Physically, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, but more then that, it destroyed the Justice system. The government can surely find reasons to explain the struggle of evacuating millions and rescuing thousands. Yet to keep thousands of innocent people in stuck in a jail cell for months, or even over a year? That is inexcusable, but its just what they did, and they were innocent. For in the American legal system all people are innocent until proven guilty. Yet people were never given this chance, as they were never even given a trial, which is guaranteed in the constitution. The sixth amendment to the United States Constitution states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, …show more content…
..., and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.” As I shall prove, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, neither of these rights were given. During and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the government trampled over the rights of thousands of Americans by not giving them proper and timely trials. The Sixth Amendment is a part of the bill of rights. Thus showing its important as a basic right to all Americans in order to protect liberty. It was put into place to prevent the government from throwing whoever they choose in jail with charging them for a crime. If someone is arrested then in a timely manor they must be charged, then put to trial. This is important to protect the innocent as someone not guilty can be sitting in jail without proper cause. Furthermore, it is needed for even if someone is guilty of their crime, it ensures that they are serving out the sentence appropriate for the crime instead of spending a disproportionate time in prison for the crime they have been accused of. Next the amendment states that each person must have the opportunity to a lawyer, if one cannot be afforded it will e provided to them. This is to make sure they are able to properly defend themselves. It benefits all sides as the defendant gets a proper defense and the government saves money as they do not have to pay for a prison system full of innocent people. The government must have lawyers to provide for any accused unable to get one for themselves. Both of these parts of the sixth amendment were not properly followed in New Orleans because of the hurricane. People are guaranteed the right to a speedy trial.
According to Ellard, for a misdemeanor people have forty-five days to be indicted, and 60 days to be indicted for felonies. Yet, in New Orleans, prisoners were kept for an average of 385 days without even be arraigned. Unquestionably at least some people were kept in jail for a year without any due process. It is almost a hard to believe the number that people were kept in jail for this long unconstitutionally. It is a disgrace to civil rights. Yet if this time is passed, legally the case should be thrown out and the people set free as legally they can no longer be held in jail. Yet this was not the case. According to Simmons, people were kept in jail waiting to be charged longer then they would have actually been charged for. For minor infractions people were kept in jail for months. According to Garrett and Tetlow, “Most were arrested for petty offenses such as public drunkenness, reading tarot cards without a permit, or failure to pay traffic tickets, and …show more content…
then detained based solely on a police affidavit”. People are being jailed, it seemed, not due to there own activities, yet the inability of the government to function during crisis. Each defendant is allowed the right to an attorney under law.
Due to the hurricane, following this became a mess. Most of the attorneys in New Orleans became displaced due to the hurricane. The effect of this, is all there clients still in New Orleans were left with their lawyer. The law offices in New Orleans had become flooded, making it difficult for an attorney to work if if they had tried. Documents were lost and they struggled to find new offices. Thus many people were forced to turn to government provided attorneys. This became a problem, since, according to Ellard, due to the lack of income from parking fines from the hurricane, the public defenders lawyers had been cut to only six. They could not afford more. The state had no other way of raising the money. Six lawyers cannot and were not able to hand the massive load of awaiting trials due to the hurricane causing a massive backlog of cases. Government inefficiencies were enormous.
The prosecutors were hurt to. Since they had the burden of proof to prove someone guilty, they lost a lot of evidence. It took such a long time that witnesses memories began to fade and their testimonies became unreliable and unable to be used in a court of law. People who have been proved guilty were let go because it had taken too long to get them to
trial. Some problems could have been expected. Yet the amount was too high. The complete lack of preparation and the long amount of time it took to recover from the storm was the real problem. Documents should have been saved and backed up. Alternative sites for court should have been pre planned. Yet none of this was done. In the following months it took them to sort out this mess thousands of lives were ruined. Simmons details the case of Pedro Parra-Sanchez, a man from California who had come to help clean up the city after the hurricane. He ended up getting accused of a crime and being jailed for around thirteen months before ever getting charged of a crime. In that time he lost his job, his family lost their house, his kids had to get jobs, and his life was practically ruined. He was out of contact with his family as they were all the way accross the country with no means of getting to him. After being found innocent, he was only able to get home because a local Synnagogue donated the money for his fairs to get home. He was ignored by the government and the system failed him. This is a story that thousands likely had after the hurricane. According to Ellard, 8,000 people were stuck in similar situations waiting to be charged. Ellard thinks that given the severity of ones crimes, they should have simply been released. If the government is not able to charge them then they should not be keeping someone in jail for a misdemeanor for that long. This would have solved many problems. People would not have had to pay to keep people in jail for such extended amounts of time. Cases would have been able to go to trial quicker. People that are released could then become productive members of society and helb rebuild the city. People that did not deserve to be in jail for so long would have been released. Government officials ignored the lack of Constitutional rights. Garrett and Tedlow speak about how there was no public forum for the discussion of Constitutional rights. Ellard believes that the right to a speedy trial is often treated a second class citizen. If it was given more thought to, then it probably would have been prepared for and maybe the criminal justice disaster that occurred would not have happened. According to Ellard the right to a speedy trial is important for multiple reasons. It protects “freedom from oppressive pretrial incarceration, mitigation of the anxiety and concern accompanying public accusation, and avoidance of impairment to the accused defense”(Ellard). Each of these are important. Furthermore, prison conditions were poor. They were overcrowded. Prisoners complained of water levels reaching their chest during the actual hurricanes and prison guards fleeing the prisoners. There were also complaints of guards denying prisoners food and water. Also being unable to contact ones family is a form of abuse. It is hard to imagine that such a violation for human rights was done by the United States government itself. That is how the government failed its citizens during because of Hurricane Katrina. A disaster was mishandled and the people paid the price. Hopefully they learn from it and create plans incase another disaster should affect any part of America. The Constitution helped make American great and needs to be followed in order to preserve the rights of citizens.
The. Niman, Michael I. "KATRINA's AMERICA: Failure, Racism, And Profiteering." Humanist 65.6 (2005): 11. MasterFILE Premier. Web. The Web.
The book Murder in the Bayou: Who Killed the Women Known as the Jeff Davis 8?, written by independent journalist and private investigator Ethan Brown, tells the horrific true story of the bayou town of Jennings, Louisiana located in the heart of the Jefferson Davis parish. During the four year duration between 2005 and 2009, the town of Jennings was on edge after the discovery of the bodies of eight murdered women were found in the filthy canals and swamps. The victims became known as the “Jeff Davis 8.” For years, local law enforcement suspected a serial killer, and solely investigated the murders based on that theory alone. The victims were murdered in varying manors, but when alive they all shared many commonalities and were connected to
Even though it is the responsibility of the federal and state governments to aid citizens during times of disaster, the people devastated by Hurricane Katrina were not effectively facilitated as according to their rights as citizens of the United States. The government’s failures to deliver assistance to citizens stem from inadequate protection systems in place before the storm even struck. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security were the two largest incumbents in the wake of the storm. The failure of these agencies rests on the shoulders of those chosen to head the agency. These directors, appointed by then president George W. Bush, were not capable of leading large government agencies through a crisis, let alone a disaster the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina. Along with the federal government, the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans did not do enough to lesseb the damage caused by the storm, and forced thousands of poorer citizens to remain in cramped and unsanitary conditions for extended periods of time. The culmination of federal, state, and local government’s failures in suppressing and repairing the damage of Hurricane Katrina to a level acceptable for citizens of the United States is a denial of the rights citizens of the United States hold.
"I see a perfect explosion, God's ammunition dump, going up in flames of righteousness, Satan storming heaven, his artillery captain, a fiercely grinning fool with red flayed cheeks, Damien by name, never to be Michael Hutchison again. The end is near. Kiss your ass goodbye people, it's time to pay up. Now is the judgment. I am the judge."-Damien Echols, (West Memphis Three Facts). The West memphis three is considered one of the most unfair trials in US history. On May fifth, three eight year old boys came up missing from their West Memphis, Arkansas homes. The next day, they were found brutally murdered in which appeared to be the attempts of a Satanic ritual. This lead to an opinion that only Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley, due to the assumption, the investigators of this case, caused Jesse Misskelley to have a nervous breakdown caused by his unrecognized mental retardation, which forced a confession out of him. When word got out on this case, celebrities backed up the belief that the three boys were innocent and were giving an unfair trial.
Most of the destructions from the events of August 29th 2005, when Katrina Hit the City Of New Orleans, were not only caused by the storm itself; but also, by failure of the engineering of the levee system protecting the entire infrastructure of the city. The years of poor decision making and avoidance of the levee system led to one of the most catastrophic events in the history of the United States. Throughout our research, we have identified three key players in charge of the levee system design, construction and maintenance. These three organizations are the Unites States Corps of Engineers, the New Orleans Levee District and the Louisiana Department of Transportation. The consequences of the hurricane showed the organizations negligence in the design, construction and maintenance of the protective walls. Later independent sresearch showed that more than 50 levees and food walls failed during the passage of the hurricane. This failure caused the flooding of most of New Orleans and all of ST. Bernard Parish. The Unites States Corps of Engineers had been in charge of the of the levee system and flood walls construction since the 1936 flood act. According to the law, the Louisiana Department of Transportation is in charge to inspect the overall design and engineering practices implemented in the construction of the system. Once the levee systems were finished, they were handed over to the New Orleans Levee District for regular maintenance and periodically inspections. The uncoordinated actions of these three agencies resulted in the complete failure of a system that was supposed to protect the people of New Orleans. The evidence is clear that this catastrophic event did not happened by chance. The uncoordinated response of these...
New Orleans has always been a hotspot for crimes, historically having one of the highest murder rates in the country. New Orleans prolific crimes can be traced back to the 19th century, when New Orleans was expanding its ports and commerce; groups fought for power to control the revenue streams. Ultimately, organized crime groups and mafia families fought for control - of ports, types of commerce and groups of workers they could control. These fights led to assassinations, murder, and other crimes that continue to this day. The police lost control - they would not step in to interfere with the illegal activities because either they were paid off by the criminals or feared they would be killed by the mafia. The lack of police intervention caused private citizens to step in, creating lynch mobs to tackle crime and take out criminals.
...already had a predetermined verdict. They were automatically determined to be guilty, even though there was a lot of evidence that they were innocent including one of the victims (Ruby Bates) eventually defending the Boys. Besides all the problems this case revealed, it also showed that there was good in society. Facing the possibility of death, Samuel Leibowitz still defended the Boys as much as he could. The second judge that presided over the case actually followed the law and prevented any harm from coming to the Boys.
The justice system present in the United States is one of fairness, equality, and human rights. In a court of law, all men are created equal and have certain unalienable rights that nothing or no one can take away. What is to happen when these rights are denied, abused, or ignored? It is a frightening outcome when unruly factors destroy the basis of this system. As a victim of injustice once said, “People have prejudices, people have fears, people have hates. These things cloud our ability to reason.” Injustice has a tendency to overshadow reason. How can one feel safe in this country, when no one is totally safe from the sometimes unjust scrutiny of the law? If justice rests on one being innocent until proven guilty, what is to happen when one is to be guilty until proven innocent?
To begin with, anybody privy to the events in New Orleans that ensued after Hurricane Katrina struck knows that horrible things that had nothing to do with natural causes happened: there were murders, gunfire directed at a rescue helicopter, assaults and, courtesy of New Orleans’ city police department, a myriad other crimes that most probably went unreported (Katrinacoverage.com).
The population of New Orleans was steadily decreasing, between the years of 2000 and 2005, 30,000 (6%) of the population left New Orleans in search for better lives (4). The declining population shows us that before Hurricane Katrina residence were already considering leaving the city, some push factors leading them away from the city include poverty and unemployment (5). Accord to the U.S 2005 Census Bureau around 23% of the residence lived in poverty, this can be a result of the nearly 12% unemployment rate (5). With an unemployment rate double the national standard and nearly one forth the population living in poverty, the city of New Orleans had many push factors against it resolution in a decline population prier to Hurricane Katrina. At the time of the storm nearly 400,000 residents were displaced from their homes too near by safe areas or other states. The population reming in the city as decreased to a few thousand (6). A month after the disaster when the levee breaches were repaired and the flood water was pumped out of the city, residence were allowed to return to what was left of their homes. The first reliable estimate of the New Orleans population after Hurricane Katrina was an ‘American Community survey’. The survey projected that by the start of 2006 around one third or 158,000 of the population returned. By the middle of f2006 the city
Saint Augustine once said, “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?” The criminal justice system in America has been documented time and time again as being a legal system that borders on the surreal. We as Americans live in a country where the Justice Department has failed to collect on $7 billion in fines and restitutions from thirty-seven thousand corporations and individuals convicted of white collar crime. That same Justice Department while instead spending more than 350% since 1980 on total incarceration expenditures totaling $80 billion dollars. America has become a place where a 71-year-old man will get 150 years in prison for stealing $68 billion dollars from nearly everyone in the country and a five-time petty offender in Dallas was sentenced to one thousand years in prison for stealing $73.
... to blame because they could have worked around the difficult environment surrounding to reduce flooding. The local authorities could have developed buildings in areas sitting in higher grounds to provide a safer living for the residents. Such actions would have reduced flooding because more space in the city would have provided adequate space for drainage, as well as for water run-off. New Orleans is not “unnatural metropolis” per se, but it depends on the natural setting that fails to bend to all human efforts to repossess it. All human actions lead to a series of water problem from urbanization, levee construction, bowl-shaped location, and failure to create a sound drainage system. Based on this argument, the New Orleans water problems center more on the human actions and to less extent, on the environmental elements including heavy downpours and flooding.
New Orleans is an American city known for being very different from the rest of America. The differences vary in food, attitude, location, and atmosphere. These differences make New Orleans a unique part of America, but these differences come with a price. New Orleans has been through various things such as white supremacy in its early days as a colony, Hurricane Katrina, and others. White supremacy may even still carry on today. Our nation still does not understand how to handle New Orleans. Support groups and government have good intentions behind their actions in some cases but sometimes it just falls through. FEMA tried to help during Hurricane Katrina, but the politics within the organization made things worse instead of better. The federal
Every year many natural disasters happen around the world. In New Orleans, and several other states, a devastating hurricane struck. High speed winds and major flooding caused many people to lose their homes and even their lives. Many people have heard of hurricane Katrina, but not everybody knows what caused it and the affect it had on the United States.
Another way in which the criminal justice system can be improved upon that rarely gets talked about is holding prosecutors responsible for their dereliction of duty. Their negligence could be the direct reason why someone is falsely convicted and yet nothing is done to them for it. They find ways to circumvent crucial evidence and suffer no punitive repercussions. Some prosecutors have even been known to completely piece together or even make up evidence that makes the defendant appear guilty. How is it possible that these individuals get away with these types of activities and experience no legal