NEW ORLEANS — One of New Orleans' most heart-wrenching murders over the past few years was the fatal stabbing of physical therapist, Congo Square drummer and community fixture Portia Pollock. Career criminal Bryan Andry is now serving 35 years in prison for manslaughter after he admitted stabbing the 60-year-old Pollock during a carjacking near her 7th Ward home.
In that June 2021 case, a simple clerical oversight at New Orleans Criminal Court led to Andry being released from jail without a court-ordered electronic ankle monitor after he after he posted bail following a previous armed robbery arrest.
Despite the grief over Pollock’s killing and outcry over the court’s mistake, an investigation by WWL-TV shows that the slip-up continues to plague the courthouse at Tulane and Broad, sometimes putting violent crime victims at risk.
“That should have been the clarion call to tighten up this system,” said New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams.
Williams said his office regularly hears from victims of violence, many of them in domestic abuse cases, after they are threatened by their alleged attackers who weren’t fitted with court-mandated ankle monitors.
“If a judge makes an order that someone's supposed to be on an ankle monitor then nothing else should happen with that defendant until the ankle monitor is put on,” Williams said.
Instead, Williams said his victim assistance specialist keeps getting calls from frightened victims saying they are being re-victimized.
“She gets calls from domestic violence survivors who say, ‘Wait a second. He's on my block. He's not supposed to be here. And there is no ankle monitor.’ ”
Take the case of Lance Bennett.
The 35-year-old is accused of repeatedly punching a dating partner, shattering her eye socket and sending her to the hospital, a police report shows. The report states that the victim and his family repeatedly threatened to kill her.
Stay-away orders with electronic monitoring can provide a safeguard against more violence, especially in volatile cases of domestic abuse.
That was ordered for Bennett.
Court records show that after he was booked with second-degree battery, a magistrate commissioner set his bail at $40,000 with monitoring. For extra protection, the commissioner ordered a key fob for the victim that sounds an alarm if the defendant comes anywhere nearby.
Bennett bailed out of jail, but without the bracelet.
“It's not too much to ask. It's just belts and suspenders to hopefully keep someone alive, to keep someone protected,” Williams said.
Police and prosecutors learned about the mistake in Bennett’s case when they received a complaint that he returned to her house.
“This is human error. This is sloppy work,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the non-profit criminal justice watchdog group, the Metropolitan Crime Commission. “We know that the people who are most likely to commit an offense have been recently arrested for an offense.”
The paper trail of court records in Bennett's case shows that while the ankle monitor order was issued verbally in court, it never made it onto the bail order received by the jail. The order is noted in the so-called “docket master,” a short-hand summary of official court proceedings prepared by the court’s minute clerks.
Spokesperson for New Orleans Criminal Court, Judicial Administrator Rob Kazik, said the sheriff's office is supposed to go by the docket master.
But other officials in the criminal justice system, citing state law, disagreed. They say the bail order is the official document that has always been used by the sheriff's office, not the docket master.
“It (the docket master) is not an official court order,” Williams said. “It is a repository of information. And there is nothing in the code that tells someone to refer to docket master.”
“The bail order is the controlling document, not the docket master,” Goyeneche said.
In an emailed statement, Sheriff Susan Hutson, herself a lawyer, wrote, “We do not deviate from what is written on the court order. We also do not follow what is in docket master as that is not a binding legal document.”
Williams added, “Lawyers have been killing trees for a number of years. Documentation. Memorializing things. Court orders. These things have to be done in writing to be formal.”
Based on his ex-girlfriend’s complaint, Bennett was re-arrested and booked with violating a protective order. The electronic monitoring company, Assured Supervision Accountability Program, or ASAP, helped the NOPD with the arrest.
But Bennett's case is far from the only one to fall through the cracks. In August, James Cordier, 45, was arrested for domestic abuse battery, accused of pushing a girlfriend into a wall, then throwing her to the ground, according to a police report.
A magistrate commissioner ordered Cordier into electronic monitoring as part of his $10,000 bail, court records show. The monitoring system worked when Cordier came to the woman's house a week later. He was promptly arrested and booked with violation of a protective order.
But when Cordier went to magistrate court on the new charge, the commissioner did not re-order the ankle bracelet. He posted bail and left jail without one, records show.
“Right now it's hit or miss. And something that's hit or miss is not a system,” Williams said. “This needs to be fixed. And it needed to be fixed months ago. And it's fixable.”
Others in the criminal justice system seemed to agree, even the city’s new Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick.
“We have the tracking of the GPS of those ankle bracelets,” Kirkpatrick said in an exclusive WWL-TV interview. “That's why it must be a full-court press from all different disciplines and law enforcement.”
Matt Dennis, owner of ASAP, the city's predominant monitoring company, said he's been trying to get all the agencies in the criminal justice system on the same page for months.
“The only thing standing in our way is no one wants to sit down as a group,” Dennis said. “This is a simple fix.”
Dennis said his company will participate in any meeting of the minds to hammer out a coordinated system for the technology.
Especially if that system can prevent another Portia Pollock.
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