This is just crazy. A New Orleans judge sentenced three people who looted liquor from a grocery store after Hurrican Katrina to 15 years in prison, saying he wanted to send a message.

They were convicted of attempting to leave the grocery with 27 bottles of liquor and wine, six cases of beer and one case of wine coolers, six days after Katrina made landfall. Little, McGowen and Pearson each testified that they were not looting, but they offered conflicting accounts of matters such as who drove to the store.

The looting law under which they were convicted had been in effect for two weeks. Compare their sentence to the year these men got for bribing a federal official in the aftermath of Katrina.

by TChris

Among a dozen criminal court judges in New Orleans, one so far has had the courage to stand up for the Constitution. Speedy trials are impossible in a city that can't get lawyers to indigent defendants, leaving more than a thousand jail inmates with no trial date, no lawyer, and no immediate hope of having their day in court. The presumption of innocence is a hollow promise to those who are jailed indefinitely as they wait for the system to fulfill its obligation to provide them with counsel.

Judge Arthur Hunter recognizes that enough is enough.

And so Judge Hunter, 46, a former New Orleans police officer, is moving to let some of the defendants without lawyers out of jail. He has suspended prosecutions in most cases involving public defenders. And, alone among a dozen criminal court judges, he has granted a petition to free a prisoner facing serious charges without counsel, and is considering others.

I'm always in awe of college kids who invest their time and energy in great social causes. Princeton has my admiration tonight. Students at Princeton University have launched a progressive social activism and fundraising campaign, The Katrina Project.

I watched Hardball's interview with Michael Brown tonight. I was impressed. I'm going to join Jane and Moderate Voice and Taylor Marsh and say apologies are due him and I regret my criticism of him during Katrina.

On Hardball, Brown was confident and direct in answering the questions. His biggest beef is with HSA Chief Michael Chertoff. When asked to rank his own performance, Brown gave himself a 5. He also gave Bush a 5 (too high in my opinion, but it's probably out of loyalty.) He gave Chertoff a 2.

Michael Brown was a scapegoat for the Administration.

Sorry, Mr. Brown, I was was wrong about you.

Update: Michael Brown responds to Jane here in FDL's comments.

The Katrina tape showing that President Bush and HSA Chief Michael Chertoff were warned about possible massive death tolls in New Orleans speak for themselves.

Six days of footage and transcripts obtained by The Associated Press show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.

Bush's comment when being told of the likelihood of massive deaths: "We are fully prepared."

by TChris

Donald Rumsfeld is an expert at disaster creation. Why would the president want to put him in charge of disaster relief?

A White House assessment of the sluggish federal reaction to Hurricane Katrina concludes the Pentagon should oversee future catastrophe responses but does not recommend that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff be fired, officials said Wednesday. ... [T]he document - which a congressional aide said approaches 200 pages - proposes sweeping changes to federal response plans. These include making the military the lead agency to coordinate immediate relief when state and local resources are overwhelmed, one official said.

FEMA would continue to handle lesser disasters, thus dividing disaster management into two competing turfs. Can you imagine Rumsfeld and Chertoff arguing with each other -- as victims drown -- about which agency should be in charge of the latest hurricane response?

by TChris

An editorial in today's NY Times gives sound advice to the president: fire Michael Chertoff. In the wake of a report by an all-Republican Congressional panel that assigned blame for the inept governmental response to Katrina, Chertoff "stands out above the rest."

According to the panel's report, Mr. Chertoff has "primary responsibility for managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster," yet he handled his decision-making responsibilities "late, ineffectively, or not at all." A FEMA official named Marty Bahamonde sent word back to Washington on the same day Katrina struck, saying the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans had been breached. This was not based on a rumor; he had seen it with his own eyes from a Coast Guard helicopter. FEMA public affairs officials sent Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff an e-mail note that night. The former FEMA director, Michael Brown, says he notified the White House at the same time. Yet the next day, President Bush said New Orleans had "dodged the bullet," while Mr. Chertoff flew to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu.

The president is more likely to give Chertoff a medal or a promotion than to admit that Chertoff wasn't up to the job, and we know he doesn't read newspapers. Still ...

It would be nice for the administration to finally send a message that if important people do a bad job, they go away.

Former FEMA director Michael Brown testified before Congress today, despite Bush's attempt to block his testimony by asserting executive privilege. He blamed Homeland Security. Crooks and Liars has some video.

Mr. Brown said that homeland security officials were being regularly updated by reports delivered through video conference calls, and that he personally contacted White House officials.

"My obligation was to the White House and to make sure the president knows what's going on," he said, "and I did that." Mr. Brown's testimony provided the first detailed look into communications between emergency management officials and the White House.

He said claims the White House didn't know of the levee failures until the next day are "baloney."

More Katrina-related disaster: The public defender's sytem in New Orleans is dead.

Check out the news reports from Washington Post AP, and Henry Weinstein of the LA Times. More than 4000 people without a lawyers spells disaster again.

One month after Katrina, the Orleans Indigent Defender Board laid off more than 30 of its public defenders, said Tessier. There are now only four part-time public defenders in New Orleans, he said.

"My guess is that we have 4,500 people who have been sitting in jail for up to six months and haven't seen a lawyer," Tessier said. "The issue is what do we do with those people if we don't have public defenders for them and don't have money for lawyers."

by Last Night in Little Rock

The biggest story of 2005 on CNN was Katrina and its aftermath, and this blog, as all the others, also exploded with stories about the government's gross mismanagement. "Brownie, you've done a heck of a job" became the catch-phrase for governmental cluelessness.

April 18th is the Centennial of the Great San Francisco Earthquake, and I've started reading up on it. Over the holidays, I read A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 by Simon Winchester. This was my first installment on the subject.

What shocked me was that the government's response in 1906 was immediate and decisive, unlike 2005.

by TChris

The Washington Post provides new information about Brownie's (heck of a) job at FEMA. It turns out that Michael Brown warned Homeland Security's Tom Ridge that Ridge's plans for FEMA would "shatter agency morale" and "break longstanding, effective and tested relationships with states and first responder stakeholders" while making a mockery of FEMA's motto: A Nation Prepared.

The inevitable result, he wrote, would be "an ineffective and uncoordinated response" to a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

At least Brownie got that right. The explanation for FEMA's miserable response to Katrina reaches beyond Brown's legendary incompetence.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Tomorrow's NY Times has a significant article online tonight about the scapegoating of Hurricane Katrina: In Newly Released Documents, a View of the Storm After Katrina. It started as soon as the water leveled out in NOLA, and Bushinistas were already finding ways to blame everybody but themselves for the lack of preparation. No plan, except plan to shift blame. Worked with everything else to be thrown at Bush for the last five years, so why not then?

The gamesmanship and political posturing were, in a word, amazing. The greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States, maybe other than the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (see below), was a political tool or weapon in the hands of those who consider politics bloodsport without rules.