2021 Budget Approval Puts OPD Funded at 65% of the DA’s Local Funding, Pushing Closer to Equity and Funding Parity in New Orleans
Yesterday, the New Orleans City Council brought the city closer to fairness and equity with the approval of an historic appropriation of $3,400,000 for the Orleans Public Defenders Office (OPD). This amends the proposed $1,626,442 by the Mayor and increases the appropriation to 65% of that allotted to the District Attorney. The budget amendment comes after the City Council unanimously passed the funding parity ordinance in August mandating an 85% parity threshold between OPD and the DA. The ordinance and the adopted appropriation begins to close the resource gap between public defense and prosecution, and level the playing field for people navigating the legal system. The amended appropriation includes the 20% cut proposed along with other city emergency austerity measures due to the unprecedented COVID19 pandemic and fiscal crisis.
“While we still have a long way to parity, we recognize the exceedingly difficult budgetary times and need for shared sacrifice. The City Council took a courageous and critical step yesterday toward fairness and justice. This is another historic moment for New Orleans, and a message to our clients and community that their voices were heard. New Orleans deserves a legal system that values and prioritizes fairness, equity and justice. For too long, the system has remained unfair and unbalanced – favoring incarceration. We have repeatedly warned of the consequences of a system that disregards the rights of New Orleanians – furthering the systemic and racial disparities baked into the legal system. Today, we again bend history’s arc toward justice. We still have work to do and look forward to continued collaboration with the Mayor, City Council and other legal system stakeholders to achieve the full 85% funding parity mandated by the parity ordinance. We are exceedingly grateful to the City Council and Mayor’s office for recognizing the critical need for equity.”
Thursday’s vote followed a powerful budget hearing last week where OPD and other community advocates spoke about the pervasive inequities, systemic racism and oppression embedded in the criminal legal system and the harms caused by public defenders unable to do the job required by the Constitution. Justice depends on each entity being equitably funded and resourced. Establishing parity and equity in the legal system puts New Orleans at the forefront of reform efforts post-Katrina and makes New Orleans a leader in justice equity in Louisiana.
“There is no city more deserving or more urgently in need of a robust public defense system than New Orleans. We must remember that a budget is a moral document. We must reflect our community’s values: equity, fairness, human dignity,” Alanah Odoms Hebert, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana said in a recorded testimony.
OPD has long called out the funding and resource inequities in New Orleans’ user-pay legal system and made clear the immediate and long-lasting effects these inequities have on poor people within the legal system and to our greater community. While the parity ordinance and increased appropriation is progress and moves toward a more equitable New Orleans, it does not eliminate the fundamentally flawed user-pay structure of funding the legal system, nor does it address the inequities in funding at the state level.
OPD represents 85% of all cases in Criminal District Court, as well as Municipal, Traffic and Juvenile Court. OPD protects innocence, holds powerful actors accountable, and fights for our community by connecting clients to critical social services and treatment, housing, education and employment, and reentry services.
