Inside the ‘dysfunction’ at Baton Rouge’s public defender office: ‘It’s down to the bones’

In the months before Lisa Parker was ousted as Baton Rouge’s chief public defender, her office was roiled by investigations, accusations of favoritism and nepotism, severe tensions with state leadership and her own allegations she had suffered racial and gender discrimination, documents show.

Amid the turmoil, some in Baton Rouge’s criminal justice community fear the quality of public defense for the parish’s poorest defendants has suffered. And while the East Baton Rouge Office of the Public Defender prepares for the second time in two years to change leadership, the future remains uncertain for the largest criminal defense firm in the parish. 

“We are getting ready to go into these very uncharted waters, and all of the chaos is not good for the system, but it’s most especially not good for the clients,” said the Rev. Alexis Anderson, a community activist and member of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition.

As the dust has settled in the week since the Louisiana Public Defender Board declined to renew Parker’s contract, it is unclear when the sense of turmoil that has long pervaded the office will subside. 

“The sooner that they make a decision to put someone in that spot to try and get it back together, the better off they’re going to be,” said Rep. C. Denise Marcelle, a Baton Rouge Democrat. “Because right now, people don’t know what’s going on.”

‘An unequal partner’

Parker, 53, stepped into the district defender role for one of the largest jurisdictions in the state in July 2021 following the departure of Chief Public Defender Michael Mitchell, who led the office for close to three decades. 

Flozell Daniels, whose term on the state public defender board that appointed Parker ended in May, argues her hiring was problematic from the start. He characterized the search to replace Mitchell as “politically gamed by the state public defender and others on the board to look not at who was best qualified, but instead to give someone who was more likely to be responsive to and pay fealty to the state public defender” and a “spare” model of public defense that saves money but sacrifices clients. 

State Public Defender Rémy Starns, who has offered support for Parker but later criticized her office’s management, said the idea that he politically manipulated the board was “completely false.” 

“The board appointed Lisa Parker,” Starns said. “At the time, the board’s composition was such that it created this situation.”

He also categorically denied Daniels’ summation of how he views public defense, emphasizing his commitment to robust representation. 

Public defender board members who were active during Parker’s tenure did not return an interview request, apart from Daniels. Parker also did not return a request for comment.

In the months after her arrival, Parker’s office began to hemorrhage attorneys and support staff, some of whom accused Parker of a toxic leadership style. Ten months in, almost half of the office’s attorneys had quit. Parker’s office did not return a request for the latest numbers.

Citing that turnover, Marcelle, the state lawmaker, wrote to state leaders questioning Parker’s management, later saying she should be fired. Judges publicly and privately shared concerns about Parker’s leadership negatively impacting court.  

“There is a lot to be said, quite frankly, about not being able to staff your office appropriately. An unequal partner is not a vigorous defense,” Anderson said. “Due process is supposed to be the thing that happens when all the sides are even. When they’re not even, you run the table because you can.”

The investigations

Eventually, the state public defender board intervened. Some members requested a report on Parker’s office in the months before her contract was up for renewal. Starns also requested a legislative audit of her district.

The final board report, presented in a public meeting in March, showed employees continuing to leave the office nearly two years into Parker’s leadership and that court officials were concerned about the dearth of attorneys.

It said Parker did not seem to understand the importance of fines and fees to fund the office, resisted a financial auditor’s attempts to address internal problems and was hostile toward the state office. State staff also questioned her office’s handling of a more than $167,000 settlement involving former employees, which the office failed to pay on time; Parker said she had not been made aware of it.

Another report by state staff for a site visit found that only 23 people out of a staff of more than 80 employees completed a survey, apparently out of concerns over confidentiality. For the interview portion, staff were only able to speak to nine people — among them, one of Parker’s relatives and her own attorney, they later found.

“Nepotism and favoritism have also been alleged,” the report says.

Around the same time that she learned of the site visit, Parker filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint alleging racial and gender discrimination from the board and Starns, arguing she had been targeted along with other female district defenders while trying to do her job. 

Total ‘dysfunction’

The current state of the public defender office “leaves many of the clients in a bad predicament,” according to Marcelle. As lawyers leave, their cases fall to the remaining attorneys, increasing the workload.  

One of the state reports illuminates some of the office’s challenges with fewer attorneys.

State staff found what “appeared to be the bare minimum” entered into a database that oversees cases for two attorneys at the office, with no notes regarding jail visits, initial interviews or statements. 

An aggravated kidnapping case was not entered into the database, although it had been open for more than six months. In one second-degree murder case, no information had been added since May 2022 — a full year before the site visit. Another second-degree murder case hadn’t been updated since August.

“What people are getting right now as a matter of public defense in Baton Rouge is not matching the best practice standards,” Daniels said. “It’s not matching the golden rule approach of what would you want or need for you or your loved one, and it’s not matching what other high-performing districts are doing.”

Anderson worries about clients slipping through the cracks — sitting in jail as their cases are repeatedly continued, suffering from mental health issues, taking plea deals just to get home. She referred to the office as “dysfunctional, but critically necessary.”

“Whatever happens in that office, it is not a small thing,” she said. “It is a tsunami as to what kind of justice we have in this parish. To me, that is why it has got to be built up, it’s got to be strong — but it’s also got to be an effective advocate.”

Systemic problems

While Parker has drawn much of the focus and blame for the office’s woes in recent years, Starns, the State Public Defender, argues some of the challenges facing the Baton Rouge office predate her, such as running an office that is not adequately funded — a concern many public defense leaders across the state have expressed. 

Public defenders’ offices are funded mostly through fees paid in the court system. The Baton Rouge district has seen its annual collection of conviction user fees decrease by more than $1.6 million since 2016, state public defense staff reported.

“I’m looking forward to resolving the challenges that we’ve had and having a more stable situation in the 19th,” Starns said. “We know it’s going to involve more resources there and we’re going to get that under control.”

Starns said he was not concerned with employees leaving the office for the first few months of Parker’s tenure — that’s to be expected when there is a period of transition, he said. The problem, he said, is that the office has suffered from a deficit of attorneys in the past two years.

“We need to reimagine what the office looks like going forward,” Starns said. “We have good lawyers in the 19th, and they do good work. We just need more of them. We need to pay them better. We need to have a more stable environment there. Hopefully, with new leadership in the 19th, we can have that.”

He declined to comment specifically on Parker’s tenure, instead referring to the state staff report from March.

Building back 

Parker’s contract ends on June 30, leaving an opening for an interim chief and, eventually, a full-time district defender replacement. 

Marcelle, who has expressed frustration the board did not remove Parker sooner, said she thinks leadership should pull Parker from the office before her contract ends, pay her severance and start fresh as soon as possible.

“It’s down to the bones in there,” Marcelle said. “I kept saying, the longer y’all wait, the worse it’s going to be.” 

Attorneys need to be hired — and it won’t be a quick turnaround, according to Daniels.

“It takes years to replace those people and get the same performance,” he said. “It takes years.”

For her part, Anderson worries that the office could end up in even worse shape when all is said and done — that history could repeat itself while the office is at its lowest. She also wonders about the people who need legal representation, and what an office in flux means to them.

“There’s a whole lot of tables that the public defender’s office needs to be sitting at from a very strong defensive model, and all that’s not going to stop while this office gets reconstituted,” she said. “What happens to the clients?”