By Staff Attorney Diana Yu
“How long will I be in jail?”
“When is my trial going to happen?”
“What’s going to happen when we go back to court?”
Every day, several of my clients call me from jail to ask these questions I don’t have the answers to.
And it’s hard to tell them the same thing every day: that I don’t know, and I don’t know when I’ll have answers for them. And there’s a second thought in my brain – that because of the coronavirus lockdown at the jail, my clients are only allowed out of their cell once a day for 30 minutes to make phone calls.
Imagine being locked up in a cage, worried about your family members on the outside, and trying to stay as connected as possible to your loved ones. In a time when people are staying more digitally connected than ever on FaceTime and Zoom, you’re cut off from the outside world more than ever. Maybe you have a family member who is sick or in the hospital. And still, you are using part of your precious 30 minutes a day to call your lawyer, hoping that he or she can give you some information, some hope for what the future holds.
It breaks my heart that I can’t give them that hope.
For all of us who feel like we are losing months of our lives in limbo, some of my clients are spending those months stuck in a dystopian trap. They’re presumed innocent. They were promised they would get their day in court. But when that day will come now, nobody knows. People who had trials set before quarantine now may not be able to get a trial date until...July? August? Maybe even later. And all these months they’ve spent and will spend waiting, they remain vulnerable to contracting a potentially deadly virus while they are confined in what is essentially a human petri dish.
On top of all this, in the past week, they’ve seen coverage of George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests that have captured the nation on a tiny jail television, knowing that the same system of racial injustice that contributed to his death is what built the bars of their cages.
Even as Phase 1 continues in Louisiana and Criminal District Court enters its first week of reopening, I can’t feel optimistic about what this means for my clients.
With OPD’s funding shortfalls, I can’t hire necessary experts anymore. That means one client who was set to be evaluated by an expert when the quarantine began, now won’t be able to have that evaluation that would have likely opened up access to housing and services. With investigators being furloughed—like all of us at OPD—critical investigation on cases becomes even scarcer. Even before COVID, my clients often faced impossible choices like having to decide whether to take a plea offer while having very little information about their case or sit in jail even longer, waiting. Now, the alternative of trial is a distant possibility. Now, we have even less capacity to investigate. How can someone possibly choose whether or not to spend the next five years in prison under those circumstances?
It’s not just that those daily decisions will be harder for clients to make. They shouldn’t have to make life-changing decisions under those circumstances at all. Our clients deserve better.
Our clients deserve their day in court. They deserve freedom while they’re presumed innocent, especially if we cannot even give them their day in court. They deserve a fully-funded public defender who can do adequate investigation to stand up to the police narrative. They deserve lawyers, period.
These are the thoughts that go through my head when my clients call me from jail every single day. The thing is - my clients know. They know they’re drawing the short straw.
They have more grace than I could ever muster when they thank me and hang up after I’ve told them for the thirtieth time since quarantine started, “I don’t know” and “I’m sorry.”
