Original reporting · St. Landry Now Online Newspaper
What happened
State and parish officials gathered in downtown Opelousas on Friday morning to open the 27th Judicial District Office of Public Defenders on East Landry Street, St. Landry Now reported. Rémy Voisin Starns, whom Gov. Jeff Landry appointed to oversee a statewide indigent defender agency, said St. Landry now has one of 14 state-operated offices, according to the outlet. Antonio Birotte, who heads the parish’s indigent defender board, said the building was refurbished for about $350,000 and will give 17 attorneys room to consult with clients.
Until now, St. Landry Now reported, the parish’s defense attorneys worked out of private offices, including one lent by former longtime defense attorney Edward Lopez that had grown too small. Birotte told the outlet the district has seen a recent influx of crime and carries a civil and criminal docket nearly equal to that of the neighboring 15th Judicial District, which includes Lafayette.
Parish President Jessie Bellard said the state’s 2024 reform of indigent defense has helped the parish recoup about $800,000 a year because it now pays to house fewer people in facilities elsewhere in the state, according to St. Landry Now. Starns said the old parish-by-parish system ran on untenable funding. State Rep. Dustin Miller, who helped secure the funding, said change was needed statewide and pointed to caseloads of “several hundred cases” in which “clients are finding ways to contact their lawyers and complain about their attorneys not answering their calls.”
The 2024 law is still disputed. The Louisiana Illuminator has reported that it shifted authority over public defense from an oversight board to the governor-appointed state public defender. Starns told legislators the previous board interfered with his efforts to improve the system; critics, including some local chief defenders, called the plan a power grab and raised concerns about pay and job security, the Illuminator reported. St. Landry Now did not report caseloads per attorney or how quickly clients will now be seen.
Our reflection
One line from Rep. Miller stays with me: clients reaching out to complain that their lawyers were not answering. I have sat across from young men in detention who know that silence well. A pending case is a life on hold. Your mother takes off work to make the calls. After enough unanswered calls, a person starts to believe what the system never says out loud, that he has already been decided.
Mark tells of a blind man named Bartimaeus on the road outside Jericho, shouting for Jesus while the crowd told him to be quiet. Jesus stopped. He had the man called over and asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). That is the posture of a good defender. It is the posture of God. Scripture calls Jesus our advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1): a defense none of us could afford, given free by the One who took the sentence himself.
The hard part points at us. Plenty of us believe in a fair trial until the charge comes from the wrong side of town. We want patience and due process when it is our son, and we want it fast and harsh when it is somebody else’s. Jesus said what defiles a person comes from inside (Mark 7:20 to 23). Contempt for the accused is one of those inward things, and it sits in church pews as comfortably as anywhere.
So a building matters. Seventeen attorneys with real rooms to meet clients is a real improvement. A building does not return phone calls, though. People do. The test for this office is whether someone arrested in St. Landry meets a lawyer who knows his name early, before weeks in a cell turn into months. Whoever ends up running Louisiana’s system, the standard stays the same: the poor get a real defense. That gap between arrest and outcome is where We The Revolt works too, beside young people and their families, and beside them again when they come home. A person who is known is harder to throw away.
If you live in Acadiana, spend a morning in the gallery during an arraignment docket and notice who has a lawyer standing next to them. Wherever you live, find out how public defense is funded in your parish or county, and ask the people who write that budget. Start with the steps below.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.
Proverbs 31:8-9
Your move
Source: St. Landry Now Online Newspaper, “State Opens Parish Defenders Office”