NEW ORLEANS — The New Orleans District Attorney's Office is getting help from an unexpected place: Morris Bart's Lawfirm.
Orleans Parish DA Jason Williams outlined the new partnership with Morris Bart and his team Tuesday, calling it an out-of-the-box solution for an unprecedented problem.
“When you’re the murder capitol of the world, you have to start thinking differently," Williams said. "You have to start thinking outside of the box to combat this crime surge and that is what we’re doing."
New Orleans had the highest murder rate in the United States in 2022, not the world, but Williams made the point that his office has been overwhelmed by cases due to the surge in violent crime over the past three years.
According to Williams, the rise in crime, backlog of cases from COVID-19 lockdown and cases being retried after non-unanimous juries were declared unconstitutional was too much for his staff to handle.
"We have an unparalleled amount of work coming into this building and we simply need more women and men to get through this," Williams said. "Morris Bart and his team of lawyers head that clarion call for help."
According to the DA, Bart and a team of six lawyers have been volunteering as ADAs supporting the offices' screening division. Those volunteer ADAs are specifically looking into firearm cases and not into what Williams called "victim crimes."
Specifically, Williams said that the volunteer ADAs have been working on cases that require them to watch hours of body cam footage in order to fully screen a case.
"When we do this work for the DA's office, we are doing it as fully-commissioned ADAs," Bart said. "We have done the heavy lifting to learn how to screen these cases as ADAs, not as civil attorneys."
Bart said that the volunteer ADAs are just that — volunteers — and that they are not being paid by the city, state or anyone else to do this work.
"I wanted to step up," Bart said. "I wanted to do something meaningful to help New Orleans, the city I love."
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