A clerk of the court for the 5th Circuit of Louisiana revealed that the court refused to even read prisoners' appeals in direct violation of the law.
This might never have come out but for a suicide note written by staff director for the court Jerrold Peterson, who sent it to every judge, the judicial review board, and the New Orleans Times Picayune.
On a warm Monday morning in May 2007, as the secretaries and clerks began filing through the glass doors of the Louisiana 5th Circuit Court of Appeal, staff director Jerrold Peterson was inside his office with a 9 mm Beretta pistol. A letter he had written to the court’s eight judges was making its way to the chambers of Chief Judge Edward Dufresne Jr. Versions of that letter were en route to the Judiciary Commission, the panel responsible for investigating allegations of judicial misconduct, and to the Times-Picayune, the state’s most influential paper.
Peterson hoped the letter would unleash a massive scandal — one that he had helped perpetuate for more than a decade. Fifty-five years old, Peterson had long been a fixture at the courthouse, and he reminded the judges that he had kept their secrets, clearing contempt charges against their friends and fixing traffic tickets whenever they asked. But he focused his rage on one secret in particular: their handling of appeals sent to the court by prisoners who claimed they’d been unjustly convicted.
Louisiana requires that a panel of three judges review all such petitions — known as pro se petitions, a Latin phrase that means “for oneself.” But Peterson wrote that the judges had instructed him to ignore the law and dispose of the appeals on his own. Dufresne, he explained, signed off on the documents “without so much as a glance.”
The implications were staggering. Over 12 years, the 5th Circuit, which is responsible for reviewing challenges from trial courts in four parishes, had disregarded at least 5,000 pro se petitions from Louisiana prisoners, according to the court’s records. The inmates ranged from people convicted of murder to nonviolent offenders sent away for life. Many had limited education and struggled to present their arguments in the language of the courts. If Peterson’s accusations were true, none of the judges had ever laid eyes on their claims.
Peterson, who was known to keep his door open, didn’t answer the business services manager when she came by to tell him that Dufresne wanted to see him. The chief judge instructed her to have the head of security unlock the door. As he slid in his passkey, the sound of a gunshot echoed through the building.
A police detective arrived at the courthouse and found Peterson at his desk, slumped to one side, the Beretta still clutched in his right hand. The rest of the office, the detective wrote in his incident report, “seemed to be void of any further evidence.” When the officer searched the room a second time “for a final attempt to locate a possible suicide note,” Dufresne joined him. The chief judge didn’t mention that he had already read Peterson’s suicide letter. The detective, though, sensed something was amiss. In his report, he noted that Dufresne “appeared to be evasive.”
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During a monthly meeting of the 5th Circuit’s judges in 1994, he proposed changing how the court handled criminal pro se petitions, also known as writs. The minutes note the proposal but only in passing; it’s sandwiched between a lengthy debate over plans to upgrade the court’s computer system and a discussion about renting a new office copier. Dufresne’s plan is described in two sentences: A three-judge panel would no longer rule on the petitions unless they were “special or unusual”; instead, Dufresne would oversee them himself.
“Administratively, it got somewhat cumbersome to have to select three-judge panels for every writ, because you’d get hundreds of them,” said Bryan Pedeaux, who was Dufresne’s longtime law clerk. “So Dufresne said, ‘Let’s see if we can somehow streamline the situation.’”
At the time, the 5th Circuit had the lowest caseload — and the lowest number of pro se petitions — of the state’s five appellate courts. In the year preceding the meeting, it reported 235 criminal pro se petitions, fewer than one-tenth of the statewide total. The 4th Circuit, which includes New Orleans, reported 1,031.
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To create the appearance of a proper review, former staffers said Dufresne formed a “pro se committee,” which included three judges who agreed to lend their names to Peterson’s rulings. Whenever a judge on the committee retired, Dufresne appointed someone new. The nature of the pro se committee was an open secret at the courthouse. “I knew what they were doing, and I knew it was unconstitutional,” said one former clerk. “Everyone knew about it.”
In Louisiana, courts charge prisoners a fee for petitions — generally $50. Those costs are usually paid by parishes in which the defendants are convicted. By 1999, the 5th Circuit was charging $300. The money, paid by taxpayers, flowed into the 5th Circuit’s discretionary fund. In a period when the state’s criminal justice system was close to financial collapse, with some public defenders representing as many as 400 people at a time, records show that the 5th Circuit collected at least $1.7 million for the pro se petitions its judges did not read. Former 5th Circuit employees told me the judges spent the money on office furnishings, travel allowances — even for retired judges — and other perks the state didn’t cover. When asked about the fund’s expenditures, the 5th Circuit said it keeps financial records for only three years and could not provide an accounting.
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None of the judges involved in the episode was disciplined. A few months after Peterson’s suicide, the 5th Circuit quietly adopted a new policy for handling pro se petitions: A panel of three randomly selected judges would now review them, as Louisiana law required. No one, however, alerted the men and women whose petitions the court had improperly rejected and who were in prisons across the state.
They did this for years.
That these individuals are still members of the state bar, and in many cases still judges, is an abomination, even by the standards of the Louisiana justice system.
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