Posted by Hardy Parkerson, Atty. - Lake Charles, LA on 12/21/06

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THAT’S NOT THE WAY IT’S S’POSED TO BE!

by Hardy Parkerson, B.A., J.D.; former Asst. Prof.
Criminal Justice, L.S.U., Baton Rouge

We need help badly down here in Louisiana. We need
you to call upon the United
States Department of Justice to come here and take over
the Criminal “Justice”
System. It has just become a big industry, designed to
make money for those who
run it; and there are literally thousands of them. There
are upwards of
one-thousand deputies sheriffs in Calcasieu Parish. There
is the Sheriff’s
Department, the Lake Charles City Police, the Lake Charles
City Marshal police
force, the Sulphur City Police, the Vinton City Police,
the Westlake City
Police, the DeQuincy City Police, the F.B.I., the McNeese
Police, the Port
Police, even the Railroad Police…no joke! The citizens are
apparently willing to
pay any price to fight crime, so that now we have
literally thousands of
police.Oh, yes, I forgot to mention the Louisiana State
Police, which has
literally thousands of state trooper police officers.And
all of these thousands
of policemen, have to justify their paychecks, so they
literally make thousands
of arrests, arresting almost anybody for almost anything.
There are so many
policemen in Calcasieu Parish that law enforcement has
become one of the top
employers in the parish, even employing more men that any
one of the local
petro-chemical plants and rivaling even the Calcasieu
Parish School System as
the number-one employer in the parish. And it seems that
the whole Criminal
“Justice” System is based on money and calculated to
generate money for those
who run it.

For example, for one to even post a bail bond to
get out of jail to await a
trial which never seems to come, he has to pay the Sheriff
Thirty Dollars
($30.00). That is illegal, as it is unconstitutional to
make a defendant who has
never been found guilty pay money.It is unconstitutional
to make a defendant pay
money to exercise a God-given Constitutional right, such
as the right to bail
pending trial.Since those accused and awaiting trial have
to pay $30.00 per
bailbond, there is a tendency of the arresting law-
officers to book them with as
many charges as they can dream up. These arresting
officers have a tendency to
literally throw the book at these accuseds, booking them
for multiple
charges, notwithstanding that once the accuseds’ files are
ultimately reviewed by the prosecutor, many of the charges
for which these accused have been booked by the police
will be “rejected”, and the defendants will not be charged
by the
prosecutor with these “rejected” counts. Nevertheless,
there is a breakdown and
failure of communication between the prosecutors and the
police, and defendants
are still required to bond out on each charge for which a
defendant is booked in
by the police; and for an accused to bond out of jail
pending trial on each such
charge, he must pay the Sheriff a $30.00 fee for each such
charge for which he
has been booked by the arresting officer; plus he must pay
a professional
bailbondsman a fee of twelve percent (12%) of the amount
of the bond originally
set by the Judge on each such count for which he has been
booked in. It is all
about money, money, money, money, money! It’s like I say
in my poem THEIR CRIME:
“I visit prisons all the time./They’re filled with men/
Whose greatest crime/ Is
that they haven’t got a dime.”

Secondly, and more startling, the Judges who set
the amounts of bail bonds for accuseds who are awaiting
trial, get a cut of the money paid to a professional
bailbondsman by the accuseds who post the bonds.
Therefore, the higher that the bonds are set, the more
money the Judges get. The higher the Judges fix the bonds,
the more money they get. The same applies to the D.A.s who
recommend to the Judges the amounts of the bail bonds.
They to get a cut of the money paid a professional
bailbondsman for a bailbond. Therefore, D.A.s have a
financial interest in seeing that bonds for those accused
and awaiting trial are fixed as high as possible and that
those bonds, once set, are not lowered. The higher the
bonds are set, the more money the D.A.s get. The same
thing applies to the so-called Public “Defenders.” They
get a cut of the money paid to a professional bailbondsman
for a bailbond.They have a financial interest in seeing
that bail bonds stay high; for the higher they are, the
more money they get. For these public officials to have a
financial interest in seeing that bailbonds are fixed high
and remain high is a financial conflict-of-interest, and
Judges, D.A.s and
so-called Public Defenders should not have financial
conflicts-of-interest.
Thirdly, instead of Calcasieu Parish’s having only one
parish prison, like most
normal parishes, in Calcasieu Parish we have two: the
Calcasieu Correctional
Center and the Calcasieu Sheriff’s Prison, both of which
are filled to the brim
with hundreds of men awaiting a trial which never seems to
come.
And few men are ever placed on trial in Calcasieu Parish.
It seems the courts
are reluctant to spend the money necessary to grant them
jury trials. Jury
trials cost much money, and such money is paid out of the
District Judges’
Judicial Expense Fund; and the District Judges get their
perquisites out of the
Judicial Expense Fund. There is a reluctance to spend
money out of the Judicial
Expense Fund on juries.
In Civil Cases juries are paid by litigant advanced court
fees, and Civil jury
cases are tried often. However, in felony and capital
criminal cases, few jury
trials are ever held; especially in Calcasieu Parish,
where the jails are
bursting at the seams with men awaiting a trial which
never seems to come.
The reluctance to try felony and capital criminal cases in
Calcasieu Parish has
gotten so bad that a new Criminal “Justice” practice has
developed, and that is
of defendants who plead guilty to get out of jail. One
defendant who had been
held in jail for several months on some worthless check
charges complained to
the Judge presiding at his arraignment that he had been
held in jail so long
unable to make bond and not even advised of the nature of
the charges against
him until that fateful day he was finally brought to court
from the parish
prison for his arraignment on the charges against him. The
presiding Judge
informed him from the Bench that all he had to do was to
plead guilty and he
would get out of jail that very day. The defendant, being
nobody’s fool, said,
“What a minute!I thought that if you plead guilty, you
went to jail, not the
other way around!”

And that, my friends, is not the way it’s s’posed
to be!

That's Not the Way It's S'posed to Be!, 12/21/06, by Hardy Parkerson, Atty. - Lake Charles, LA.

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