The agony of losing someone close to violent crime is unimaginable. But it becomes even worse when, after an arrest is made, the justice system is slow, halting and often unpredictable.
The loved ones of hundreds of victims in two of the state’s biggest court systems, New Orleans and East Baton Rouge, know it all too well. Repeatedly, their quests for closure through the criminal justice system have faced lengthy delays, repeated continuances and trials scheduled and then postponed. It’s led many to despair.
That’s the conclusion of an exhaustive analysis of the justice systems in those two parishes by this newspaper’s Jillian Kramer and Jeff Adelson. Their study, which looked at years of homicide case data, found that, in both places, murder cases move far slower than what experts recommend and similar cases in other cities with a high number of murders…