Photo by Cheryl Gerber Clerk of Criminal Court Arthur Morrell is responsible for storing evidence for criminal cases going through the court system in Orleans Parish.
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For obvious reasons, defense lawyers and prosecuting attorneys don't
collaborate very often. The former want to prove their clients'
innocence while the latter's primary interest is in convicting
criminals. The spirit of cooperation, however, is at the heart of a new
$1.4 million federal grant recently secured by members of the New
Orleans criminal justice system. Funds will pay for an overdue
inventory of materials from the city's evidence facilities, as well as
DNA testing on evidence from closed homicide and rape cases in which
defendants have been convicted and are serving time in prison.
"The majority of this effort is going to be with the
goal of exonerating people, who the evidence will show have been
wrongly convicted," says Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon
Cannizzaro. When new materials are discovered for a particular
investigation, defense lawyers and assistant district attorneys will
screen the case to determine if DNA testing would prove innocence. DNA
testing, which involves taking biological materials — such as
hair, blood, saliva or skin — from a crime scene and analyzing it
to determine its unique DNA markers, is considered the gold standard
for proving a suspect's guilt or innocence.
The National Institute of Justice, an agency within the
U.S. Department of Justice, is funding the 18-month program, dubbed
"The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA Testing Project," and will
start this coming January. Grant monies will flow through the Louisiana
attorney general's office, which hopes the project will become a pilot
program for other jurisdictions in the state. Only states were eligible
to apply for the grant, so while the AG's office is the financial
conduit, the ideas behind the program, as well as writing the grant
itself, are the work of a local organization, ASPIRES (Accountability,
Strategic Planning and Integration of Evidence Systems).
ASPIRES was formed in March 2007 by representatives from
the city's criminal justice system, including the police department,
the DA's office, criminal court, Clerk of Criminal Court's office and
defense counsel, as well as the Innocence Project New Orleans, an
organization concerned with freeing people who have been wrongfully
imprisoned, and New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation. Although
some of the group's members often oppose one another in court, there is
a common goal, says Emily Maw, director of the Innocence Project.
"We've come together for a specific purpose, which is,
our evidence facilities need to be better," Maw says. "They need to
work better, have better policies in place and better equipment, and
that's not really antithetical to anyone's interests."
Clerk of Criminal Court Arthur Morrell is in charge of storing
evidence for Orleans Parish criminal cases that have gone to trial or
are in trial. As far as he knows, there has never been a complete
inventory of the criminal court's evidence storage areas. There is a
considerable backlog of evidence ("We have evidence that has been there
for 70, 80 years," Morrell says) and his office has started purging
items that no longer need to be stored: cases that are more than five
years old, have gone through the appeals process and do not involve a
murder or rape. He says with police assistance, they are about to
dispose of 30,000 damaged and unidentifiable guns from evidence
storage, but he adds that his efforts have been limited and the grant
will make a difference.
"Because right now we can't spare anyone," Morrell says.
"By hiring people to do this, they can concentrate just on this, and we
can move it out quicker."
Disposing of old materials isn't the only issue the
clerk's office faces. Cannizzaro says there have been ongoing holdups
with transferring materials from the New Orleans Police Department's
evidence and property room to the clerk of court, and that has made
prosecution difficult. He says he has met with Morrell to resolve the
problem and is confident that the procedure will improve. Even with
this hindrance, the clerk of court facilities are much improved from
what Morrell inherited from his predecessor, Kimberly Williamson
Butler, in May 2006.
As it did with so many things in New Orleans, the 2005
levee failures and resulting flood transformed an obstacle into a
crisis. Both the clerk of court's and the NOPD's facilities sat
underwater for days, and it has never been ascertained exactly how much
evidence was lost. Some materials were temporarily housed elsewhere and
other items, such as paper documents, were freeze-dried and scanned
into a computer database for later use. When it became clear the task
of reorganizing the office and the damaged evidence facilities was too
much for Butler, the state Supreme Court appointed Judge Edwin Lombard,
a former clerk of criminal court, to supervise evidence remediation.
Morrell says by the time he replaced Butler — who spent three
days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to appear before the
criminal court to relinquish some of her duties — the office was
in disarray.
"It was a mess," Morrell says. "When the former clerk
left, we had intended to have a meeting with her with my transition
team. That never took place."
Morrell's first order of business was to prepare for the
reopening of the criminal courthouse, which took place only a month
later, in June 2006. It was impossible to deal with damaged evidence or
older materials because, as he says, "When the judges wanted to start
up again, we needed to have the evidence for those cases ready."
Further complicating matters, the NOPD was storing some
evidence, but it wasn't doing a very good job safeguarding it. In July
2009, the State Legislative Auditor Steve Theriot issued a report,
blasting the NOPD for not effectively keeping track of materials in its
evidence and property room and losing more than $200,000 from the
facility.
If successful, this new project should prevent, or at
least create a paper trail, for any losses or theft of evidence. It
provides the clerk of court with three contract employees whose task
will be going through the facilities room by room, cataloging evidence,
and entering it into new integrated software, which will allow access
by the courts, police and defense and prosecuting attorneys. A similar
process, although not as vast in scope, will take place at the NOPD
facility. New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation is serving as the
grant facilitator, and will hire a project director to oversee the
operation.
Although one of the main goals is to inventory all of
the appropriate evidence in city storage, close attention will be paid
to biological evidence from any rape or homicide cases. As these
materials are found, the project director will consult the DA's office
and Innocence Project to find out the status of the affected cases. If
a case is closed and the conviction is final, it will be added to a
list for the DA's office and Innocence Project to review.
"Obviously, we hope that in the process, we'll find
evidence in cases where, for example, people have written to the
Innocence Project asking for help, or cases where they've written to
other places asking for help, and have wanted DNA testing in their
case," Maw says.
She adds that the vast majority of criminal cases do not
involve DNA evidence, but a high proportion of rape and murder
investigations do. If the DA's office (which will have three attorneys
assigned to the project) and the Innocence Project staff decide DNA
testing is warranted, the material will be sent to a crime lab.
According to Maw, as of May 2009, there were 1,571 people from Orleans
Parish residing in Louisiana prisons that have been convicted of rape
or homicide. Since DNA technology was introduced in the 1980s, the
Innocence Project reports that nationally 245 people have been exonerated because of
DNA testing.
With NOPD making more arrests and with more cases being accepted for
prosecution, Cannizzaro says his office will need more evidence from
the clerk's office, and that this project should help facilitate those
requirements. He doesn't rule out the possibility that project staff
could find new evidence that aids in prosecuting suspects, but he
doubts that will happen. He doesn't recall an Orleans DA ever working
with the Innocence Project on such a proposal, and though this kind of
work may differ from the public's perception of a criminal prosecutor,
Cannizzaro insists it's part of his job.
"The prosecutor is charged with the responsibility of
doing justice, and that is our main goal and people have to keep that
in mind," Cannizzaro says. "It is not our goal to go out and try to
convict everybody."
Tags: Leon Cannizzaro, Arthur Morrell, Innocence Project New Orleans, New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation
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