The moment he heard about the first coronavirus case in New Orleans, Derwyn Bunton knew he had to realign his priorities. “I told my staff, ‘Y’all, this is going to get bad,’” he says. Bunton is the district defender for Orleans Parish, or the chief public defender for the city of New Orleans. After that first case, Bunton’s primary objective would be to depopulate the city’s jail, which could quickly become a viral time bomb.
Over the past month, the number of people in jail in New Orleans has dropped from 1,100 to 820, thanks largely to the efforts of Bunton’s staff.
Even as Bunton’s offices work to free people from the jail, arrests for low-level crimes have continued. The Louisiana Supreme Court has canceled jury trials in the state, but New Orleans courts are still holding hearings via teleconference. Bunton mentions one recent client who was arrested and spent a night in jail on a three-year-old trespassing charge. “Because of the statute of limitations, it wasn’t even prosecutable,” he says. “We had another client arrested for possession of a single Oxycodone tablet. Another for failure to return a rental car on time. We need to be limiting law enforcement’s interactions to serious crimes only, for the safety of everyone.”
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