In August 2006, a full year after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, University of Maryland School of Law students Brigid Ryan and Ali Herischi volunteered in the city?s Office of the Public Defender.
They returned with a bleak picture ? not only of the remaining physical structure of New Orleans, but of the city?s legal system as well.
“Many of the people I saw had been incarcerated for minor offenses, such as failing to pay a parking fine or loitering,” Ryan said.
“They were abandoned and placed in prison cells alongside people accused of violent crimes and with convicted felons,” she said.
On Sunday, 50 Maryland School of Law students will travel to Louisiana for a week to aid in the ongoing process of rebuilding New Orleans and its legal system.
Nearly 20 students, led by Alicia Welch and Clayton Solomon, will work on rehabilitating damaged homes adding to students? work last year. And 36 other students will assist with the public defenders office, locating defendants, conducting preliminary interviews and creating background defense files.
Ryan, president of the Maryland ACLU chapter at the law school; Shakeya Currie, vice-president of the Black Law Students Association; and faculty professor Doug Colbert are part of the Maryland Katrina and Indigent Defense Project, a student group leading nationwide efforts to help the New Orleans legal system recover from the catastrophe. They came together following on-campus screenings of Spike Lee?s documentary “When the Levees Broke” and a BBC documentary, “Prisoners of Katrina.”
“Following Hurricane Katrina, the public defenders office in New Orleans was reduced to a skeletal staff,” Colbert said at the students? third training session Wednesday afternoon.
“The Spike Lee documentary and BBC documentary truly outraged me,” Colbert added later. “It was shocking and alarming that the legal profession could ignore their responsibility like that. In many ways, law students are the social conscience of the legal community.”
University of Maryland law students are planning to post a daily blog about the project at www.law.umaryland.edu/studentorg/katrina/index.asp.
“The justice system failed the citizens of New Orleans and, being a person of color from Baltimore, this struck a chord,” Currie said. “The population of Baltimore is very similar to the population of New Orleans.”
