The elephant in the room

We need to talk about Louisiana.

Louisiana justice is in retrograde motion, with the tremendous gains achieved through years of toil by lawyers, politicians and activists being dashed to smithereens with a few pen strokes.

Wielding that pen is the recently-elected governor, Jeff Landry, abetted in servile fashion by a Republican super majority in both houses of the Louisiana legislature.

If ‘servile’ seems a harsh word to use about the Republican-run house and senate, it’s worth contemplating the extreme rapidity with which both houses rubber-stamped Governor Landry’s laundry list of civil rights rollbacks; and it was many of those same Republicans who, a mere seven years ago, provided the votes to create those now-abolished civil rights reforms.

Crime on the decline

In demolishing the 2017 criminal justice reforms, Landry couldn’t point to problems caused by those reforms. Instead, he simply stated that crime was “out of control” in Louisiana and that the majority-Black cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport were “dangerous”—echoing language being used on the national stage. (It’s worth noting that crime declined in those cities in 2023.)

People are susceptible to such unsubstantiated claims about public safety (see this recent Scientific American article, Why We Believe the Myth of High Crime Rates) and so they are powerful tools in the politician’s arsenal. It was no surprise that Landry amped up public sentiment immediately before the special criminal justice session which ushered in the new laws, declaring a state of emergency due to the “police officer shortage across Louisiana.”

Feeding the mass incarceration machine

Here’s an illuminating sampling of just a few of the items that sailed through the special session on crime:

• Approving the use of the electric chair and asphyxiation (nitrogen hypoxia) for executions, and increasing the secrecy surrounding execution protocols.

• Reducing the age at which juveniles are tried as adults.

• Extending the length of sentence served before someone becomes eligible for parole, reducing the ability to earn good behavior credits towards parole, and, for most people convicted after August 1st, 2024, eliminating parole eligibility altogether.

In amongst these ‘crime-reducing measures’ were two anomalous items:

• A law allowing people 18 years and older to carry a concealed weapon without a special permit or training.

• Civil immunity for someone who holds a concealed carry permit and uses their firearm to shoot someone in self defense.

Coloring our visits

The weight of these changes accompanies us when Sister Helen Prejean and I visit our friend Manuel Ortiz on death row.

For the past twenty-four years, Louisiana has been out of the execution business for two main reasons: the state has been unable to secure lethal injection drugs and there has been little political will to find an alternative.

Now there is political will aplenty.

Even before his ascension to the governorship, then Attorney-General Jeff Landry scuttled a move to have the entire death row receive commutations from the former governor, John Bel Edwards.

Now, not only is commutation off the table, but the clock is ticking for all 57 people on death row in the state.

It is heartbreaking to know that Manuel—innocent of the crime!—and all the other men on the row face the possibility of witnessing their tier mates taken away to the death house, and of their own grim fate.

I say ‘possibility’ because we, together with capital defense attorneys and civil rights activists, are working hard to make this never eventuate.

Justice Train song

On that note, perhaps it’s a good time for another selection from Sister Helen’s Justice Train playlist.

This time, a song about feeling down. Never fear! This performance of Hear Me Lord, by Oliver Mtukudzi, is likely to have you up dancing and feeling that your hopes or prayers are not in vain.