Eddie Jordan spins; City council does diddley

Eddie Jordan announced a bunch of meaningless changes in his office; some of which should have taken place years ago -- some didn't need to happen at all.  Nothing addresses the cancer of incompetence that permeates everything he touches.

In other news, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell says that she, Stacy Head, and Arnie Fielgood are as useless as ever. 

Tacitly, Oliver, Jimmy Carter, and the other Cynthia throw all of their support behind Eddie Jordan, because their silence evidently shows that they think he's doing a wonderful job.

Say what you will, but Shelley is the only one on the council with huevos.

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I edited the first line to state that some changes (eliminating homicide) didn't need to take place at all.

Here's more from the T-P.

Comments

[Kelly]

I don't understand Jordan's staff changes. He has disbanded his homicide unit and thrown all of the cases over to the new, now understaffed violent offenders unit.

That being said, Midura acted rashly in her letter asking for Jordan's resignation. The NOPD handed the DA's office an unwinable case with the only evidence being an eyewitness who is a known drug user and has changed her story so many times that the prosecution is afraid to put her on the stand. The NOPD was not able to produce any additional physical evidence nor witnesses to support Anderson's arrest. Finally the lead detective on the case quit and was never replaced.

A conviction cannot take place unless all city agencies are working together. Prosecutors are not miracle workers. When they are handed a bad case, they have no other choice than to dismiss especially when the NOPD refuses to help until the cameras appear.

[ashley]

This is more than one case, Kelly. I think that Midura's reaction was a result of several nolle prosequi actions by Jordan, with Shavers (rather than the gang of 5) being the straw breaking the camel's back.

[Nora]

Kelly,
Jordan ruined his own case when he called his eyewitness unreliable and said she was changing her story. According to the eyewitness she was never contacted, has never waivered in wanting to testify and has not changed her story. What you heard was Eddie trying to cover his ass. Please dont drink the kool aid that Jordan is passing out.

[Kelly]

I am not a fan of Jordan but I know people who were working on the case -- people that I trust and who work hard for this city.

I myself was angered by the Shavers case but when the NOPD builds a case on one witness' testimony, it is hard for the prosecution to carry out a trial. I don't know what the solution is but I don't like to see Jordan play the fall guy for an entire faulty system. And while I am a supporter of Midura, I do not like the way that the City Council has been dictating to the D.A. how his office should be run, especially in regards to the Violent Offenders Unit.

[bullet]

Whatever. Carry out the trial, anyway. Lose, if that's the only option. Don't just give up.

Jordan's never been anything but a poser looking for an easy score. Too bad it didn't turn out that way.

[G]

The witness was a known drug user who changed her story on countless occasions. Prosecutors have an ethical obligation to refuse to call witnesses who they know to be testifying falsely. What Letten didn't say was that the reason the witness protection thing "didn't work out" was because the woman and her boyfriend were evicted for selling drugs. The ex post facto concern now shown by NOPD officials is disingenuous. Why didn't NOPD find a detective to follow up on the case after the lead detective left? Why didn't NOPD heed the requests to find the witness? Why did they not develop a better case to present to the grand jury initially? Where were these officials and councilmembers through all of the pretrial hearings? Where was Ray Nagin? Imagine asking 12 citizens to kill another man based solely on the incredible testimony of a crackhead. The case was indicted to prevent Anderson from being released on 701. The hope was that NOPD develop a better case before trial. I'm astounded by people who know nothing about how the criminal justice system operates and about the facts of a given case who dare to adamantly make erroneous conclusions.

[ashley]

G, (who has the same IP as Kelly), was there *NO* physical evidence? NONE?

[Nora]

I do not see anyone making erroneous conclusions here. The fact is, Jordan could have picked up the phone and said get me this witness and the NOPD proved they were capable of doing that within hours. Regardless whether the witness is a crack head or not, when Jordan announced on TV that she was unreliable he destroyed any credibility she may have had. Is the NOPD faultless in this, of course not, we all know better. But the fact is, Eddie is the one who dropped the ball on the Anderson case and Shavers case and he has no one to blame except himself.
And someone needs to dictate to him how to run his office because apparently he has no freakin clue.

[Carmen]

No more apologists for Jordan. Citizens don't care about the DA's "conviction rate" of ANY department (so don't bother doing an internal shuffle) because it's based on dropping every case before trial. Don't try to shift blame to the NOPD either. We'll tackle them separately. Jordan must go. His staff must go. The cronyism protecting him and them must go.

In this town, a jury of 12 peers is likely to include drug users anyway, so who's to say between a drug user/seller and a murderer the drug user's testimony isn't credible? That's not an open-ended question: the debate is over. Citizens are angry.

[Anon]

I just graduated law school, and for a while I was seriously considering becoming an ADA. From what I hear, though, Jordan regularly orders his attorneys to act unethically, and as a result few firms will hire anybody who has worked for him.

This is a serious problem.

[Schroeder]

If we eliminated all drug users as witnesses, we'd get appallingly few murder prosecutions -- er ... appallingly fewer than we do now. Reality is that most defendants witness a crime because they were doing something they shouldn't have been doing. What was the defendant in the Anderson case doing out there at 4:00 AM? Looking for her boyfriend? Really? It doesn't matter. She claims to have witnessed the event. The weight of other evidence should be used to try the case -- win or lose -- but don't just drop the case on the lame excuse that the witness couldn't be found. *That* is fundamentally the problem. It seems to be an acceptable office procedure to drop cases because prosecutors under Eddie Jordan't authority are too friggin' lazy to pick up the phone. And the fact that such behavior appears to be acceptable to Jordan is the reason the witless jordan needs to forced out of office.

I too am a Shelley backer. She may not know the answers off the top of her head, but by the time she's finished with an issue, she comes around to thinking the way most of us do, and then she actually *does something*!

[Southern Leftist]

Midura did not call for Jordan's resignation based on one case. She called for it based on a pattern of mismanagement and the resulting loss of public confidence required for the DA to function effectively. She cited the theory of the consent of the governed, an underlying theory that forms the basis of our democracy, and said he had failed that test. The Central City and Shavers cases were the straws that broke the camel's back.

The Central City case does have some problems. But the reason we were given by the DA for dropping charges was inability to find the witness, not the lack of other evidence or the lack of credibility for the "missing" witness. If he dropped the case because the witness is unreliable, then he dug his own grave by giving the public a different reason for dropping the case.

[Will]

2006 saw 162 murders in Orleans Parish, and exactly ONE conviction.

162 and 1.

How can anyone seriously question Jordan's incompetence?

[Aaron]

Jordan is used to being a federal prosecutor, and federal prosecutors almost never lose. The problem with that mindset is that federal prosecutors take less than a tenth the number of cases the Orleans Parish DA takes, and the cases they DO take are so exhaustively investigated before they even indict someone they are virtually guaranteed a conviction. With Jordan, he looks at a high profile case he might not win and decides it would be better to dismiss charges than lose it in the courts. It's a mindset you CANNOT HAVE in Orleans Parish; it is morally wrong and he is doing every constituent who put him in office a great disservice. He needs to resign or at least let someone else steer the ship until his tenure is up.