New Orleans city workers search landfill for mistakenly discarded court records

New Orleans clerk of court staff stood ankle-deep in a massive landfill, digging through mounds of trash, to salvage court records that the city erroneously discarded.

As photos surfaced online — showing city staff scouring for the misplaced documents among heaps of garbage — city and state officials were outraged over the situation.

“This is unacceptable,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a Wednesday statement. “I have questions. I’m going to ask the Clerk for an explanation of how this happened and just what records were dumped.”

In a statement, Clerk of Criminal District Court Darren Lombard blasted the city for an “egregious breach of responsibility and negligence” of public records. Photos shared by the criminal clerk of court’s office show city workers standing in debris beside an excavator and extracting tattered papers from heaps of garbage earlier this week.

Lombard said he was notified last Friday that containers housing official court documents had been relocated from trailers without his knowledge and, in at least one instance, destroyed. He blamed the Department of Public Works for moving the records and said he dispatched city employees to recover what they could.

“What they discovered was deeply disturbing: one entire container – filled with official Clerk records – had been dumped into a debris field and mixed with general trash,” Lombard said. “Documents were strewn across the yard, caught in the wind, and scattered beyond the secured perimeter.”

Lombard said the records had been stored outside the clerk’s office, in trailers and containers, because of the “longstanding absence of a secure, dedicated Clerk of Court storage facility” dating back to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Flooding from the collapse of the city’s levee system led to the destruction of thousands of criminal case files.

Lombard, who took office in 2022, said he has repeatedly requested funding for a secure storage facility.

The court records, many dating back to the 1950s through the 1970s, included capital murder and aggravated rape cases, Lombard told Nola.com.

Lombard said he has called for a city investigation.

New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams — whose main role is to represent the government in criminal cases and decide whether to prosecute individuals accused of crimes — stressed the importance of “proper recordkeeping,” saying that in order to “administer justice” it is vital that there is “accurate maintenance of all information associated with criminal cases.”

The Promise of Justice Initiative, an organization that advocates for criminal justice reform, said that in its experience, even on a “normal day,” case files can be hard to obtain. The organization emphasized that such documents “represent human beings sitting inside of prisons” and are the “vehicle” to freedom, once someone has been convicted.

“The fact that the City can treat such life-saving and invaluable property with so little care is a failure of their duty and a violation of people’s rights, who have a right to their information,” Renard Bridgewater, a spokesperson for the organization, said Wednesday.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s office released a brief statement, saying that they were working with the Clerk’s Office and the Department of Public Works to “resolve this issue.”