If Abraham Lincoln, the president of a fractured country at war with itself, didn't have the constitutional authority to declare martial law, it can be safely assumed that a mayor or a police chief or captain, even in post-levee failure New Orleans, also lacked that authority.
So it's hard to know what the mayor, Ray Nagin, was saying when he told a journalist, "I've already called for martial law in New Orleans," as was recently rebroadcast in PBS's stunning "Law and Disorder" documentary on Frontline. If indeed any police officers even heard this order, they were obviously in no position to research the constitutionality of the claim at the law library of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Instead, they would have understood that the mayor was telling the world that he had lost the city to "insurgents" and "mobs" and that they needed to take it back without regard for the normal rules.
In the defining moment of crisis, when panic and passion were already so likely to overcome judgment, it appears that those in charge illegally threw out the rule of law. That they might have panicked and believed the rumors and very worst exaggerations about the citizens of our city is no excuse. The problem with the Law of Mars is that it easily confuses the blood of the guilty with the blood of innocents.
Via J Stratton on Flickr, one of my favorite post-K photos shows a declaration of Martian Law here.
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