Katie Schwartzmann

On April 2, 2012, Katie Schwartzmann signed a class action complaint in the Eastern District of Louisiana as trial attorney for the men, women and youth imprisoned at the Orleans Parish Prison, with Sheila A. Bedi of the Southern Poverty Law Center beside her on the signature page. Most of the people held in the jail were pretrial detainees waiting for their court dates, and the ten named plaintiffs described what had happened to them there. LaShawn Jones had been beaten by a deputy on arrival at the psychiatric tier of the House of Detention and left bloodied, without medical care, for days. Kent Anderson had been denied his prescribed psychiatric medication until he became suicidal, and said that “it’s hard to keep waking up.” Jimmie Jenkins, a man with schizophrenia, had gone about nineteen months without medication and reported suicidal thoughts in January 2012. Anthony Gioustavia, nineteen, had been attacked soon after he arrived at the House of Detention with no deputy present. Greg Journee had been stabbed repeatedly after a transfer meant to keep him safe and received no medical attention for the wounds; Steven Dominick had been jumped, stabbed and threatened in protective custody; Leonard Lewis had been stabbed and beaten several times, protective custody included, after the jail housed him with people connected to a case in which he had testified. Richard Lanford had been beaten repeatedly in the Old Parish Prison and the House of Detention, his face broken and his arm injured, and threatened with sexual assault. Euell Sylvester had been beaten and sexually assaulted at the Old Parish Prison after being housed near the man he was pressing charges against. Mark Walker, legally blind and diagnosed with bipolar disorder, had been forced to perform oral sex on another prisoner, beaten by a guard and denied mental health care.

Fourteen months later, after a four-day fairness hearing that opened on April 1, 2013, Judge Lance M. Africk approved the consent judgment the plaintiffs had negotiated with Sheriff Marlin Gusman, certified the class, and found in a 103-page ruling that the jail imposed systemically unconstitutional conditions marked by severe violence, untreated illness and dysfunction. Inmates had testified under their full names, and in a footnote the judge quoted the plaintiffs’ lead counsel: “It has taken enormous bravery for the plaintiffs to come forward and to tell the Court about their experiences.” He called the judgment “the only way to overcome the years of stagnation” at the jail. It has no end date and lifts only after two years of substantial compliance, and as of late November 2025 it remained in effect, with status conferences continuing and the mental-health annex the court ordered still under construction.

Schwartzmann was managing director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Louisiana office when she filed that case, with six attorneys and four investigators under her. She had already spent six years as legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, from August 2005 to May 2011, and she would go on to co-found and direct the MacArthur Justice Center in New Orleans from November 2013 to December 2018, return to the ACLU as legal director until May 2020, become the inaugural director of Tulane Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, and join Protect Democracy as Special Counsel, working on free expression and the protection of dissent. The work runs from immediate constitutional relief and appellate rulings to damages recoveries, lasting reforms, public records and continuing oversight, in matters of free expression, government abuse, jail conditions, privacy and constitutional limits on official power, carried through Louisiana trial courts and the Fifth Circuit, monitored settlements and public-records suits. By March 2026 she was Special Counsel on a case in the District of Oregon for the tenants of a 209-unit Portland apartment building across the street from a federal immigration facility.

Six Hundred Emergency-Room Transports

The Justice Department had investigated the jail before the class action. It opened an inquiry under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act in February 2008, bringing corrections, medical, mental-health and environmental-safety experts into the buildings; on September 11, 2009 it issued findings describing the conditions as egregiously dangerous, and in April 2012, days after the suit was filed, with the conditions unimproved, it sent an emergency update. It had not sued. The plaintiffs assembled evidence of violence, contraband including knives, deficient supervision, inadequate staffing, withheld psychiatric medication and failures in medical and mental-health care, and on September 25, 2012 the court granted the United States leave to intervene. The Sheriff answered with third-party complaints against the City of New Orleans, which he blamed for refusing to fund adequate operations.

At the fairness hearing the plaintiffs called four experts, each from a different field of corrections. Romero concluded that the jail was “totally dysfunctional in terms of overall security” and an “unsafe facility for both staff and inmates.” Schwartz, after decades of work with state corrections departments, testified that “OPP is the worst jail I’ve ever seen” and that “it is likely the worst large city jail in the United States,” and estimated that the jail realistically needed at least 75 to 100 percent more staff. The numbers behind those judgments went into the order. In 2012 the jail sent more than 600 people to local emergency rooms for physical injuries, far more than half of them from violence, against seven violence-related transports at a comparable Memphis-area jail in a similar period. The original prison often ran with 25 to 50 percent of its direct security posts unfilled, a single officer sometimes responsible for several floors. On a sample date in December 2012 about 35 percent of inmates past intake had not been classified in any manner. In October 2012 the jail logged 30 sexual-assault grievances and investigated none of them; in November, 26 and two. A plaintiffs’ video showed an inmate reporting a sexual assault being read his Miranda rights and told repeatedly that nothing had happened. One man, identified in the order as M.H., had hanged himself in an isolation cell at the Intake Processing Center, a death the expert Gage testified could have been prevented with proper assessment; another, R.S., died of urosepsis and pneumonia while still on suicide watch. An inmate attacked on June 23, 2012 suffered a brain hemorrhage that left him in a nearly brain-dead state. The jail had one full-time psychiatrist working forty hours a week, and after hours no mental-health provider on call or present.

The City of New Orleans opposed the decree. It argued that the terms went well beyond constitutional minimums, violated the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s requirement that relief be narrowly drawn, and could cost as much as $35 million the City did not have after its own settlement with the Justice Department over the police department; in early 2013 it asked the court to put the jail in receivership instead and blamed the Sheriff’s management. The weekend before the hearing three videos surfaced, apparently filmed by inmates around 2009 at the since-closed House of Detention, and the City introduced them: they show inmates brandishing a loaded gun, using intravenous drugs, gambling, drinking beer, using cell phones and, having left the jail for an evening, walking on Bourbon Street, inmates who, the judge wrote, were able to blatantly engage in criminal conduct without staff intervening. Judge Africk held that the plaintiffs faced a high bar under the Act and that the court had to conduct an independent inquiry, and he found that the safety-and-security provisions represented a reasonable factual and legal determination on the record and that the judgment was “narrowly drawn to remedy the violation of Plaintiffs’ federal rights,” the least intrusive means of doing so, extending no further than necessary. The jail’s inmates, he wrote, were subject to an epidemic of violence, and the mental-health units, including those designed for suicide monitoring, “were patently not suicide proof.”

Any Replacement Facility

The agreement had been reached in December 2012, three months after the United States intervened, while Schwartzmann’s team negotiated with the Sheriff over enforceable changes and the City’s funding responsibility stayed before the court. Announced on December 11, it required review and monitoring of the jail’s operations by a professional corrections administrator and an independent monitor; comprehensive policies on the use of force and restraints; documentation and tracking of excessive-force complaints against staff; a staffing plan with enough officers to keep prisoners safe, with supervision and officer training; a ban on housing teenagers in units where they could come into contact with adult prisoners; guidelines for medical care and mental-health treatment, with medication and suicide prevention; investigations of serious incidents, prison-rape prevention and contraband control; sanitation and fire safety; and Spanish translations so that prisoners with limited English could reach medical and other basic services. Its obligations applied to any new jail built to replace the existing complex, so that relocation could not end them, and the plaintiffs and the United States could each enforce it. Schwartzmann, as lead counsel, said the Sheriff was “taking the important first step of acknowledging the problems within the jail,” and turned to the funding fight set for trial on April 4, 2013: “April 4 is a long time for the men, women and children in Orleans Parish Prison to wait,” she said, urging Mayor Mitch Landrieu to provide emergency funding. “Every day we wait, the lives of thousands of New Orleanians remain at risk.” Byron Morgan, a prisoner and SPLC client, said he was excited that the sheriff had agreed to take a hard look and fix the jail.

Judge Africk gave preliminary approval on January 22, 2013 and final approval on June 6. On September 9, 2013 he appointed Susan W. McCampbell lead monitor, with sub-monitors, the Sheriff and the City each paying $105,000 toward that year’s monitoring; on October 10 he approved a $900,000 settlement of the plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees, payable by the Sheriff, and on October 21 ordered the City to pay $1.8 million in interim funding for 2013. From November 2013 the MacArthur Justice Center, which Schwartzmann founded that month, had attorneys and investigators in the jail several times a week, reviewing the Sheriff’s records and answering the monitors’ reports. The monitors’ fifth report, in April 2016, supported a motion for contempt and a receiver that the plaintiffs filed on April 25, 2016; after a six-day evidentiary hearing the parties stipulated on June 21, 2016 to an independent jail compliance director with defined duties and transparency requirements, the court finding the Sheriff’s Office out of compliance with specified sections of the judgment on a record that by then included more than eighty status conferences. The decree also required the new jail then under construction to be redesigned to house prisoners with mental illness, the annex later called Phase III. When the City sought relief from that obligation, Magistrate Judge Michael B. North recommended denial after a multi-week hearing, finding that FEMA funds were contractually restricted to this case and that the City’s proposed retrofit was haphazard and flawed; Judge Africk adopted the recommendation in full on January 25, 2021, the Fifth Circuit affirmed on August 22, 2022, and on September 5, 2023 the court ordered the City to issue a notice to proceed. The Fifth Circuit dismissed Sheriff Susan Hutson’s further appeal on August 26, 2024, and the Supreme Court denied her petition for certiorari on November 17, 2025.

Records from Sixty-Three Parishes

In the same months Schwartzmann directed a statewide public-records effort on immigration detainers. Immigration and Customs Enforcement often asks local agencies to hold a person after traffic, municipal or state charges are resolved when it suspects a civil immigration violation, and federal regulations bar holding anyone more than forty-eight hours after the underlying charges end. Beginning in July 2012 the Southern Poverty Law Center asked all sixty-three Louisiana parishes for their policies and procedures for detaining immigrants and for copies of individual detainer forms, to learn whether local jails were holding people beyond that window. Fifteen parishes refused, claiming an exemption; Vermilion Parish was among them. Schwartzmann, the named records requester, sued Sheriff Michael Couvillon in state court on September 19, 2012 under Louisiana’s Public Records Act after several unanswered demands, seeking the documents needed to test the parish’s detention practices. She argued that the Act contains no express exemption for immigration detainers, nor for records relating to federal immigration enforcement, and that access to public records is a fundamental right under statute and the Louisiana Constitution. “The law is clear that the public has a right to review these public records,” she said. “We are merely asking the sheriff to abide by state law and provide us access to these documents.”

In November 2012 state District Judge Herman Clause ordered the sheriff to release the policies, procedures and individual detainer forms. Their release supplied the records needed to compare the parish’s written rules with actual detention periods and to identify whether people remained confined after the forty-eight-hour federal window had expired, and it reinforced the same right of access she was pursuing across the sixty-three-parish review. “We will fully examine the records to determine the extent of potential rights violations,” she said.

Books from the Approved Vendors

Schwartzmann, a New Orleans native, took a political science degree magna cum laude from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, in April 2000 and graduated cum laude from Tulane Law School in May 2003 with the CALI Excellence for the Future Award in International Human Rights, a civil law certificate, the presidency of the Public Interest Law Foundation and clinic work in civil litigation, Street Law and the Project for Older Prisoners. After a staff attorney’s job at the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee she returned to New Orleans in August 2005 as legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, where she built the legal department, managed the docket and intake, and served as counsel on every ACLU case in the state. One of the first was Norman Sanders’s. Sanders, held at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, had belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints all his life, and his faith required him to study its texts. Until December 2003, when the prison adopted an approved-vendor list, he could receive them; afterward the prison returned books ordered from established Latter-day Saint sellers, the Brigham Young University Bookstore among them, because those sellers were absent from the list, and Warden Burl Cain repeatedly refused to amend it so that Sanders’s faith was treated like the Baptists and other favored denominations. The claim in the 2006 suit she filed in federal court in Baton Rouge focused on that unequal treatment embedded in the vendor list: books used by some faiths could enter the prison while established Latter-day Saint sellers could not, and officials identified no safety or security concern tied to the requested sellers. Angola officials, she said, may not control the private practice of religion unless it poses a clear safety or security risk. The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections settled in March 2007, adding the Brigham Young University Bookstore, the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Deseret Book Direct to the approved list and providing Sanders $10,950 in damages; the full $21,786.13 resolution also covered attorney fees and costs.

Henry Leonard, a member of the Nation of Islam at the David Wade Correctional Center, asked for The Final Call, the newspaper the Nation publishes. Louisiana prison officials had banned it statewide in 2005 on the strength of a single page, “The Muslim Program,” the statement of beliefs printed at the back of every issue; they found the content objectionable and asserted that it might threaten order, and the ban left Leonard without a publication central to his religious practice. Schwartzmann and cooperating attorney Nelson Cameron of Shreveport filed suit on May 9, 2007. On March 31, 2010, after nearly three years of litigation, Judge Donald Walter of the Western District of Louisiana entered summary judgment for Leonard, no facts being in dispute. He found no evidentiary basis for treating the newspaper as a security threat, since officials could link no violent act to it, called the ban an exaggerated response to security concerns, compared the denial to refusing a Christian the Old Testament or a Latter-day Saint the Book of Mormon, and concluded that without the paper Leonard had no alternative means to receive the religious instruction it carried. “Allowing the government to decide which ideas and religions are preferred is extremely dangerous,” Schwartzmann said. The State appealed, and on November 10, 2011 a Fifth Circuit panel of Judges Garza, Graves and Reavley affirmed, requiring delivery of the publication: the court did not agree that “The Muslim Program” was free of racially inflammatory language, but it held that banning the entire newspaper on that account was not justified, since an objectionable page could be deleted, the page had appeared in every prior issue, and it had always been available to Leonard. The State’s petition for certiorari was denied. A companion action for Shawn Anderson, a prisoner at Angola, had been held in abeyance while Leonard’s appeal proceeded; the controlling ruling resolved it and secured The Final Call for both readers.

The rest of her First Amendment docket in those years ran through Louisiana’s smaller jurisdictions and its prisons. In Crayton v. City of Natchitoches, filed in 2007 with co-counsel Jane Johnson for a protester who had been told he needed a permit, the city repealed the ordinances. In 2008 she represented the Social Aid and Pleasure Club Task Force and the Original Pigeontown Steppers against New Orleans over standardless police escort fees for second-line parades, a case that settled. In Billizone v. LeBlanc, in 2009, a prison rule that punished a prisoner for spreading rumors in a grievance was declared unconstitutional and vague, after an earlier Tulane Law Clinic challenge to the same rule. In Simmons v. City of Mamou, a retired police officer who had emailed a newspaper about the police chief, and been arrested and charged with criminal defamation for it, settled with damages in 2012.

Direct Money Grants to Favored Houses of Worship

House Bill 1, the 2007 general appropriations act that Governor Kathleen Blanco signed in July 2007, directed unrestricted cash grants to selected churches: $100,000 to a church in Bossier City and $20,000 to a church in Shreveport, with no competitive process, no stated secular purpose and no oversight conditions. Schwartzmann and Daniel Mach, director of litigation for the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, sued in the Eastern District of Louisiana to stop the transfers before the money left the treasury. In October 2007 Judge Sarah S. Vance blocked the grants, holding that they fell within the core proscription of the Establishment Clause: “these non-neutral, direct money grants of taxpayer funds to favored houses of worship are clearly unconstitutional.” The injunction held the money in the treasury while the action expanded to six additional church earmarks, so that the final resolution could address all eight houses of worship at once. Louisiana settled in January 2009 and agreed to end the challenged earmarks; the settlement made the October 2007 order permanent and ensured that none of the disputed taxpayer funds went to the eight churches. “No longer will government officials be allowed use taxpayer dollars to fund their favorite churches,” Schwartzmann said.

Peggy Reno’s Urine Test

Peggy Reno was a veteran teacher in East Baton Rouge Parish and twice its Teacher of the Year. On September 24, 2008 a student punched her. No one suspected she was intoxicated, and she had never used illegal drugs, but a School Board official required her to take a urine test under a policy that automatically tested any teacher hurt on the job. A urine sample can reveal prescription medication, pregnancy and medical conditions as well as drug use, and for a public employee its compulsory collection is a government search; an injury supplied no individualized suspicion that Reno was impaired. Schwartzmann’s ACLU of Louisiana, with Adam Wolf of the national ACLU, represented the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers, a local of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers with more than 1,600 members, alongside Yigal Bander of Kleinpeter & Schwartzberg, the Federation’s lawyer. A consent decree filed on May 29, 2009 in the Middle District of Louisiana ended automatic post-accident testing: the Board’s teachers would no longer be tested after an accident or injury in the course and scope of their employment without reasonable suspicion of intoxication. The decree placed a reasoned, individualized decision before compelled testing, so that an injury alone no longer triggered the collection of biological evidence from a public employee, and employment by a public school no longer meant surrendering bodily privacy every time a teacher was hurt at work. “In this case, both common sense and the Constitution called for a change in course,” Schwartzmann said. “It is a waste of time and money, not to mention a gross violation of educators’ rights, to drug test without suspicion.”

Twenty-One Days to Feliciana

Louisiana courts had found more than one hundred pretrial detainees incompetent to stand trial and ordered them into inpatient restorative treatment at the Feliciana Forensic Facility, and Feliciana was full. About 200 people were committed there each year, it held about 410 forensic patients, and the statute allowed the state up to 360 days before it had to act. People who had been convicted of nothing waited in parish jails for months or years, some for more than two years, without the treatment they needed to understand the proceedings against them or assist their lawyers. In St. Tammany Parish the jail had one part-time psychiatrist and no registered nurses; detainees on suicide watch sat in small isolation cells for weeks; at Orleans Parish, patients were restrained to beds for weeks. The state’s jail-based program sent nine masters-level forensic coordinators around Louisiana to see each detainee twice a month, and the state’s own evidence suggested it failed for about seventy percent of them. On April 12, 2010 the ACLU of Louisiana, with Kirkland & Ellis working pro bono and the Advocacy Center, sued three state officials in the Eastern District of Louisiana on behalf of a detainee identified as W.B., through his mother, Charrie Butler, and the Advocacy Center. Schwartzmann’s team connected the competency findings, the treatment orders, the jail conditions, Feliciana’s capacity and the months of confinement without restorative care in a single due-process record.

The State argued that funding and paperwork explained the delays, that some detainees were malingering, and that emergency transfers and the jail program were enough. Judge Sarah Vance answered each on August 9, 2010. Forty-seven detainees were ready for transfer with no obstacle at all and thirty-nine awaited paperwork that was not that great a burden to assemble; no mental-health professional had recommended keeping anyone in jail, and the decision to do so was an economic one. “Lack of funding cannot justify the continued detention of defendants who have not been convicted of any crime,” she wrote, paperwork could not be used to justify the deprivation of their constitutional rights, and the emergency transfers and the jail program were a band-aid on a much larger problem. Under Jackson v. Indiana a defendant cannot be held longer than the reasonable time needed to decide whether he will attain competency, and the nature and duration of a commitment must bear some reasonable relationship to its purpose; she found the Ninth Circuit’s Mink decision, which held that keeping incapacitated defendants in jail for weeks or months violates due process, starkly similar. She enjoined and ordered the officials to transfer every detainee committed by court order and eligible for admission to Feliciana within twenty-one days, to contact the courts within ten days about the paperwork for the rest, and to file a sealed status report within thirty days. Their continued confinement, the court said, bore no rational relationship to the restoration of their competency.

The consent decree entered on April 13, 2011 converted the injunction into a treatment system with deadlines. Detainees with emergency mental-health needs had to be transferred within two working days of assessment; other urgent cases within ten working days; inpatient treatment had to begin within thirty days of a finding of need, with adequate testing done promptly. Continuing reports let the parties and the federal court, which oversaw implementation, measure compliance. Counsel were Schwartzmann, as the ACLU’s legal director, with Marjorie Lindblom, Maura Klugman and Adam Humann of Kirkland & Ellis and Nell Hahn, Miranda Tait and Conception Otero of the Advocacy Center. The deadlines connected due process to medicine: a prosecution could not stay suspended indefinitely while a presumptively innocent person deteriorated in a jail unequipped to restore competency.

Deputy Thompson Left His Post

In November 2013 Schwartzmann co-founded the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center’s New Orleans office and directed it for five years as its founding co-director, a nonprofit civil rights firm of twelve focused on criminal justice reform. Its docket took in the incarceration of people with mental illness in jails, bail and fine practices, overdetention, public-records violations, secrecy in district attorneys’ offices and free speech; she challenged the extreme use of solitary confinement on men with mental illness in the Louisiana Department of Corrections, and in Kissinger v. LeBlanc, filed in 2017, represented a prisoner transferred to harsh solitary confinement after he sent messages to reporters, a case that settled with his return to Angola, his class A trusty status restored, and damages. The office also carried the day-to-day enforcement of the jail decree she had won at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

William Goetzee was forty-eight, a career reserve officer in the United States Coast Guard who held the rank of commander. On August 2, 2011 he was arrested at a federal courthouse for trying to seize a security guard’s firearm; his family said he had wanted the gun to kill himself, and he entered the Orleans Parish jail after that apparent suicide attempt, showing suicidal behavior. Jail policy required that suicidal prisoners be watched around the clock. Deputy William Thompson, assigned to monitor him, left his post, and Goetzee died in his cell, apparently from swallowing pieces of toilet paper, while responsibility for his safety rested entirely with the jail. Thompson was fired, charged with malfeasance in office, pleaded guilty, and in September 2012 was sentenced to five years’ probation. Schwartzmann represented Goetzee’s sister and brother, Margaret Goetzee Nagle and John Eric Goetzee, in Nagle v. Gusman in the Eastern District of Louisiana against Sheriff Gusman and numerous jail personnel, with Emma Freudenberger of Neufeld, Scheck & Brustin in New York and Mary E. Howell of New Orleans, and carried the continuous-observation failure toward trial while the jail operated under the consent decree addressing its broader dangerous conditions. The case translated “continuous observation” into concrete operational duties: an assigned person, an occupied post, a visible detainee and a timely response. A written suicide-prevention rule mattered only if someone remained there to carry it out.

In March 2016, three days before the scheduled trial, the defendants agreed to a $1.75 million settlement. The suit had claimed that staff treated Goetzee in a callous, harsh and indifferent manner, and Freudenberger put the point about the deputy plainly: “It wasn’t just a problem with one rogue deputy.” The Sheriff’s lawyer said the office had been strong-armed into settling. Schwartzmann’s statement looked back to the decree: “The Consent Decree has been in place for almost three years and still people are dying in our jail.”

A Passport inside an Immigration Hold

Schwartzmann returned to the ACLU of Louisiana as legal director in December 2018. Within the next year she won summary judgment in Morris v. City of New Orleans, the challenge to the city’s mural permit scheme as an unconstitutional prior restraint; intervened in Guidry v. Elberson to challenge a library’s patron-attestation form and its ban on drag queen participation, arguing that the ban was viewpoint discrimination in a public forum, and prevailed; and defended the photographer Abdul Aziz in a Florida defamation suit over a photograph of a former school principal, which was dismissed.

Ramon Torres had been a United States citizen for nearly a decade and carried a Louisiana driver’s license, a United States passport, a Social Security card and work-security credentials. Arrested in August 2018 on suspicion of driving while intoxicated, he should under the Ascension Parish court’s policies have been released the next morning, and a court order for his release existed. Jail staff kept him anyway, on an immigration fugitive hold, because they suspected he was undocumented. When he asked why, a deputy told him: “honey, it’s because you’re Spanish. They call ICE on all of ya’ll.” He stayed three days after the release order and four days overall, until a friend hired a lawyer who went to court. Schwartzmann, with Bruce Hamilton of the ACLU of Louisiana and cooperating counsel James Bullman, filed a Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment action in the Middle District of Louisiana in August 2019 challenging detention based on perceived ethnicity rather than lawful immigration evidence, and seeking a declaration of unconstitutionality and compensatory and punitive damages. In February 2021 the court approved a settlement requiring Ascension Parish and its Sheriff’s Office to pay Torres $50,000 in damages plus attorney fees. The payment compensated one citizen; the case also exposed the danger of treating a surname or an appearance as an immigration warrant. “Sheriff’s deputies had no basis to suspect our client of being undocumented,” Hamilton said, “and in fact, Ramon produced voluminous documentation proving his citizenship.”

Four Hundred Cameras and a Public Map

Laura Bixby, a staff attorney for the Orleans Public Defenders, had obtained crime-camera footage of the drug arrest that put her client Clint Carter in jail, and the footage showed that the city’s cameras could zoom in clearly on people from hundreds of feet away. The city had added hundreds of cameras after Mayor Mitch Landrieu opened the Real-Time Crime Monitoring Center in 2017, run by the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. On August 9, 2018 Bixby asked that office for maps of the approximately 400 publicly visible cameras in the Real-Time Crime Center network, excluding traffic, red-light and school-zone cameras, for its policies on keeping records of past camera locations, and for records on the center’s staffing. Five days later the City Attorney’s Office refused the maps, citing an exemption for investigative technical equipment and physical security information created in the prevention of terrorist-related activity. Bixby argued that the cameras were being used in ordinary criminal investigations and that defense lawyers needed the same opportunity as prosecutors to identify footage that could establish innocence or challenge an official account. Schwartzmann and Bruce Hamilton of the ACLU of Louisiana represented her with Jamila Johnson, Liyah Brown and Conor Gaffney of the Southern Poverty Law Center. On May 3, 2019 Judge Ethel Simms Julien of the Civil District Court granted a writ of mandamus, found that the office was not an intelligence agency under the statute, ordered the maps produced and awarded attorney’s fees and costs. On December 5, 2019 the Louisiana Fourth Circuit affirmed over one dissent: the right of access to public records is fundamental, access can be denied only when the law specifically and unequivocally provides otherwise, the exemption had always been strictly construed, and the record showed that the office had no investigatory or law-enforcement function and that none of its components focused on intelligence gathering; as the prevailing party, Bixby was entitled to fees. The Louisiana Supreme Court later upheld the ruling. The affirmed mandamus gave defense lawyers the same practical opportunity to locate footage that could establish innocence or test an official account, making the public camera network accessible from both sides of a criminal case: a network operated by government could not be public enough to prosecute with and secret enough to keep defense counsel from finding its footage.

Ten Hours in Jail for an Information Table

Luke Fontana, the environmental activist who leads Save Our Wetlands, set up an information table for the organization in a public space during the April 2018 French Quarter Festival. New Orleans police arrested him under the city’s clean-zone ordinance, No. 32,047; he was injured in the arrest and spent ten hours in jail for distributing information, and the charges were later dropped. The city adopted a clean zone again for the 2019 festival. On Monday, April 8, 2019 Schwartzmann’s ACLU team filed a First Amendment action in the Eastern District of Louisiana asking the court to declare the ordinance unconstitutional and bar the police from enforcing it to restrict speech. “Expressing an opinion about a political cause in a public space should never, under any circumstances,” she said, “land someone in jail.” Two days later, on April 10, the City signed a consent agreement: the police department would not enforce the clean-zone ordinance or other municipal ordinances against Fontana for speech on behalf of Save Our Wetlands at the 2019 French Quarter Festival, while the broader challenge to the ordinance proceeded.

A Rubber Bullet Enclosed

Schwartzmann left the ACLU in May 2020 to found Tulane Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, established with funding from the Stanton Foundation, as its director and a professor of the practice; in its first year she would supervise five students on cases from free speech to the right to peacefully assemble, and teach a seminar on federal court and litigation practice. On Wednesday night, June 3, 2020, as marchers protesting racism and police brutality after the murder of George Floyd moved onto the Pontchartrain Expressway toward the Crescent City Connection, New Orleans police fired tear gas into the crowd, and someone in it screamed that they were shooting rubber bullets. The department said at least four times, Superintendent Shaun Ferguson repeating it on Thursday, that no rubber bullets had been fired and that only gas had been used. Within her first week directing the clinic, on Sunday, June 7, Schwartzmann wrote to Chief Arlinda Westbrook of the department’s Public Integrity Bureau, to Susan Hutson, the Independent Police Monitor, and to Jonathan Aronie, the federal court’s monitor of the police consent decree, with copies to seven City Council members. She enclosed a rubber bullet that had struck someone on the bridge that night, photographs of injured people, among them a woman’s bruised chest and an open wound on a man’s inner thigh, and photographs of other projectiles that did not match it, and she wrote that multiple types of projectiles had been fired. The letter identified the conflict between that evidence and the department’s public account, said that ranking staff knew the denial was false, asked the department to state immediately what weapons had been used against people on the bridge, who decided to use them and why, and asked the recipients to explain the Chief’s statements and get the community answers at once. It placed the material before police leadership while the event and the official response were still under immediate review. She asked the department to “immediately tell the truth about what weapons were used,” and wrote: “I am deeply concerned that the material in my possession is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Within two days the department’s senior leadership apologized. Ferguson acknowledged that members of the Special Operations Unit had used what he called rubber balls along with tear gas to disperse the crowd on the bridge, without the approval of the commanders on the scene, Captain Bryan Lampard of SWAT and Captain Lejon Roberts, a use that violated normal police protocol, and he opened an investigation whose outcomes ranged from reprimand to termination. “I acknowledge and want to make a formal apology to our citizens,” he said. “I received information that we deployed tear gas and tear gas only.” Schwartzmann’s letter had established the factual record quickly enough to change the department’s position before the investigation moved forward.

A Fine and Imprisonment May Be Imposed

For about twenty years the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office sent witnesses and crime victims papers labeled “SUBPOENA” in bold that bore the office’s seal, cited state law, directed the recipient to appear before the District Attorney for the Parish of Orleans, and warned: “A FINE AND IMPRISONMENT MAY BE IMPOSED FOR FAILURE TO OBEY THIS NOTICE.” No judge or clerk had issued them. Louisiana law requires prosecutors to channel proposed subpoenas through a court; under Article 66 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a court may order the clerk to issue one on the district attorney’s written motion setting out reasonable grounds. Reporters at The Lens published the documents in April 2017, and District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro banned them the same day; prosecutors in Jefferson Parish and on the North Shore had used similar papers and stopped after publication. The papers had no legal effect, but prosecutors sometimes used them as the basis for arresting witnesses, misrepresented information in applications for material-witness warrants, and used the threat of arrest to force cooperation, so that people accused of no crime, often the victims of one, spent days, weeks and sometimes months in jail. In October 2017 the ACLU, the ACLU of Louisiana and Civil Rights Corps, later joined by Venable LLP, sued Cannizzaro, the office and individual prosecutors in federal court. Renata Singleton, a domestic-violence victim who had declined to speak with prosecutors, had received two of the papers at her home from an investigator and had not complied. Lazonia Baham, whose daughter’s boyfriend had been murdered, was pressured to give testimony contradicting her memory, refused several of the papers, and after an assistant district attorney sought a material-witness warrant was jailed for more than a week. A victim of child molestation and child pornography, identified as Jane Doe, was ordered by one of the papers to appear for questioning and threatened with arrest by the assistant district attorney, and met with him privately. Fayona Bailey and Tiffany LaCroix, potential witnesses in two murder cases, each received one; their lawyers moved to quash, prosecutors withdrew the papers, and neither was called. Silence Is Violence, a victims’ advocacy organization, diverted its resources to protecting victims from the coercive tactics. Schwartzmann helped challenge the practice, and the Louisiana Legislature restricted material-witness procedures in 2019.

The prosecutors invoked absolute immunity, the doctrine that ordinarily shields core prosecutorial acts tied to the judicial phase of a criminal case. Creating and issuing the papers, they argued, related to the core prosecutorial function of preparing evidence and testimony for trial; they relied on the Supreme Court’s language in Imbler about a prosecutor’s effort to control the presentation of a witness’s testimony, and they noted that the papers went out after charges had been filed. On April 21, 2020 a Fifth Circuit panel of Judges Elrod, Southwick and Haynes, in an opinion by Judge Haynes, held at the motion-to-dismiss stage that the individual prosecutors were not entitled to absolute immunity on the subpoena-related state-law claims. The court applied the functional test that separates investigative from advocatory conduct and adopted the Ninth Circuit’s rule that “Where the prosecutor has side-stepped the judicial process” he “has forfeited the protections the law offers to those who work within the process.” The defendants had never used the fake subpoenas to compel anyone to testify at trial; Imbler was different because those prosecutors were controlling testimony during a court break; and the Supreme Court has never held that the timing of a prosecutor’s actions controls whether he has absolute immunity. The allegations described investigative behavior that was not intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process. The ruling turned on the alleged use of papers that bypassed the judicial process Louisiana law required for genuine subpoenas rather than carrying out an authorized court function, and the court affirmed the district court’s denial of absolute immunity, leaving the defendants to try to meet their burden at summary judgment.

The Monitor inside the Prosecutor’s Office

The remaining plaintiffs, Singleton, Baham and LaCroix, and the office’s new administration under District Attorney Jason Williams settled in October 2021; a settlement in principle had been announced in July, and earlier settling plaintiffs, Silence Is Violence among them, had already received payments. The agreement ended the fake-subpoena practice: no document that appears to be a subpoena may go out without judicial authorization. It required documented communications with survivors and witnesses, a grievance procedure for them and better contact records, rigorous annual training on dealing with victims and witnesses, and regular internal audits of material-witness warrants so that outstanding ones are closed. It limited the warrants themselves to an extraordinary measure used only when absolutely necessary: none in any misdemeanor or sex-crime case, none against witnesses known to be pregnant or seriously ill, none against crime victims in felony cases unless exceptional circumstances apply, no cash bail for witnesses arrested on them, and every warrant request reviewed by a supervising attorney and free of misrepresentations or material omissions. The office agreed to pay $120,000 to the ACLU Foundation in two installments over the following year, allocated by the plaintiffs and their attorneys, and the three plaintiffs received significant financial compensation.

The settlement added independent external supervision, which a district attorney’s office rarely accepts; monitors are common for police departments and jails, including in New Orleans, and almost unheard of for prosecutors. The parties selected Schwartzmann, then director of Tulane Law School’s First Amendment Clinic, to monitor compliance for a fixed term of forty-two months beginning within fifteen days of the settlement taking effect, and she agreed to do it without charging the office. Her review included forms, warrant requests, case files, training materials and daily office practices: under the terms she would periodically access the office’s data on material-witness warrants and on grievances from victims and witnesses, report potential noncompliance to Williams, and, if a substantial problem went unresolved, notify the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who could ask the federal judge to intervene. The monitoring terms gave her access to the documents and daily procedures needed to test whether an invitation was again being presented with the force of a court order, so that the settlement’s safeguard operated through continuing inspection of what the office actually issued and used. Williams, who called her uniquely qualified, put the arrangement this way: “We measure air quality and water quality.” “Seems to me that we should be measuring the quality of justice being delivered as well.”

A Clinic Built for Local Journalists

When Schwartzmann organized the clinic she began with a listening tour. Local reporters described a recurring barrier: Louisiana’s public-records law is strong, with few exemptions and firm enforcement rights, but enforcing it requires a lawsuit in state court, and small newsrooms, in a state with very few media lawyers, often lacked the capacity to bring the actions needed to obtain withheld records. Under her direction the clinic secured a $375,000 grant from the Legal Clinic Fund for Local News, supported by Democracy Fund, the Klarman Family Foundation and Solidarity Giving, for a full-time Louisiana-licensed Sunshine Fellow to lead public-records litigation, conduct intake for regional journalists, negotiate and litigate other matters supporting local media, mentor students and give Louisiana-specific know-your-rights presentations to journalists statewide. The program combined direct representation with intake, negotiation, litigation, student supervision and access training for regional journalists, and it expanded the clinic from individual disputes into a standing resource for news organizations seeking government information. “When journalists cannot get documents or access information, stories go untold,” she said. “Civic dialogue and democracy suffer, and the public cannot hold its government accountable.”

From its 2020 launch the clinic handled dozens of matters on public speech, protest and dissent, government retaliation against speakers, and censorship of constituents, public-school students and government employees. Its clients included city workers suing New Orleans over a social-media policy meant to silence negative views, librarians fighting book removals, a man told he could not fly political flags bearing expletives from his truck, musicians threatened with arrest for playing in the French Quarter, residents seeking to protest industrial pollution, journalists facing obstacles to covering stories, and speakers with sharply different political views; the matters ran to public meetings, book restrictions, protest permits, street music, environmental demonstrations, government-employee speech and press access. In February 2023 the clinic sued State Senator Katrina Jackson for Maya Detiege, a New Orleans resident whom the senator had permanently blocked on Twitter after Detiege criticized her sponsorship of Louisiana’s abortion ban; “The internet is the modern public square,” Schwartzmann wrote in the complaint. Student-attorneys interviewed clients, preserved evidence, drafted pleadings, negotiated with public bodies and appeared in active constitutional matters under faculty supervision. In 2023 the New Orleans Bar Foundation presented her with its Mark Moreau Award for Public Interest Law, one of the New Orleans Bar Association’s highest honors, named for the former executive director of Southeast Louisiana Legal Services who was counsel on the case establishing the right of the poor to receive medical care in hospitals; the award carries a $1,000 gift to the recipient’s nonprofit, and the foundation’s president, Colleen Jarrott, said the selection committee had found that Schwartzmann met all nine of its criteria. Her contribution, across a Louisiana practice spanning religion, due process, search and seizure, jail conditions, public records, speech, press and government accountability, was the legal capacity to act while the meeting, protest, publication dispute or records denial still mattered to the client.

Personal, Impertinent or Slanderous

Weston Merriott, a Bossier Parish watchdog who publishes news about northwest Louisiana politics on a website he founded, followed a 2023 petition to impose term limits on Bossier City’s elected officials and went to City Council meetings to question them. On July 18, 2023 he spoke about following the will of the people and not delaying the petition; the clerk had read the decorum rules, under which anyone addressing the Council was permitted three minutes. On August 1 he criticized members for hiring outside counsel to delay action and questioned that counsel’s impartiality, since the firm had represented Councilmember Montgomery; Montgomery and Councilmember Free interrupted him, Free told him to stay on topic, and City Attorney Jacobs called his comments absolutely false. On August 15 the clerk read the Council’s policy: “Any person making personal, impertinent or slanderous remarks or who shall become boisterous while addressing the Council shall be forthwith, by the President Pro-tem, barred.” Free and Councilmember Darby interrupted him again; Free told him to stay on topic and only ask questions, and Darby had the procedures reread. His August 20 letter asked the Council to respect his First Amendment rights and stop interrupting him. On September 5, when the Council took up the validity of the petition, he questioned the action and the outside counsel’s impartiality; Montgomery asked that he be removed, Free let him finish but told him to make no accusations against councilmembers, and the minutes, approved unrevised, recorded that he became disruptive. Directly afterward several members met privately. A news outlet released audio of Darby and Montgomery discussing limiting public comment to the beginning of meetings, with Montgomery asking whether four votes to two would be enough with Free absent and the clerk answering yes; the City Attorney threatened to involve the FBI in wiretapping charges against whoever released the recording and opened an internal investigation, and when Merriott complained to the Louisiana Attorney General, the City Attorney, writing to the Attorney General, confirmed that the members had met to change the rules in reaction to Merriott’s comments.

Through Tulane’s First Amendment Clinic, Schwartzmann filed a federal action for Merriott in Shreveport in October 2023 against Bossier City, two council members and the city attorney. The complaint presented First Amendment and Louisiana Open Meetings Law claims based on the rules, the interruptions and removal threats, and the alleged private meeting concerning revised restrictions, connecting the written policy to repeated interruptions, retaliation for criticism and the closed-door session at which a quorum discussed changing the policy; it pleaded that the proposed resolution eliminating public comment on agenda items was retaliatory and served to silence his core political speech. It sought damages and fees, a declaration that the city had violated the First Amendment and the Open Meetings Law, an order barring enforcement of the speech-curtailing rules, First Amendment training for the Council, and removal of the word disruptive from the September 5 minutes. The pleading preserved distinct theories under the First Amendment and Louisiana law, challenging both the language used to control speakers in the chamber and the private process alleged to have produced the revised restrictions.

The district court dismissed much of the case under Rule 12(b)(6), and the clinic carried the record to the Fifth Circuit. Student-attorneys and recent graduates Raleigh Hightower and Ezekiel Millrood researched, briefed, prepared and argued the appeal in March 2026 with the clinic’s continuing litigation team: Bruce Hamilton, by then its director, legal fellow Annie Cleveland, and former clinic attorneys Melia Cerrato and Virginia Hamrick. The panel had three distinct records to examine: the text of the public-comment rules, the officials’ interruptions and removal threats, and the alleged private meeting of a council quorum, which together supported the speech, retaliation, viewpoint-discrimination and open-meetings claims. The City argued that Merriott could point only to his own situation, that the policy’s words were commonly understood dictionary terms, and that the Council acts only by majority vote. On June 25, 2026, in an opinion by Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez for a panel with Judges Clement and Douglas, the Fifth Circuit reversed much of the dismissal. Merriott had identified applications of the policy distinct from his own and plausibly alleged that it was overbroad: it “prohibits speakers from uttering an infinite number of protected, relevant statements,” and “Bossier City set the scope of its Policy, and it is nearly limitless.” On vagueness, “The existence of a common dictionary definition does not automatically cure any constitutional defect”; slanderous was void for vagueness, personal and impertinent turned on a listener’s sensitivity alone, and violations turned only on the listener’s discretion. Personal, impertinent and slanderous were viewpoint-based restrictions and therefore unreasonable restrictions on content. The Council had enacted the policy, so it was official policy for purposes of municipal liability, and an interruption, the court held, is tantamount to removal. The three interruptions sufficed for retaliation, since Merriott self-censors for fear of repercussion, a cognizable injury. A meeting of four of seven members was a quorum conducting some survey of opinions under the Open Meetings Law, and hosting a secret meeting, the court wrote, is far from technical. The court reinstated the claims that the policies were overbroad, unconstitutionally vague and enforced through viewpoint discrimination, restored the retaliation allegations and the Louisiana-law claim concerning the private meeting, and returned the restored claims to the district court. The case placed student lawyers inside the full path from factual development and briefing to argument before a federal appellate panel, carrying forward the clinic model Schwartzmann established, and that spring Millrood received the Clinical Legal Education Association’s Outstanding Clinic Student Award for his work on the litigation.

Less Than a Hundred Feet

By June 2025 Schwartzmann had joined Protect Democracy as Special Counsel, working on free expression and the protection of dissent. That month, as a reviewing stand went up in front of the White House for the Army’s 250th-birthday parade and the President promised to meet protesters with “very heavy force,” she and Hayden Johnson, the organization’s counsel for free expression and the right to dissent, wrote in Just Security that the threat, with the troop deployment and the National Guard memorandum, would chill peaceful protest and could lead to retaliatory force, arrests and discriminatory limits on access, including on press coverage. “The official threat of retaliation or force used in response to speech will itself cause people to self-censor,” they wrote, and “Federal officials and military personnel must heed their duty to the Constitution and our democratic values.” Courts had enjoined disproportionate force against demonstrators in Denver, Portland and Seattle in 2020, and the First Amendment still permitted legitimate law enforcement in response to law-breaking. The move to national constitutional work carried forward experience from Louisiana trial courts, the Fifth Circuit, monitored settlements and public-records litigation.

Gray’s Landing is a 209-unit affordable-housing building in Portland, Oregon, owned by REACH Community Development, across the street from the Portland ICE facility and at its closest point less than a hundred feet from it; its tenants include young families, retirees, people with disabilities, domestic-violence survivors and military veterans. In the months before the suit, during mostly peaceful protests at the facility, federal officers repeatedly fired tear gas, smoke grenades, pepper balls and other chemical munitions toward the building, close enough to seep into apartments, hallways and common areas. Residents, children, seniors, veterans and people with disabilities among them, reported breathing problems, chest pain, vomiting, dizziness, burning eyes and skin, falls, panic attacks and repeated trips to emergency rooms; video showed people covering their faces and rubbing their eyes in interior hallways and elevator areas, and a paramedic told one resident that the gas was worse inside the building than outside. Some sealed their homes and wore gas masks indoors. Josiah Burks, eighteen, who had first been tear-gassed at home at thirteen during the 2020 protests, closed his windows at the sound of canisters and the gas still came in, with burning eyes, coughing and trouble breathing that followed him to track and football practice. “This is my home, and chemical agents have repeatedly entered our apartments,” said Mindy King, a resident and plaintiff.

Twelve residents and the entities that own and operate the complex sued the Department of Homeland Security in the District of Oregon on December 5, 2025, with Democracy Forward, Protect Democracy, Jacobson Lawyers Group and Bradley Bernstein Sands as counsel and Schwartzmann serving as Special Counsel on the matter; the case went to Judge Amy M. Baggio. They challenged the deployments under the Fifth Amendment, including the right to bodily integrity, as an infringement of personal security, freedom of movement and the safe use of their homes, and moved for a preliminary injunction on December 29. A first amended complaint and a superseding motion followed on January 30, 2026, and the court held an evidentiary hearing on February 13 and heard argument on February 18.

On March 6, 2026 Judge Baggio granted the motion. The government had argued that the residents lacked standing, that it unquestionably has the power to enforce federal law and protect federal employees and property, that the Supreme Court’s O’Bannon decision foreclosed the claim, and that environmental-exposure cases defeated it. The court answered that the challenged use of chemical munitions was not only likely to happen again, it had; that the government is required to wield its power responsibly and lawfully; that O’Bannon is a procedural due process case with little bearing on a substantive due process claim; and that none of the environmental cases concerned a record in which the government intentionally and repeatedly deploys chemical toxins. Applying the Winter standard and the Ninth Circuit’s serious-questions approach, she held that the right to bodily integrity is fundamental and implicit in the concept of liberty, that under Lewis only the most egregious official conduct is arbitrary in the constitutional sense, and that officials act with deliberate indifference when they disregard a known or obvious consequence of their actions. The residents had shown likely deliberate indifference based on the volume and location of the deployments, the quantity of munitions used and the distance to the impact areas, conflicts with the agency’s own use-of-force guidance, and the government’s specific notice of harm to the resident plaintiffs: “the Resident Plaintiffs have established a cognizable deprivation of the constitutional right to bodily integrity.” The order barred the Department of Homeland Security from using tear gas, smoke grenades, pepper balls and other chemical munitions in ways likely to reach Gray’s Landing while the case proceeds, except when necessary to protect human life, and the court denied a bond and a stay. “The Court recognizes a preliminary injunction is an extraordinary remedy,” she wrote, “but this is an extraordinary case.” The injunction supplied immediate constitutional protection for occupied homes while the merits were litigated, connecting the residents’ bodily-integrity claim to a concrete limit on further deployments near the community; its object was prospective, keeping toxic agents out of occupied homes rather than pricing a past injury.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for the families at Gray’s Landing, but it also serves as a fierce rebuke of a federal agency that believes it can wage war on American neighborhoods with impunity,” Schwartzmann said. Margaret Salazar, REACH’s chief executive, called it an important step toward accountability. The government appealed on March 16, 2026. In the Ninth Circuit, Brenna Scully of the Justice Department argued that the order was overly broad and not grounded in law, that it limited officers’ responses and irreparably harmed the government, and that because wind carries chemical irritants it could effectively bar them in urban areas: “Chemical irritants are a critical defensive law enforcement tool.” Stephen Wirth, for the residents, answered that agents had operated under similar restrictions for weeks without a documented problem while the residents’ harm was real and continuing, and that one resident’s Cushing’s disease had been made worse by the gas, so that further exposure threatened her life. Judge Ana de Alba told the government’s lawyer: “I don’t see the court’s preliminary injunction being that different from what DHS is already requiring.” The panel heard the merits of the appeal on July 10, 2026, and as of late August no decision on the merits had issued.