When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans 20 years ago this month, Meghan Garvey was fresh out of law school.
She was not even certified to work as a lawyer yet, but she wound up helping a team find thousands of incarcerated people who were lost in the prison system after the storm.
"There were people being moved around to different sorts of jails and prisons around the state. They kept moving people here and there," Garvey recalled recently. "It was really hard to figure out where people were, what they were in jail for, what was going on."
At the time, estimates show New Orleans housed 6,000 to 7,000 people in the local jail, more than any other city in the U.S., according to the Vera Institute of Justice. The city's incarceration rate was more than five times the national average per capita. Thousands of inmates were taken to dry land as the storm devastated the city, but their records didn't go with them. That meant that for months, the understaffed public defender office struggled to locate and represent its clients.
It was a moment that would define Garvey's career.
"I really do think that I became a public defender because of Katrina," she said.
The chaos exposed flaws in the city's criminal justice system that existed before the storm, but it also cleared the way for changes and some visionary people like Garvey took advantage of that opportunity.
A troubled system, underwater
While the storm created the emergency, long-standing problems made the issues worse. Public defenders only worked part time and they didn't know who their clients were until their first court appearances, which could take place weeks or months after someone was arrested.
Those lawyers also had to share computers and phone lines, and the system was funded through traffic tickets.
Then Hurricane Katrina made landfall.
Ronald Marshall was at the Orleans Parish Prison that day, which also happened to be his 31st birthday.
He and thousands of other inmates survived for days without any help.
"The air conditioner went off, everything went off," he recalled, standing in front of the now-closed prison building where he had been held. "Completely shut down, no lights."
Marshall said the inmates burned baby oil to light lamps. The thick black smoke coated their airways. And they spent about four days without meals.
Marshall had been taken to New Orleans from a prison in upstate Louisiana for a court appointment. He was challenging his conviction and sentence of 50 years for armed robbery. That challenge wasn't successful until 2021, when a judge vacated his sentence.
From his cell window in 2005, Marshall could only look out into a courtyard, so he didn't know how much damage the storm had done.
"The guys on the fourth floor could see the city, so they put signs in the windows to us, letting us know, 'Hey man the city is underwater,'" Marshall said.
After close to a week, he and the other men finally evacuated out the front door of the courthouse connected to the prison.
He said the water reached the top of the steps, about 15 to 20 feet high. Handcuffed and chained, the inmates were loaded onto rescue boats and taken to a highway overpass.
"It was a scene out of a sci-fi movie," Marshall recalled. "They had [dead] bodies that were, like, floating in the water and people [were] tying them to posts" so they wouldn't float away.
"It was horrible, man. At some point you could see alligators in the water."
Marshall was eventually taken to a prison in Florida.
"Four months passed before I heard from anybody; my family, anything," he said.
In a functioning criminal justice system, public defenders would know who their clients were from the beginning and would be able to reach their clients more quickly. That legal defense is a constitutional right. But nothing about the criminal justice system was working the way it was supposed to during the emergency.
"The entire court system had collapsed," said Ross Foote, who retired as a judge in Alexandria, La., a year before the storm hit. "The files and all the evidence were under 4 feet of water."
Alexandria is about 200 miles northwest of New Orleans, so the storm didn't reach Foote, but he remembers what happened when hundreds of incarcerated people were driven there without records or identification.
"We didn't know what they were charged with," Foote said. "We didn't really know who they were. We didn't know if they were pretrial or serving time."
Many of those people who were taken across the South had only been charged with misdemeanors, according to Harvard law professor Ron Sullivan.
"The speculation was, and it turned out to be true, that most of them were there for quality of life crimes: open containers of alcohol, loitering, you know, all sorts of things," Sullivan said.
After Katrina, the city of New Orleans appointed Sullivan to a one-year assignment to revamp the public defender system.
Transformation, two decades in the making
The current Orleans Public Defenders office is downtown. It takes up three floors and employs about 60 lawyers.
Garvey said the difference between her early days as a public defender in the city after Katrina and now is "night and day."
"We got an office, we hired people full time, we had training," she said. "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."
All of this change has been in the works over the two decades since Katrina.
"It was sort of a living, breathing experiment, a startup, scrappy group of folks trying to do what seemed at that point insurmountable," said Danny Engelberg, who now runs the office as chief public defender.
Engelberg arrived in New Orleans in 2007. He said the team faced a dilemma: To do good work, the office needed funding. To get funding, they needed to show that the office could do good work.
"So, we just did it incrementally," he said. "For instance, in our client services division, we got a few client advocates and a social worker on a grant, and that scrappy group … really did amazing work. Then we were able to get a little local funding and with that we invested in some more lawyers and investigators and another client advocate or another social worker."
Engelberg 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, at times, New Orleans has had the highest incarceration rate in the country.
"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," Engelberg said.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams said the city was also the exoneration capital — meaning, it was locking up lots of innocent people.
Over the years, the number of people imprisoned in the local jail went from about 7,000 pre-Katrina to about 1,400 today.
A key pivot
In 2020, the city council voted unanimously to give the Orleans Public Defenders office funding parity with the district attorney's office. The parity is at 85%, since the district attorney handles some cases that don't involve public defenders.
Williams was city council president when the law passed. He said it took some work to convince taxpayers that their money should be spent on defending poor people accused of crimes.
"It was asking a lot of the public to look at the nuances of what we were talking about," Williams said. "This was not about taking a pile of cash and giving it to criminal defendants. This was about making sure we had fair courts and safe streets."
"We cannot have a criminal justice system that says, 'Where there is smoke, there must be fire,'" he added.
Williams became the district attorney in 2021. He said the funding parity makes that job harder, but that's the point.
"It makes it harder for prosecutors to get convictions when you have a lawyer representing the defense that is well-paid or with a public defender office that is well-resourced," he said. "It certainly makes our job to prove guilt harder, but it makes the system fairer."
Engelberg said it shouldn't be surprising that a prosecutor wants to face a well-funded defense.
"I think 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 us public defenders and defense, and then there's the judges. And if one leg of the stool is poorly resourced or not functioning, then the stool doesn't hold up," Engelberg said.
Engelberg and Garvey say there's still room for improvement in the way they defend people accused of crimes in New Orleans. The office could use more lawyers and more space.
But Garvey said her experience helping to rebuild the criminal justice system in New Orleans over the last 20 years has taught her a valuable lesson — that "the system" is just people.
Today, she's the only full-time public defense attorney in New Orleans who was there in the days just after Katrina. She said the storm instilled an ethos in the office that remains to this day.
"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," she said. "I know I sound like I'm flag waving. It's the Fourth of July, but this is absolutely, 100%, what I believe."
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