While authorities are searching for seven Orleans Parish Justice Center escapees who remain on the run, local and state leaders, including Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, are playing the blame game.
Landry is pointing his finger at, among others, District Attorney Jason Williams.
"Prosecutors who are unprepared and delay cases for years must be addressed in this court system," Landry said on Sunday. "Nine of the 10 escapees have been in the pretrial stages in OPCC for years now."
Landry accused Williams of moving too slowly to prosecute violent criminals, leading to overcrowding in the OJC.
"Nine of these 10 escapees were sitting in jail waiting to go to trial," Landry claimed. "Had they gone to trial, had they been convicted, had they been sentenced, they would most likely not be in the Orleans Parish Jail but in our custody and in one of the state penitentiaries."
Landry even blamed some of the Orleans Parish criminal court judges for playing a role in the escape.
"The docket is also a key," Landry said. My understanding is that the Orleans Parish Jail is beyond capacity because the cases are not moving."
Local criminal justice officials, including Williams, are pushing back. The district attorney took offense at the governor's accusation that he's somehow responsible for the jailbreak. In fact, he says it's not his job, but the state's, to move violent convicts to state prisons.
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"For the governor to suggest that I am somehow involved or complicit in putting a man on the street that would want to cause harm to me and my lawyers because we tried to give him a life sentence not once but three times, it's absurd! I was shocked," Williams said to WWL's Tommy Tucker, noting that he personally prosecuted the case against one of the escapees, Derrick Groves, who was convicted of murder last year. "He was left there sitting on the first floor of the jail."
Williams said there's no reason why the state didn't put Groves in a state prison after his conviction.
"This person could have been shipped off, but I don't control that, and I don't understand why the governor would think I would," Williams said. "In terms of us being responsible for moving inmates out of (the jail), the 20 they just moved, nobody consulted me about that because it's not my job, and I'm not in charge of it.
As for the escapees who were awaiting trial, Williams noted that the courts are still fighting a backlog created by the COVID pandemic.
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"I can't move people out of the jail, and I can't move a case faster than the (Louisiana) Constitution allows me or a judge allows me," Williams said. "Jury trials were suspended for over a year in Orleans Parish, creating an unprecedented backlog. The guy on his right, (former Orleans Parish District Attorney) Leon Cannizzaro, could have told him that."
According to Williams, if anyone could have prevented the escape, it's the sheriff's office. He says if officials there had listened to the federal officials overseeing the consent decree governing the agency, the escape may not have happened.
"The federal monitor said you don't put the most dangerous people on the first floor where they can get out easily," Williams said. "You put them on the higher floors."
Metropolitan Crime Commission chief executive Rafael Goyeneche agrees that some of the blame for the jailbreak is "gonna be on the state." He says the Louisiana Department of Corrections--like the Orleans Sheriff's Office--is understaffed. That, he says, leads to some inmates who should be transferred to a state penitentiary being stuck in the O-P-P.
"Some of the inmates that are eligible for transfer are delayed not because of the sheriff's office and not because of any failures in the local criminal justice system but because the state is taking too much time to take those inmates," Goyeneche said to Tucker, adding that state officials transferred as many as 60 inmates from the OJC to state facilities over the weekend. "If they had been gone last Wednesday or Thursday before the escape, some of those inmates that were on the first floor may not have been on the first floor."
However, Goyeneche agreed with Governor Landry in part. According to Goyeneche, a few inefficient judges in the Orleans Parish Criminal Court have a hand in keeping the parish jail over capacity, creating opportunities for a great escape.
"When a judge doesn't do their job, it causes a backup in the system," Goyeneche said. "And the person that's left holding the bag with that is the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office."
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