Charlee Ladd, 4, thinks her daddy works in a restaurant.
That’s where she would visit him, for a few hours every month or so. She and her grandparents would make the 125-mile drive from their Kenner home to the big buildings surrounded by tall, sharp fences in Angola.
Story by
Richard A. Webster
– and –
Jonathan Bullington
The Times-Picayune
Inside, she would sit with her father in the visiting room: a cafeteria filled with tables and chairs and different types of food vendors, with lots of other children visiting their fathers, too.
This is the restaurant where Charlee thinks her daddy works. She thinks he lives there as well, said her grandmother, Lisa Ladd, and that’s the reason he stays there when they leave and why he hasn’t been home since she was born.
This is what Charlee believes. And her grandparents, who have cared for her since birth, allow her this fantasy. She will have to face the truth soon enough, they said.
Charlee’s father, Corey Ladd, is incarcerated at the Allen Correctional Center in Kinder. Before that, he was in Elayn Hunt in St. Gabriel and the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. That’s where Corey held his daughter for the first time when she was 2 years old.
Ladd, 31, was arrested for possession of half an ounce of marijuana in 2011. He had two prior felony convictions, one for possession of LSD in 2006 and the other for possession of one hydrocodone pill in 2004. For his third offense, Ladd was sentenced to 20 years in prison, later reduced to 17 years.
The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office says Ladd’s nearly two-decade prison term is appropriate: He was a drug dealer whose lifestyle posed a direct threat to his daughter and the community. Ladd’s parents, Lisa and Jelks Ladd, said their son was not a dealer and has never been charged with a violent crime. He was a young man with a drug problem who made some bad choices and deserves punishment. But not 17 years, they said.
Criminal District Court Judge Karen Herman is scheduled to reconsider Ladd’s prison term at a Feb. 23 hearing. If the current sentence stands, Ladd will be 45 years old when he is released. Charlee will be 20.
There are an estimated 94,000 children like Charlee in Louisiana who have experienced having a parent serve jail time. Nationally, there are an estimated 5.1 million.
Many of these children don’t have grandparents like the Ladds willing to take them in and raise them. That puts them at greater risk of entering the foster system, becoming homeless, or one day being incarcerated themselves.
The Department of Psychological Science at Central Connecticut State University reported that an estimated 33 percent of children of incarcerated parents would one day be jailed or imprisoned themselves; the British Journal of Criminology put the number at 43 percent.
But despite mounting evidence that a lock-’em-up approach perpetuates the cycle of crime and poverty, the New Orleans criminal justice system continues to jail low-income mothers and fathers who don’t have the resources to make bail. That can throw already struggling families into a downward spiral, even when the mother or father is eventually found not guilty. At another level, these parents often face lengthy sentences for nonviolent, drug-related offenses, typically under the repeat offender law.
State and city authorities in recent years have taken steps to soften marijuana possession penalties and push for the elimination of bail in New Orleans’ Municipal Court. But critics say more needs to be done, that Magistrate Court needs to stop jailing low-income nonviolent offenders because they can’t afford bail.
And the District Attorney’s Office should stop applying the habitual offender law to nonviolent offenders convicted of possessing small amounts of drugs, said the Louisiana 4th Circuit Court of Appeal in a ruling issued in the Ladd case.
The judges called the practice “draconian” and one that “shocks the conscience,” given Ladd’s “youthfulness, the lack of violent crime convictions, the small amount of drugs in his (previous) offenses, not the least of which is a third-time marijuana possession. The laws nationwide are changing, as is public perception.”
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The Ladds, both 52 years old now, took custody of Charlee shortly after she was born Jan. 23, 2012, which was nearly a month after her father was arrested.
Charlee’s mother, who was struggling with her own “issues,” asked the Ladds to take her daughter because she didn’t think she could provide her newborn with a safe, stable environment, Lisa said.
It wasn’t easy for the Ladds to suddenly become parents again. They both have significant health problems: Jelks has been disabled since 2002 with back problems and Lisa has lymphedema, a condition that causes the retention of fluids and tissue swelling. She nearly died of the disease several years ago.
Corey Ladd’s 4-year-old daughter, Charlee, plays in a park in Kenner. (Photo by Ted Jackson, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
Corey Ladd’s 4-year-old daughter, Charlee, plays in a park in Kenner. (Photo by Ted Jackson, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
On a Friday in November, Lisa and Jelks watched their granddaughter play on a slide at a Kenner playground.
“Her life isn’t terrible, but her life isn’t …”
“Complete,” Jelks said, finishing his wife’s sentence.
“That’s the word I’m looking for, ‘complete,'” Lisa said. “I don’t want to say ‘normal’ because what is normal? Really, this is kind of the new normal for a lot of people.
“The hardest part of all of this is she really doesn’t know Corey as her dad. She knows she has a mother and a dad, but what is that to her?”
Ladd was arrested for possession of half an ounce of marijuana in August 2011, his third marijuana possession offense. Four months later while out on bond, he was arrested for distribution of cocaine. That charge was later reduced to possession, but it’s still a felony.
The court set Corey’s bail for the cocaine arrest at $60,000, a price too steep for the family to pay. So he sat in jail for more than 18 months waiting for his trial. During that time, his daughter was born, took her first steps and uttered her first words, Lisa said.
The first time Corey saw Charlee was in court. He was in shackles and was not allowed to touch her.
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If Ladd had been arrested in Washington D.C., where the bail system was eliminated by city law in 1991, it is unlikely that he would have spent more than a few days in jail before his trial. Ninety percent of people who appear in court in the nation’s capital are released on their own recognizance, with the other 10 percent detained because they represent a significant public safety threat.
Of those who are released, records show, 90 percent appear for all of their court dates and 91 percent do not commit new crimes while waiting for trial. Of those arrested, 2 percent were accused of crimes of violence, according to the Pretrial Services Agency of the District of Columbia.
In New Orleans, the courts rely almost exclusively on financial bail. Eighty-four percent of people who appear in Magistrate Court are jailed unless they can make bail, which can range from a few hundred dollars to more than $25,000, according to the Vera Institute for Justice, a New York-based nonprofit.
Magistrate Court is where first appearances are held and bail is set by Judge Harry Cantrell and four commissioners appointed by the Criminal District Court judges.
And since 85 percent of the people who appear in Criminal District Court are indigent, meaning they earn less than $23,760 per year, it’s unlikely they can afford any amount of bail. That forces them to sit in jail until trial, which can take months — in Ladd’s case, more than 18 months.
“Even those who can post bond, there is a financial loss, and financial bail takes away from these children,” said Jon Wool, director of Vera’s New Orleans office. “It’s the families and poor communities who are paying for this system.”
Part of the thinking behind efforts to eliminate or reform the bail system is that nonviolent offenders who are also parents are better served during the pretrial period if they are at home with their families and children.
Even short periods of pretrial detention have proven to be a hardship for families, according to a 2016 Harvard Law School report. It can mean loss of employment, housing, child custody and access to health care.
Frank Palestina is director of New Orleans Pretrial Services, which provides the Magistrate Court with assessments on whether people represent a flight risk or public safety risk. He said that while he was working as a probation officer for nearly three decades, he saw firsthand how families suffer when a parent spent just a week behind bars, let alone months or years.
“We’d go out to the house for a regular visit, then someone goes to jail for a week, and at the next visit we’d see immediately the impact on the kids,” Palestina said. “I’ve seen deplorable living conditions, lack of food, lack of electricity, lack of phone. I’d see the immediate damage caused when the primary breadwinner” goes to jail.
More than half of all parents in state prisons provided the primary financial support for their children before they went to prison, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“It’s more than just mass incarceration or over-incarceration, it’s unnecessary incarceration,” Palestina said.
Charlee Ladd with her father, Corey Ladd, at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, La. (Ladd family photo)
Charlee Ladd with her father, Corey Ladd, at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, La. (Ladd family photo)
Pretrial detention can also impact a defendant’s case. Low-risk defendants who are detained for the entire pretrial period are five times more likely to be sentenced to jail, and nearly four times more likely to be sentenced to prison, when compared to low-risk defendants who are released before trial, according to the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, a private philanthropy that focuses in part on criminal justice reform.
The reasoning behind this is that people detained during the pretrial period are more likely to plead guilty just to get out of jail, said Matt Alsdorf, vice president of criminal justice with the Arnold Foundation. It is also harder for them to prepare a defense and coordinate with attorneys, he said.
“If you’re released pretrial you can demonstrate to a judge and jury that you’re remorseful by going to anger management or getting drug treatment or showing you can hold down a job for six months. There’s also the thinking that someone incarcerated shows up to court in shackles and a jumpsuit, and the impact that has on how the judge views him or her,” Alsdorf said.
“If you detain the wrong people before trial there are a number of lasting detrimental impacts that can arise.”
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The Landrieu administration, as part of its efforts to reduce the jail population, will be introducing a new pretrial risk assessment tool for Magistrate Court in the first quarter of the year. It will be overseen by the Louisiana Supreme Court and operated by Criminal District Court, in a way similar to how the drug court program works.
The goal of the risk assessment program is to decrease the number of people arrested for nonviolent offenses such as drug possession and theft who are detained during their pretrial period simply because they are too poor to pay bail, said Sarah Schirmer, the city’s criminal justice policy adviser.
The community is better served if these people are released while they wait for their trial date because it allows them to “maintain connections to housing, to their children,” Schirmer said. “They are at less risk of losing all those things that keep them stable.”
People appearing in Magistrate Court under the new program will be assessed based on their criminal history and record of making court appearances. Those considered to be low-risk will be eligible for immediate release or affordable bail amounts.
The city has made similar efforts in the past under a risk assessment program run by the Vera Institute of Justice, but Magistrate Court Judge Harry Cantrell and the four commissioners resisted.
Between January 2015 and September 2016, Vera assessed 2,800 people as presenting the lowest possible public safety and flight risk. This meant they should have been eligible to be released without having to pay any bail, or have bail set low enough that they could afford to pay and avoid pretrial detention.
The Magistrate commissioners, however, set bail amounts of at least $500 on more than 73 percent of those low-risk people, according to Vera. That includes 16 percent who had bail set between $10,000 and $25,000.
As a result, nearly 40 percent spent at least three days in jail, with many spending up to 35 days or more.
More than half of those people had children.
Ginger Parsons, the supervising social worker with the Orleans Public Defenders office, said someone’s status as a parent should be taken into consideration when the court is setting the bail amount.
“They’re still innocent until proven guilty. Why not let them continue the good things they’re doing, which is raising their children, working a job, all the things we know are things that will keep them from getting in trouble in the future?”
Cantrell, who oversees roughly 50 percent of all first appearances, refused to even look at the Vera risk assessment information, Palestina said.
Cantrell declined to be interviewed for this series, saying that it would violate the judicial canon of ethics. He did not respond when asked what specific laws or regulations he would be violating.
Chief Judge Laurie White said the judges of Criminal District Court, of which Magistrate Court is a part, instructed Cantrell to accept the Vera risk assessments.
“The problem is that we’ve got a district attorney that wants these people in jail and tells the community to be fearful, that police have arrested bad people and they’re trying to keep them in jail. And if a judge lets them out, then that judge has failed the public,” White said.
There probably will be less resistance to the new pretrial risk assessment program now that the Supreme Court is overseeing it, said the mayor’s Communications Director Tyronne Walker.
“When the Supreme Court speaks, generally people listen,” Walker said.
*****
After spending nearly two years in jail, Corey Ladd finally saw his case go to trial in May 2013. A jury found him guilty of marijuana possession, convicting him a third time, which made it a felony.
If Ladd had been sentenced under the state’s recently revised marijuana law, the most he would face as a third-time offender would be a $2,500 fine and two years in prison.
The old law, which was in effect when Ladd was prosecuted, called for a $5,000 fine and up to 20 years for a third marijuana offense. The court sentenced him to 10 years with credit for time served.
Once Ladd was convicted of a third felony, it opened up the opportunity for Cannizzaro’s office to prosecute him as a repeat offender, based on his two previous felony convictions.
The habitual offender law can more than double the length of sentences, which meant that Judge Karen Herman was required to give Ladd between 13 and 40 years. The court sentenced him to 20 years, which was reduced to 17 years on appeal.
“Mr. Ladd is serving a 17-year sentence not because he is an addict. He is serving that sentence because he is a drug dealer,” said Assistant District Attorney Christopher Bowman. “When making prosecutorial decisions, the district attorney certainly considers the threat that activities incumbent in the illegal distribution of narcotics pose to young children who are raised in the homes of drug dealers.”
Bowman added that Ladd made a mistake if he thought that prosecutors would be more permissive given the “City Council’s recent legislative efforts to decriminalize marijuana as well as their classification of the district attorney as a ‘bad actor’ for prosecuting too many criminal defendants.”
false
Children shouldn’t be punished for a parent’s mistakes: Editorial
We have abandoned children to fend for themselves and have created a pipeline to prison and poverty.
Ladd’s public defender, Kenneth Hardin, said it is absurd to paint his client as a drug dealer. His only intent-to-distribute conviction happened 10 years ago and it involved marijuana, while the 2011 distribution of cocaine charge was dropped to possession, Hardin said. Ladd pleaded guilty to cocaine possession and received a 2-year sentence, unwilling to take his chances at trial as he was facing 20 years to life following his marijuana conviction, Hardin said.
The Louisiana Appellate Project appealed Ladd’s 17-year sentence, prompting the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to issue an April 13, 2016, opinion ordering Herman to reconsider Ladd’s prison term. Judges James McKay, Daniel Dysart and Madeleine Landrieu wrote that 17 years “shocks the conscience,” given Ladd’s “youthfulness, the lack of violent crime convictions, the small amount of drugs in his (previous) offenses, not the least of which is a third time marijuana possession. The laws nationwide are changing, as is public perception.”
The court also criticized the district attorney for using the habitual offender statute on Ladd, calling it a “draconian measure” that “dramatically limits judges’ ability to consider the human element and the lifetime impact of harsh sentences on both defendants and their families, not to mention the state’s economic interest.”
“Louisiana has some of the harshest sentencing statutes in these United States. Yet, this state also has one of the highest rates of incarceration, crime rate and recidivism,” the judges wrote. “It would appear that the purpose of the habitual offender statutes to deter crime is not working and the state’s finances are being drained by the excessive incarcerations, particularly those for nonviolent crimes.”
Cannizzaro’s office filed a writ with the Louisiana Supreme Court challenging the 4th Circuit’s ruling.
*****
Charlee threw her doll down a slide at the Kenner playground in November, shouting to her grandparents to watch her go down after it.
“Watch over here. Watch over here. Over here,” she insisted.
“Occasionally she’ll call us Mom and Dad but we correct her,” Lisa Ladd said as she watched Charlee. “I feel sad for her because she doesn’t have that. And that’s my thing with Corey. By the time he gets out he’s missed all of this. He’s missed the excitement of her seeing Santa Claus. This is her first Christmas knowing Christmas, really. I would love for him to see that.”
Many children don’t have family members ready to step in when their parents are incarcerated. If it weren’t for Charlee’s grandparents, she might have ended up in state custody, working her way through group homes and foster parents.
About 20 percent of children entering the child welfare system have an incarcerated parent, according to the National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated at Rutgers University. In addition, 39 percent of formerly incarcerated parents lose custody of their children or have their parental rights terminated, according to a 2015 report by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an Oakland-based nonprofit focused on reducing prison populations.
Children who don’t have reliable family members to care for them are often looking for someone to replace their incarcerated parent; this puts them at greater risk of being abused, whether it’s in a foster home or the home of a distant relative, said Juvenile Court Judge Ernestine Gray.
“It’s a place where people are seeking children so they can use and abuse them sexually,” Gray said. “And unfortunately (the children) don’t have the skills or the wherewithal to see through all that. For them, at that moment, they are looking for someone to say, ‘I care,’ and those people say ‘I care’ when they really don’t.”
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Corey Ladd’s lawyer, Hardin, said Judge Herman has a rare opportunity to correct a systemic injustice when she reconsiders Ladd’s sentence at the Feb. 23 hearing.
“This gives her a chance to be the hero and say, ‘You know what? This is not right. He is an example of over-incarceration and of the abuse of discretion by the DA’s office and I’m not going to stand for it.’
“I have another client, he was in the Navy, has five kids, no arrests for violence. All he had was priors for drugs. They gave him 10 years. When you look at the whole war on drugs that Mr. Cannizzaro has declared, all the people we’ve been throwing in jail, do we feel any safer? Are these families better off?”
Lisa Ladd emphasized that she believes her son should have been punished for his crimes. But justice won’t be served, and neither will the needs of their family or the greater interests of the city, she said, if the court upholds his 17-year sentence. All it will accomplish is to condemn a 5-year-old girl to a childhood without her father.
“He’s done five years. That’s enough. Let’s get this done and over with, and bring him home,” Lisa said. “He’s got to get to know Charlee as his daughter and she’s got to get to know him as her dad. They’ve got to get that bond and relationship that he’s lost five years of.
“Everybody asks how this has affected her. She doesn’t know it’s affected her. But she will know later in life, if this continues to go on.”