Would you rather be told comforting lies or the unpleasant truth? If you’re seeking comfort, you’re in the wrong place.
I found Governor Landry’s response to the Orleans Parish jail break to be very appropriate because his indignation toward the District Attorney Jason Williams’ performance underscored the larger, but severely neglected, reality of what happened on Friday.
Before going further—yes—a jail break is a dreadful, chaotic event that undermines the public’s trust in its institutions. However, the reality is that our system releases violent criminals back into society every single day. There’s no need to rip a toilet off the wall and threaten to shank a maintenance worker to get out; the people in charge of our criminal justice system will do it for you pro bono.
Laura Cannizzaro Rodrigue, former Orleans Parish prosecutor and co-founder of watchdog group Bayou Mama Bears, joined the show to explain the tragic scale of this issue.
Rodrigue explains, “The release of ten violent criminals is otherwise known as a Tuesday in Orleans Parish criminal courts.”
Rodrigue took me through her research into the criminal histories of just a few fugitives. Results show they’ve been given leniency and have had charges dropped or refused by the DA, time and time again.
“Germaine Donald was arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm in 2023,” says Rodrigue. “He commits murder in August 2023.”
“We have Lenton Vanburen,” Rodrigue continues. “While in jail on a murder charge, he tried to bring drugs into the jail in December of 2022, October of 2024, and November of 2024. All charges were refused by the DA. In November of 2024, he beats up a deputy. Those charges: Refused by the DA.”
“Derrick Groves. Nobody can explain why he’s sitting there waiting to be sentenced since October 2024. He pleaded guilty. You are typically sentenced on the same day you plead guilty. That case has been reset by the state 15 times…These go on and on and on,” says Rodrigue.
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These are examples of the underlying message those like Laura Rodrigue, Governor Landry, and AG Murrill are trying to preach: Our issue is larger than a jail break.
“It’s a revolving door,” Rodrigue explains. "An escape is an unintentional act…But a release, what we see every day in court and by the judges and by the DA, is intentional. They sit there and decide Will I release this violent criminal? And they’re deciding to do so all the time. Way more than 10 every few years. They’re doing it every day.”
Rodrigue tells me, “To say it's horrible that these people escaped is ignoring the larger issue of the root cause of the problem in Orleans Parish: There is a lack of justice….Case management is terrible. They are sitting in a pretrial posture, they are sitting in parish jails for years waiting for their case to go to trial. That is not normal.”
So, how often is this happening? If you have a hat, I suggest you hold onto it.
Pointing to the conduct of District Attorney Jason Williams over the past few years, Rodrigue explains that the numbers, by any account, are preposterous.
“The DA went on TV and said (the backlog of cases) was from COVID,” says Rodrigue. “In 2021, his first year in office, he either dismissed or refused 1,859 cases. In his second year, he dismissed 500 more and went on to refuse a record number of 2,405 cases in Orleans Parish. This guy dismissed or got rid of thousands and thousands of cases in his first two years in office. That doesn’t include the 349 people he released in post-conviction… That means 349 people who had already been convicted by a jury for things like murder and rape, he went back and released them. There’s no backlog here. There’ no justification to say he’s scared. He says, ‘I’m scared there's one person I tried the case myself, he might try to come and get me.’ What a slap in the face to the thousands of victims whose perpetrators have been released in the past few years, who got no notification and no protection.”
Let's put the entire image into perspective: The jail break, the outrageous number of dropped or refused charges, the pitiful response from Orleans Parish leadership, this is nothing short of a slap in the face the the victims of these perpetrators.
Rodrigue explains, “The victims who have had perpetrators released, thousands released over the course of the last few years, have had no protections. They got no notifications.”
The trial of Derrick Groves
There’s a 2024 article you can find on the DA’s website. The title? “Verdict Reached in Retrial of Derrick Groves: Justice Delivered for 2018 Mardi Gras Day Killings.”
The article takes a victory lap, touting the verdict as a pivotal moment of peace and assurance for the families of Jamar Robinson and Byron Jackson, a “long-awaited culmination of a painful six-year legal journey,” it says.
No one can explain why Derrick Groves, instead of being placed in a max-security prison, where a jury of peers and the court system determined where he belonged, languished in jail. A jail that we now know has a poor security infrastructure.
Then, on Friday, he broke free. And the family of Jamar Robinson had to be taken into custody to re-live all the fear, all the grief, all the heartache.
Then, DA Williams wants to publicly state that he has the same right to fear as the families whose loved ones were murdered? All while refusing to explain why there was such a flagrant delay in Groves’ sentencing, or why his office is responsible for allowing thousands of violent criminals to walk free in the first place.
It’s a widespread disaster, and one that we need to start addressing on an ideological level if we are to at all, and we can’t forget this come election season.
Rodrigue summed it up best, “This is part of a much, much bigger systemic problem, and we can check their faces off on our ten little pictures on the news every morning. But once they’re all caught and brought back, we’re going to go back to the same thing.”
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