He connects clients with organizations that can help with housing, mental health, or addiction.

[Ronald Marshall]

So when the client have those issues, then we got the direct resources for them to kind of like assess and help them.

[Ari Shapiro]

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.

[Jason Williams]

So it was a sort of living, breathing, you know, experiment startup, scrappy group of folks trying to do what seemed at that point, insurmountable from the start.

[Ari Shapiro]

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.

[Jason Williams]

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.

[Ari Shapiro]

And 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.

[Jason Williams]

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.

[Ari Shapiro]

What's more, New Orleans used to lead the country in exonerations, meaning the city was locking up lots of innocent people. Engelberg says before Katrina, New Orleans had more than 7,000 people in the local jail. Today, that number's about 1,400.

[Robert Jones]

Code of the city of New Orleans Relative to public defense funding.

[Ari Shapiro]

In 2020, the city took another huge step towards fixing the problems at the public defender's office. Seven yeas, 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 handles 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.

[Professor Ron Sullivan]

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.

[Ari Shapiro]

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 D District Attorney.

[Professor Ron Sullivan]

You know, we cannot have a criminal justice system that says, where there is smoke, there must be fire. There must be due process. There must be proof beyond reasonable doubt. All of the evidence must be obtained constitutionally. These shouldn't be political things.

[Ari Shapiro]

Is there any part of you, as the city's chief prosecutor, who looks at the money going to defense attorney and thinks, that's making my life a lot harder?

[Professor Ron Sullivan]

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.

[Ari Shapiro]

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?

[Jason Williams]

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 U.S. 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.

[Ari Shapiro]

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.

[Danny Engelberg]

Meaning it's up to us that the buck stops with us, that we can't just trust the system to right itself, that the Constitution doesn't enforce itself. I mean, I know I sound like I'm flag waving, it's the 4th of July, but this, this is absolutely 100% what I believe.

[Ari Shapiro]

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 Marquez Hanse with audio engineering by David Greenberg. It was edited by Sarah Handel and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun. It's Consider this from npr. I'm Ari Shapiro.

[Alejandra Marquez Hanse]

Congress has approved a White House request to eliminate federal funding for public media. NPR remains committed to our mission of informing the public, increasing your understanding of the world and enriching everyday life. But without federal funding, we are relying on your support now more than ever. Please give [e-mail] this summer on Planet.

[Robert Jones]

Money Summer School, we're learning about political economy. We're getting into the nitty gritty of what government does with things like trade, taxes, immigration and health care.

[Jason Williams]

So politics and economics, which are taught.

[Ari Shapiro]

Separately, they shouldn't be separated at all.

[Jason Williams]

I think you have to understand one.

[Ari Shapiro]

To really appreciate the other.

[Robert Jones]

So what is the right amount of government in our lives? Tune into Planet Money Summer School from npr, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Megan Garvey]

Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon prime members can listen to Consider this sponsor free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Consider this +@ +npr.org. that's +npr.org.