A group of over 30 local justice organizations in New Orleans banded together in 2020 as The People’s DA Coalition and proved their power at the ballot box, helping to elect the Crescent City’s first progressive District Attorney in Jason Williams.
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However, less than a year later, the group was already addressing concerns about Williams’s tenure and his about-face on certain campaign promises regarding justice reform. Now, the group has made public a letter it sent to Williams last November, an action they said they would take if they received no response from Williams or his office.
Published publicly via a post on Twitter on Friday, the letter takes Williams to task over several different issues that the People’s DA Coalition considers to be broken campaign promises. Among them:
A lack of commitment towards providing equal resources to the public defender’s office as compared to the district attorney’s office
A continued propensity for juveniles who commit violent crime to be charged as adults in Orleans Parish
The lag time between arrest and the formal charging of suspects, which forces those who cannot make bail to languish behind bars with little recourse for release
A continued use of the habitual offender law, which the coalition argues leads to over-incarceration
“We believe your election as District Attorney represents a new chapter for our city which has too long suffered from systems and policies that are out of touch, ill-informed, and proven to be disastrous failures,” the letter says.
“We understand that change takes time. However we are simultaneously going to push you to be the best reform District Attorney we know you can be, and that the city desperately needs.”
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