Whose Justice System Is It Anyway? Participatory defense helps ordinary citizens have a greater say in court outcomes.

• Author: Law, Victoria

IT BEGAN AS an ordinary school night in New Orleans. Second grade teacher Nziki Wiltz was grading math papers when her daughter burst in, clutching her phone. On the screen blared the headline from The Times-Picayune: "Six charged in racketeering indictment, accused of running drug trafficking enterprise." Wiltz was one of those six.

"When she showed me the phone, my whole life changed," Wiltz recalled of that night in January 2019. Her teenage son had been in trouble with the police, but she never imagined that his actions would lead to her own entanglement in the legal system.

She was wrong. The next morning, the single mother of five learned that she had lost her job and that she and her son, who had recently turned eighteen, were being charged in connection with an alleged illegal narcotics trafficking operation.

Wiltz's court-appointed lawyer "was talking all sorts of lawyer-talk that I couldn't understand," she recounts in an interview. She didn't know where to turn for help. Even friends and family members avoided her, convinced she was a criminal. Wiltz began wondering if she had unwittingly done something wrong and contemplated pleading guilty in exchange for a ten-year sentence, even though imprisonment would tear her family apart, sending her children into the foster care system. "I never touched a gun or drugs in my life, but they convinced me that I might have," she says.

Then an acquaintance told her about Participatory Defense NOLA.

Participatory defense is a community organizing model in which people facing charges, and their loved ones, learn how to participate in their own defense. The model began in San Jose, California, in 2007 and has since spread across the United States, where plea bargains make up more than 90 percent of criminal convictions and prison sentences. Across the nation, nearly three dozen grassroots groups have used a participatory defense model to push for reduced prison time or even a dismissal of charges.

"The only way to get sustainable, positive change is to create a social movement," says Janet Moore, a University of Cincinnati law professor and former public defense attorney, who has co-written about participatory defense. The model enables individuals to draw on the collective wisdom of others who have had experience with the court system. "You're being transformed from someone who's isolated, scared, and confused to [someone] wrapped up in a powerful emotional support that comes with wisdom and the power to make change happen."

Moore says participatory defense can allow individual defendants to demand better representation instead of accepting the first plea offer. When such demands are made repeatedly, they change the expectations for and quality of their legal representation. Moore calls it "a grassroots constitutionalism."

According to the most recent data, Louisiana in 2018 had the nation's highest incarceration rate, locking up 695 of every 100,000 state residents. The same Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that the incarceration rate nationally was 1.8 times higher for Black women, compared to white women, and 5.8 times higher for Black men than for white men.

In Louisiana, Black people comprise one-third of the state's population, and two-thirds of its prison population.

In New Orleans, 85 percent of defendants are represented by the public defenders' office, which has been chronically underfunded for years. The attorneys appointed to defendants, including Wiltz, often have heavy caseloads and little...