BY JOHN SIMERMAN | Staff writer Mar 6, 2024| Nola.com
A report published Wednesday by the Metropolitan Crime Commission paints a bleak picture of Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams’ office in its first two years, claiming the rate at which prosecutors secured felony convictions in that span plummeted.
The commission, a privately funded local criminal justice watchdog, found that Williams’ office engineered a “purge” of felony cases, either refusing to file charges or dismissing them later, that resulted in a felony conviction rate in 2022 of just 20%. That was down from 44% in the last pre-pandemic year under his predecessor, Leon Cannizzaro, the commission said.
The report cites data from the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office and alleges that those low figures are the result of policy changes that Williams imposed after he took office in early 2021.
The report credits Williams with since pivoting to tougher policies, such as the threat of the state’s habitual-offender law, saying the DA has “begun using all available tools to hold violent and repeat felony offenders accountable for their crimes.”
In a lengthy statement Wednesday, Williams’ office panned the report while largely ignoring its analysis.
“Notably, this report does not provide a single example of a case where we are alleged to have made a bad decision,” the statement read. “With respect to the MCC numbers, some of the representations are factual and some are speculative or editorial on the tails of a special (legislative) session designed to roll back the bipartisan criminal justice reforms of 2017 which sought to change our status as leaders in mass incarceration.”
Williams did not dispute a steep decline in the “arrest-to-conviction” rate from 2019, the last pre-pandemic year, to 2022, when the court largely resumed normal operations.
Rather, his office called it a byproduct of a new regime of fairness since Williams took office after running as a progressive reformer.
“This is what the statistics and conviction rates look like when you don’t cheat…or threaten to use the habitual offender statute in every case, or have defendants who cannot afford to bond out pleading guilty just to go home and get back to their jobs, regardless of their guilt or innocence,” Williams said.
The commission pointed to a rate of refusals – tossing a case before charges are ever brought – that it says rose from one-third of all felony cases under Cannizzaro in 2019, to more than half of felony arrests in 2022.
The MCC report criticizes policies that Williams introduced to the office that it claims harmed public safety: refusing to prosecute juveniles as adults, to use the threat of arrest to force reluctant witnesses to testify, to prosecute drug possession charges or to deploy the state’s repeat offender statute. It’s not clear, however, in what ways many of those policies reflect in the high rates of refused or dismissed cases that the report highlights.
The report points to rising crime figures in Williams’ first two years, while crediting his office with changes that it said hold “substantial promise for gradual if not significant improvements in public safety in 2023 and beyond.”
Williams argued in a statement that the returns are already in.
“The statistic that matters is the one that reflects the City’s crime rate. By the end of 2023, after publicly articulating and implementing a series of strategic OPDA initiatives, the city logged a 27% decline in homicides and the largest decline in all major crime categories in the country,” Williams’ statement read.
“That is an objective truth regardless of vantage point, and we should all embrace that success while doing our parts to ensure those gains are sustainable.”