Hurricane Katrina helped change New Orleans' public defender system

Published August 6, 2025 at 4:21 PM EDT

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Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams (left) at his office in New Orleans, Meghan Garvey, the only full-time public defense attorney in New Orleans who was there in the days just after Hurricane Katrina and Danny Engelberg, head of the Orleans Public Defenders.

In 2006, Ari Shapiro reported on how Hurricane Katrina made an already broken public defender system in New Orleans worse. The court system collapsed in the aftermath of the storm.

Katrina caused horrific destruction in New Orleans. It threw incarcerated people into a sort of purgatory - some were lost in prisons for more than a year.

But the storm also cleared the way for changes that the city's public defender system had needed for decades.

Two decades later, Shapiro returns to New Orleans and finds a system vastly improved.

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