Crime

New Orleans Is Letting Prosecutors Listen To Inmates' Phone Calls To Their Lawyers

I'm not an expert in the Napoleonic Code, but this should be entirely illegal.

By  
on

Every single time Alan Dershowitz or some Trumped up lawyer complains about prosecutorial overreach in the Mueller probe, I wish I could send a few hundred indigent criminal defendants to their office to receive representation. There are many people who suffer because over-powered prosecutors exceed all bounds of due process, and none of those people are the President of the United States. The rank hypocrisy of the pro-Trump legal crowd makes me want to body-switch them with a public defender until they BEG FORGIVENESS for spending their lives in the service of tyrants while innocent people ROT in jail on the say so of shady prosecutors.

There’s a story coming out of New Orleans today that should lead to a prison riot if the prisoners knew how wrong it was. From The Guardian:

According to advocates from Court Watch Nola (CWN), the city is indeed an outlier when it comes to monitoring inmates’ calls. CWN said that out of more than 45 cities it contacted, including New York, St Louis, Boston and Dallas, New Orleans stands alone in not providing for calls from inmates to attorneys’ cellphones to be exempt from monitoring and recording. This is a “profound problem” for attorney-client privilege, the report says.

“No US supreme court case or provision of the US constitution has said that attorney-client privilege can only be obtained via a landline and not a cellphone, and neither is this distinction realistic in the 21st century,” said CWN’s executive director, Simone Levine…

It is common practice for jails to monitor and record phone conversations. It allows jailers to keep tabs on plots to move contraband or escape. But in New Orleans, prosecutors in the office of DA Leon Cannizzaro, who have no responsibility for how the parish jail operates, appear to have unfettered access to such calls. For years this included all calls in and out, even if between client and attorney.

Every. Single. Prosecutor. who listened in on inmate calls and used that evidence against them at trial should disbarred. EVERY ONE OF THEM. I don’t give a Cajun fart if some pidgin prison wardens decided this was acceptable. A barred attorney should know better. Prosecutors are not supposed to be mere weapons deployed against whatever vulnerable citizen gets in their line of sight. They are supposed to UPHOLD the administration of justice. They know or should know that listening in on privileged communications is wrong. And if they can’t be trusted to know that, then they do not deserve the enormous discretion granted to them by our corrupt criminal justice system.

We won’t fire them all, because our criminal justice system is a joke that’s more concerned with placing racial minorities in bondage than justice. But they should be.

We live in a failed state. This whole freaking system needs to be burned down and rebuilt from the ashes.

Sponsored

‘Plainly unconstitutional’: New Orleans jail records inmates’ calls to lawyers [The Guardian]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Sponsored

Topics

, , ,