In other words, he skipped bail

You have to admit it has a certain elegance to it. 

The Louisiana Supreme Court set up new rules this year to quell public criticism over its secretive system for disciplining judges accused of misconduct.

But the first judge to face public charges under those attempts at transparency, Orleans Parish Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell, is about to run out the clock. He'll be leaving the bench and a stack of ethical complaints behind him -- with no public disciplinary hearing, much less a blot on his judicial record.

Judge Cantrell will leave the bench without having faced any consequences for his overly harsh, obnoxiously so, in fact, treatment of defendants and their lawyers who had the nerve to object to his bail policies even though a federal court found them to be unconstitutional. 

Among other things, Cantrell was accused of “willful misconduct” and “persistent and public conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice that brings the judicial office into disrepute.”

From the bench, he launched or threatened contempt-of-court proceedings against defense attorneys who requested bond for their clients in amounts below a $2,500 floor that he’d adopted. That sparked a federal civil rights lawsuit that forced an overhaul of the court’s funding scheme.

And yet now it is Judge Cantrell who is skipping out on bail.  And that many not even be the biggest irony here.  For that we need to look at the reason the judge was able to postpone his matter past the expiration of his term.

Cantrell requested, and received, an extension to this week, saying that COVID-19 concerns had slowed depositions and subpoena returns. A new hearing date was set over three days to begin Monday. Recently, it was recently “continued without date.”

In and of itself, that seems proper.  But consider the judge's lack of consideration for accused persons in his own courtroom and it seems less like justice. Makes one wonder what his daughter-in-law might say.

She has stoutly resisted more recent pressure from advocacy groups urging that police release nonviolent suspects from custody. “You’re worried about criminals catching coronavirus? Tell them to stop breaking the damn law,” snaps Cantrell, a streetwise woman known for her salty tongue.

Nobody wants this big pile of money

Last week, City Council passed a non-binding resolution instructing the Criminal District Court to stop collecting conviction and bail fees from defendants and to return money to people from whom they've already collected these fees.  Supposedly, the idea is to discourage the courts from hoovering up unnecessary money from the poor and indigent who make up the vast majority of people wrung through our brutal criminal justice system. But there are problems.

To begin with, at least some of these fees (the bail fees) are mandated by state law which supersedes the council's authority so at least some of this money has to be collected. The courts are already in a state of limbo regarding that money since a different state law passed this year instructs them to hand it over to the city.  The new law is intended to eliminate a perverse incentive whereby the courts use these fees to fund their own operations. As a result of a 2018 lawsuit ruling that forbids the judges from keeping the funds, they've been collecting in a separate escrow account. 

Anyway that's as good a job as I can do summarizing the Lens's article.  The point is, because we haven't yet managed to ban cash bail altogether, there is a tub full of money that the courts aren't allowed to keep but the city council asserts that it does not want.  

OR maybe they do want it. 

At a City Council Criminal Justice Committee meeting last week, prior to the passage of the resolution, Councilwoman Helena Moreno wondered what would happen with the money judges do not have discretion over collecting. 

“So let’s say that the judges say, OK, the city isn’t going to collect, so it’s not worth imposing some of these additional fines and fees,” Moreno said. “But for those that through state law — statutorily — they have to, and it ends up in the escrow account, what do we do with the money in the escrow account?”

Will Snowden, executive director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office, said that money from mandatory fees would go to the city, as is prescribed by state law. 

“This resolution can’t address those mandatory fines that the judges are required to assess on an individual. I know specifically, the bail fee is not something they have discretion in not imposing. That’s a fee that is assigned to every bail that is already set. So my understanding is those funds going into the escrow account — those bail fees — that escrow account will go on to the city as it is currently prescribed.”

“So then it would be up to [the annual city budget passed by the council] on how we use the escrow account, is that right?” Moreno asked.

The subsequent discussion between Moreno and Kristin Palmer there suggests the council could return the money to individuals themselves.  Something tells me that's going to be more easily said than done. 

Something else tells me, it won't be what they choose anyway.

Who "settled" for what

The lawsuit against Blair Boutte for extorting excessive bail and fees from criminal defendants has been settled. We still don't know exactly what the parties agreed to.

U.S. District Judge Wendy Vitter dismissed the lawsuit on Thursday, one day after the parties confirmed their agreement.

The parties, who have 60 days to finalize the settlement, were mum Friday on its details. But the pact appears to end a lawsuit that leveled serious allegations against a well-connected bondsman and political consultant.

It's hard to know if this is actually a positive end or not.  It looks like Boutte has slowly been winning by attrition since the suit was filed.

The lawsuit suffered a blow in June 2018, when U.S. District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo dismissed many of the claims, including one alleging a racketeering conspiracy.

The lawsuit was among a batch of 15 cases that Milazzo, who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, handed over to Vitter after the U.S. Senate confirmed the nominee of President Donald Trump in June. Judges in other sections also transferred cases to her to balance their caseloads.

So unless we learn something really surprising has been negotiated here, such as, Blair's Bail Bonds is going out of business and starting a daycare or something, we're going to assume the SPLC side has done most of the settling.

Oh also Harry Cantrell is in this story. The mayor's father in law is still ignoring orders to reform the way money bail is set in his courtroom since he and the other judges who benefit from bail fees have been found to have an inherent conflict of interest.

Cantrell is appealing the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision on the alleged conflict of interest to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has yet to decide whether to take up the case.

Separately, the lawyers at the MacArthur Justice Center in New Orleans and the Civil Rights Corps have filed a motion asking a judge to hold Cantrell in contempt of court.

We have no idea how the US Supreme Court might rule. But Cantrell might end up doing okay politically given the renewed fever for "tough on crime" judges in the more influential corners of the city.   We'll see how that winds up. Maybe Cantrell won't have to settle at all.

Whatever keeps everybody miserable

Orleans Parish Criminal District Court has found a creative way to deal with its unconstitutional "debtors prison" situation. Rather than give up entirely on setting cash bail and collecting punitive fines and fees from poor people, they've instead been taking that money and putting it aside in escrow. It isn't useful to anyone there. The money had been going to cover the court's operating expenses but, last year, a bump in their allocation from the city budget was meant to eliminate the need for that. Which leads us to suspect that some of these judges are still setting bail out of spite.

Meanwhile, advocates say that even if there were no conflict of interest, (Judge Harry) Cantrell is ignoring his constitutional obligation to consider whether defendants can actually make bail.

In a federal court petition filed Friday, they cited the case of Miles Moran, a 28-year-old homeless man from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, who’s accused of unauthorized entry into a Walgreens drugstore on Canal Street.

Cops say Moran has a history of shoplifting at the store. On this occasion, they claim he walked out with four Bud Light Lime-a-Ritas, two bags of Lay’s potato chips and two Cokes. The total cost of the goods was $21.28 — but the unauthorized entry charge is a felony.

Cantrell set Moran’s bail at $1,250, then slashed it to $300. Still, attorneys from the Orleans Public Defenders say Moran, who’s been unemployed since December, can’t afford any cash bail. They’ve asked the judge to release Moran with no bail to Odyssey House, which offers residential treatment for people with substance abuse problems.

In a written ruling, Cantrell stood by his decision to impose a money bail, citing a pending municipal attachment and warrant for Moran from Kenner. Public defenders said Kenner wouldn't even have bothered to pick up Moran from the New Orleans jail.

Clearly the judges need additional incentive to treat people humanely. One solution offered today during City Council budget hearings would have made their budgetary supplement contingent on eliminating the bail and fees but the judges say their hands are tied by state law.  Instead, it looks like the Council resolved to create a "task force" to figure out ways to lobby Baton Rouge. Good luck talking to the incoming Republican supermajorities about bail reform.

Helena Moreno floated a different idea.

As a "solution" to federal court rulings against LA judges setting & taking #cashbail, Councilmember @HelenaMorenoLA suggests "the city could be the one collecting [cash bail]." How would this be better for poor New Orleanians? We must #endcashbail, not change who is robbing us. pic.twitter.com/q4hxDT6pbh

— VOTE-NOLA (@FIPVOTENOLA) November 13, 2019

The problems with that should be obvious and VOTE says it well enough in that tweet.  But it turns out this is an actual thing under consideration.

One option the court is considering is to ask the Legislature to pass a law that would direct money raised from bail fees to the city, which would continue to make up for the resulting revenue shortfall. The money in escrow could also be sent to the city.

Rafael Goyeneche, president of the watchdog Metropolitan Crime Commission, said he thought that would solve the conflict of interest problem.

So there's your solution. Keep right on collecting exorbitant bail, fines and fees from poor people. But make sure to "Fair Share" the proceeds out to City Hall and everything's golden.

The bail industry

Doing pretty good business in this city according to a new report released this week by the Vera Insitute.

The report argues that money bail and conviction fees are unjust, disproportionately harm black people, do not increase public safety and end up unnecessarily costing taxpayers.

“The extraction of wealth is a terrible suppression of economic and racial equity in this city,” Jon Wool, the Director of Justice Policy at Vera’s New Orleans office and one of the co-authors of the report, told The Lens.

According to the report, in 2017 New Orleans residents paid $6.8 million dollars for bail fees and premiums and $1.9 million in conviction fees. The majority of those costs — 88 percent of bail premiums and 69 percent of conviction fees — were paid by black families.

The current system of money bail also fails to keep the city safe, the report argues.

“In New Orleans, 65 percent of people arrested for the most serious crimes or who are flagged as high risk for other reasons avoid jail by paying bail,” the report says. Meanwhile, it claims, many are incarcerated simply because they can’t afford to bond out.

“We are using government’s most oppressive  tool — incarceration — in circumstances where it’s wholly unwarranted,” Wool said. “And it singles out poor people and black people, all in the name of raising revenues for government agencies and politically powerful for-profit industry.”

“That’s morally wrong. Bad policy, and morally wrong.”

Vera's report further proposes that by ending the cash bail system, the city can actually save as much as $8 million a year which it should spend on the courts, the DA, and the public defender and eliminate the "user pay" system that currently prevails. 

But, of course, it won't be that simple. People have vested interests in maintaining the $8.7 million industry as it is. DA Cannizzaro sounds like he's making his pushback against reforms a central theme of his reelection campaign. During the recent legislative session, lawmakers voted to bail out the bail bondsmen, so to speak, by retroactively approving $6 million worth of new fees they had been sticking their customers with. And, of course, the Mayor recently endorsed a plan that allows judges to lock up more juvenile defendants by ignoring a standard risk assessment tool.

So there's a lot of heavy lifting to come still if we want to get out from under this oppressive system.  Here's the link to Vera's report. 

The Year Of Enforcement

"We have to shake this image of being the Big Easy where you can do anything you want in New Orleans" -- LaToya Cantrell

That isn't all she says in this unhinged rambling video about traffic cameras, bicycle regulations and the "year of enforcement." (By the way, I thought LaToya wanted 2015 to be the Year Of Enforcement.  She really does have a thing for policing people.) LaToya has no tolerance whatsoever for nuance, subtlety or the notion of  discretion in law enforcement.  "We can't pick and choose!" about when and where to drop the hammer, she says. If you are driving even one mile over the speed limit, "That's illegal!" End of discussion. There is only force and it must be applied at maximum to everyone. LaToya pounds the table as she declares, "Cyclists will be ticketed!" 

She sounds an awful lot here like her father-in-law Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell who has been repeatedly criticized for setting excessive bail in defiance of federal court orders meant to shut down what has amounted to a "debtor's prison."  Judge Cantrell is about as empathetic as LaToya.

Cantrell routinely refuses to set bail below $2,500, regardless of the facts of a case or a defendant’s ability to pay, the suit claims. In most cases, the judge forces defendants to seek the services of a commercial bail bondsman, which in Orleans Parish charge a non-refundable 12-percent or 13-percent fee on the total bond amount.

“We don’t go any lower than $2,500 in this court,” Cantrell told one defendant’s attorney. “This court never goes any lower than $2,500,” he said in another case. “I don’t got any lower than $2,500 on my bonds,” he said in yet another. In one instance, he told a lawyer he was going to set bond at $2,500, regardless of what information the lawyer provided.

The bail is the bail.  You can't pick and choose, right?  The law is the law and it has got to be enforced.  If you tried to slow down in the school zone but only made it down to 25 mph  instead of 24 by the time the camera saw you, well it's nice that you tried but also that's too bad. We have to enforce it. If you are playing music in the street for a crowd during a music festival, well that's nice but also "That's illegal!" LaToya's cops are gonna come and shut you down. Here's Kevin Allman on why that's a problem.

Was the street band in violation of some ordinance? Maybe. But doesn't the city have something, anything better to do than to attempt to shut down the next generation of musicians who are trying to make a buck — and making a lot of people happy in the process?

New Orleans' music culture isn't restricted to symphony halls, nightclubs or festivals sponsored by Acura and Shell. It's more organic than that, or it should be. And it's a bad look for a city that pays lip service to "culture bearers" to shut down actual culture bearers outside a multi-million dollar festival where Pitbull and Katy Perry are pulling down huge salaries.

The #CityOfYes official twitter put out some nonsense about how the police acted appropriately by eventually allowing the band to continue playing in somebody's yard because this is how you make "balance" happen or something.   But in reality all that was accomplished was pointless intimidation supposedly on behalf of a neighbor's complaint. Here's Jarvis DeBerry on why that's absurd.

Seriously, the solution that was worked out Friday night is as absurd as the decision of those unnamed residents to complain and is as absurd as the decision from the police to intervene and make the music stop. If the neighbors were bothered by the noise, then how would they be any less bothered by the noise after the band moved from a position in front of the yard to a position in the yard itself? And if they were bothered by something other than the noise, well, then, the police should have just told them to mind their business and that the band was fine.

NOPD shutting down live music in New Orleans, especially during Jazzfest, is always going to draw attention. But this goes beyond the typical NolierThanThou concern olympics over the fate of "culture bearers" whatever they are. The larger issue here is the city's increasingly authoritarian administration and law enforcement regime being brought to bear on its poorer and more vulnerable populations for what often appears to be the mere convenience of officials looking for the easiest and/or most revenue friendly cop-out solution to the problems of municipal governance.  LaToya explicitly says the problem is this "image of being the Big Easy" where people can do what they want to do. So the solution is we have to stop people from doing things.... unless they can afford to pay. Thus the Year of Enforcement also promises to be the Year of Collections. 

Why the party busses?

The city of New Orleans, like a lot of American cities, is hard up for money.  State and federal budgets don't offer as much support to cities for infrastructure or transit or social services as they once did. Even the $2 billion in FEMA road work assistance we've been sitting on is insufficient to meet the need.

We're apparently not allowed to take the money we need from the tourism cabal.  We aren't about to stop handing out tax breaks to real estate developers or to movie productions or to industrial concerns in "opportunity zones."  We're definitley not going to tax any property held by any politically important local non-profits.   Instead, we're going to see if we can squeeze more out of poor people and those who aren't on the ball enough to defend themselves.

This is why we're sending your name to a collection agency over your water bill even if we still don't know how to make that bill accurate.  It's why we're playing games with traffic cameras to see how many people we can entrap. It's why we're still saddling defendants with excessive bail even if we have to defy a federal judge's order to do it.  It's why we're taking advantage of legitimate concerns with motorists who obstruct bike lanes by jacking the fine for that up to an absurd $300.  And it's why we're in the process of exploring other concerns over bicycle safety to find excuses for police to also write tickets to bicyclists.

In short, we are governed according to which policy choices are most likely to generate the highest amount of revenue in the shortest amount of time from sources least likely to fight back.  Which is how it came to be that we suddenly wake up one day and discover that "not a single New Orleans party bus in in legal status."

Smith said there are some party buses that could obtain the certificates with proof of proper insurance, registration and “minimal modifications.” According to rules the city issued in 2017, party buses are considered “Charter Party Carriers" and must have working fire extinguishers and display the CPNC number on the back of the vehicle.

No doubt quite a few of these fly by night operators could stand for a little more scrutiny.  But let's not pretend your city leaders are primarily concerned with anybody's safety and well being here.  If that is the motivation in this case, it would certainly be unique.

Mostly this is about punitive enforcement for the sake of revenue generation. To some degree it is also a chance for the mayor and our more right-leaning councilmembers to exercise a favorite hobby horse and pander to the neighborhood association busybodies who comprise a large part of their base.  But, again, mostly it's about making money... not by taking it from those who can spare it but from those who are most vulnerable to coersion.  The party bus operators are one such opportunity. But one among several.

"Bond angels"

Okay let's first make some statements for the record. Posting bail bonds on behalf of people who can't afford it is a terrific harm reduction model. And since this organization is also working to end the cash bail system itself, they deserve support. Let's be clear about that at least. 

A 31-year-old man sat in the New Orleans jail for 15 days this June until he got surprising news from his attorney: Someone was posting his $2,500 bail for a heroin possession arrest. It wasn’t his fiancée, who had been trying to scrounge up the cash. “Bonded out by who?” he recalled asking. “I couldn’t believe it. They just picked me.”

The answer was an organization called the New Orleans Safety and Freedom Fund. Until this month, it has flown under the radar — except for the lucky defendants awaiting trial who have been released thanks to its money. The group's founders include Joshua Cox, a senior adviser to Mayor LaToya Cantrell who has continued posting bails since Cantrell took office, including that of the man who was arrested for heroin possession.

To the man released from jail, who asked to remain anonymous, they are the “bond angels.” His charge was refused by prosecutors the day after his release.

I'm a little curious about the Advocate's position here. This article mentions Cox's relationship with Cantrell several times.  The impression one gets is they intend it to be a hit piece on her somehow.  But tying her to a cause like this hardly seems like it should reflect poorly on her.

In any case, it is much to the Freedom Fund's credit that it has pissed off Leon Cannizzaro.  For this they probably deserve some sort of medal.

Cannizzaro declined an interview request, but he made his feelings clear in a statement.
“This is a very disturbing set of circumstances,” he said.

Family members or friends who post a cash bail with their own money will encourage a defendant to show up in court when ordered, he said. Otherwise, they stand to lose their money. “But when there is some outside group, some agency we don’t know anything about, simply posting the bond for the individual and walking away, then it gives the defendant no reason, no incentive to show up. And so he doesn’t have to be accountable,” he continued.

Still, having said all of that, it's hard to ignore the elephant in the room here. As much as we support the Freedom Fund's work, in this case it must be said that they are, in fact, terrible people. 

In an interview on Tuesday, Medbery and another group member, software developer Chris Laibe, said the Freedom Fund sprang out of the same concerns the federal judge had about the New Orleans bail system.

Medbery and Laibe said a group of entrepreneurs like them, under the name of the Krewe de Nieux, had been looking for a way to change the city’s criminal justice system.

That may seem like a small thing for now. But just make a note of it. It's likely to become relevant sooner or later.  

New Orleans runs on exploiting poor people

This is from James Gill's column today about Harry Cantrell. 

If Cantrell lacks sympathy for the poor, perhaps it is because he can hardly imagine what their life is like. The law practice he was allowed to operate on the side when he was court commissioner did so well that he declared $1.5 million in income for 2001, although he paid no taxes until the IRS secured a lien 2003. He then paid then some $300,000, and refused to cough up any more until a federal court in 2014 ruled that he had met only half of his liability.

Cantrell's law practice may have been lucrative, but it evidently overstretched him, for he was sanctioned by the state Supreme Court in 2003 for neglecting his clients. When he was elected magistrate, Cantrell converted his old law office and rented it out for $245 a night through Airbnb.

I had forgotten about the Airbnb thing.  Kind of neat that was happening while City Council was crafting the short term rental legalization that LaToya eventually supported.  Also kind of neat that she has a chance this year as a candidate for mayor to take a strong stand against excessive bail.  Recall that she helped to pass a municipal reform measure last year that was supposed to rein these practices in.  But, as this lawsuit indicates, clearly that wasn't enough.  This city appears to run on exploiting poor people. Our municipal elections should be all about examining how this happens and how far the candidates are willing to go to change it.

The Stah-mi-nah

Every now and then we get the impression that Susan Guidry is done with politics. At one point there was talk that she wasn't interested in running for reelection. She did, though, and easily won her second term.  Maybe that contributed to my impression that she was done after this one was up but, well, here she is.

New Orleans City Councilwoman Susan Guidry, who is term-limited in her District A seat, is considering a run for one of the council’s two At-Large seats this fall, and two attorneys from Uptown and Lakeview are planning to run for the seat she will vacate.

Like all councilmembers, Guidry has made some bad decisions in office. But she is very far from the worst of this lot. She made a good effort to make the recent Short Term Rental deal less bad. Unfortunately her proposal to tie STRs to homestead exemptions failed, but it's something voters should remember if she runs citywide.

More recently, she did this which is a big deal. 

NEW ORLEANS -- After a tie vote in September, the City Council unanimously approved a bail reform ordinance Thursday during a city council meeting.

The ordinance would allow people who've been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent offenses to be released without posting bail on a promise to appear in court. The reform applies to municipal and traffic courts.

Introduced by Councilmember Susan Guidry in September, the ordinance was developed to address the concern among various legal and civil rights groups that the existing bail system for minor offenses unfairly punishes poor defendants.

With idiots like Leon Cannizzaro and Jeff Landry deliberately trying to ruin people's lives for the sake of their own political advancement, it might be good to that Guidry is thinking about sticking around.

Stupid or lying or... ?

One important way in which I tend to read news and politics differently from a lot of my liberal fellow travelers is I almost never assume that the "other side" is over there on the other side because of simple stupidity or ignorance.  Like the great majority of Americans, I'm kind of stupid and not especially expert in any one thing. I figure most people are pretty much just like me. It follows, then, that if I have read about or have a basic understanding something, then whoever I'm talking to probably knows it as well or better than I do. So it's not incumbent on me to educate anyone.

In public affairs, there usually isn't one "right" answer that can satisfy everyone if only the "stupid other side" would be less stupid.  Political questions are not about finding the most inherently good policy but are instead about what policy choice will benefit whom. So those people on the other side, they're not stupid. They're just full of shit.

Take this peculiar City Council vote yesterday over bail reform, for instance.  

A meeting that started with skepticism about a measure to essentially eliminate bail for nonviolent crimes at New Orleans' Municipal Court boiled over Monday into ill-tempered spats among City Council members and recriminations between advocates seeking to end the practice and judges and bail bondsmen fighting to keep the status quo.

After a Criminal Justice Committee meeting that lasted more than three hours, the measure failed to garner enough support from council members to be formally sent on to the full City Council. However, Councilwoman Susan Guidry, the sponsor of the proposed ordinance, said she planned to bring a revised version back in the future.

Here is the problem Guidry's ordinance is attempting to address.  The jail is a profit center for people whose business depends on collecting ransom for minor offenses. Inevitably this penalizes those who can't afford to pay the ransom.  A recent Vera Institute study showed fourteen percent of the jail population at the time of the survey were there simply because they couldn't afford to be out.

Out of the 451 people in jail who were assessed for risk and given a risk score, 216—or 48 percent—were found to present a low or low-moderate risk. Those 216 people represented 14 percent of the entire jail population.

These low and low-moderate risk arrestees were held in jail because a judge decided they had to pay a financial bond to get out. One-hundred and eighteen of them were held on a $25,000 bail or less, an unaffordable sum to many: New Orleans’s poverty rate is almost twice the national average. Eighty-five percent of people who go through the criminal justice system are too poor to hire a lawyer.

That isn't hard to understand. Guidry made the point again, though, just to be certain everyone heard it.

"We're talking about misdemeanor charges that are nonviolent, and the only people who get stuck in jail before their first appearance are the ones who can't come up with those few hundred dollars," Guidry said. "Are we saying poor people are by their nature more dangerous?"

Which is why, if you take the actions and statements of the councilpersons at face value, you have to conclude that all of them except for CM Guidry, are unbelievably stupid. You might think Jason Williams was so stupid he didn't know what the ordinance said.

Williams said he had concerns the plan would not provide enough scrutiny for those accused of domestic violence, although the ordinance requires they be held until a judge has time to evaluate them, and it could still allow for some kind of bond.

More broadly, he argued that if the city wants to reduce the number of people languishing in jail, it should stop arresting people, rather than changing how bail is treated.

"The real issue here is arresting people who we as a community don't believe should be arrested or detained at all," Williams said, specifically questioning whether the Police Department is abiding by council policies aimed at making sure they are not targeting black residents for arrest.

He certainly has a point about the police department although the two problems are hardly mutually exclusive. He knows this, though. He's just full of shit.

You might also think Stacy Head is so stupid she doesn't understand what a nonviolent crime like those addressed by the ordinance actually is.

Head, who usually is an ally of Guidry, seemed skeptical of the proposal, repeatedly suggesting that something is needed to keep people who are "raping and pillaging" the community in jail. But she later said Guidry's plan could work with some changes to narrow its scope.

She just wanted to say "raping and pillaging" a lot, probably.  Notice, though, that Head ended up supporting the ordinance anyway.  Why? Well we're getting to that. First, take a look at Sheriff Gusman and his pastor friends.  

The financial issue is also a key part of the thrust behind the ordinance, as Guidry and others on the council have sought for years to whittle down the jail population. Sheriff Marlin Gusman has fought against those plans, and a group of pastors who have previously backed him were among those opposing the ordinance Monday.

You might think a lot of these pastors would be sympathetic to the bail reform. It's likely the problem Guidry describes is affecting members of their own flocks in disproportionate numbers. Are they just stupid? Nah.. more likely they're more sensitive to parishioners with money to donate. 

This is from another argument between the Vera Institute and some of these pastors over a pre-trial services program with a similar aim as Guidry's bail reform. 

Stuart was followed at the microphone by the Rev. Tom Watson, the senior pastor at Watson Memorial Teaching Ministries, who complained that Vera got its role screening accused criminals for pre-trial release without competitive bidding.

“That’s unfair and unjust,” Watson said. “I call them carpetbaggers. We have a lot of people who could go to the jails (and screen the defendants) for a lot less.”

A second pastor, the Rev. Joseph Merrill, of New Kingdom Missionary Baptist Church, said it was “nonsense” to have “folks from New York come to try to solve our problem.”

Merrill was followed by bail bondsman Matt Dennis, owner of dennisbonding.com, who said the Vera program “is turning the offender into a victim.” He added, “They’re trying to drive us out of business.”

The pre-trial program represents a financial threat to the bondsmen because the defendants get released without having to post bond.

The back-and-forth comments prompted a response from only one City Council member, Susan Guidry.

Guidry, who chairs the council’s criminal justice committee, said Vera had come to New Orleans in 2007 at the council’s request and was involved in discussions for two years before this year’s program began. She said the Justice Department chose Vera, which is why the program had not been put to through competitive bidding process. “It would be a very big mistake for us to pull the people who have been with the program for two years,” Guidry said. “It’s been a success.”

The Rev. Antoine Barriere, senior pastor at Household of Faith Family Worship Church International, had earlier endorsed Vera’s work before the council, saying the project “was going in the right direction.”

Afterward, in an interview, Barriere said the opposition to Vera surprised him since the critics had just surfaced.

“Now they come in and divide everyone,” Barriere said. “Somebody is connected to somebody who is getting bail bond money.”

Simply put, there's a lot of money in the sleazy business of leveraging the criminal justice system to extract profits from the vulnerable.  Those councilmembers who voted to maintain that system aren't stupid. They're benefiting from it.  Similarly, those who voted to shut it down.. including the reluctant Head despite her "rape and pillage" crowing... aren't benefiting and are jealous of those who are.

None of these actors is stupid. They're all acting rationally.  But none of them is doing anything simply because it's the objectively moral policy choice.