Katie Schwartzmann

The District Attorney’s Unissued Subpoenas

The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office once sent witnesses and crime victims papers bearing the office’s seal and threatening fines or imprisonment for noncompliance. The documents called themselves subpoenas, but no judge or clerk had issued them.

A 2017 federal suit challenged those papers and related requests for material-witness warrants. People accused of no crime—including some who had reported crimes—were detained for days, weeks, or months through procedures presented with the appearance of judicial authority.

The Louisiana Legislature restricted material-witness procedures in 2019. The civil litigation continued toward rules governing the prosecutor’s office itself.

Monitoring the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office

The remaining plaintiffs and the office’s new administration settled in October 2021. The agreement ended the fake-subpoena practice, required documented communications, established internal audits and training, and limited the use of material-witness warrants.

The settlement added independent external supervision. The parties selected Schwartzmann—then director of Tulane Law School’s First Amendment Clinic—to monitor compliance.

Monitoring required more than reading a revised policy. She examined forms, warrant requests, case files, training materials, and office practices to determine whether an invitation was again being presented with the force of a court order.

The Teacher Whose Urine Became Government Evidence

Peggy Reno was a veteran teacher and two-time East Baton Rouge Teacher of the Year. On September 24, 2008, a student punched her. No one suspected that Reno was intoxicated. The school board nevertheless required a urine test under a policy that automatically tested teachers after workplace accidents or injuries.

A urine sample can reveal prescription medication, pregnancy, and medical conditions as well as drug use. For a public employee, compulsory collection is a government search. An injury did not supply individualized suspicion that Reno was impaired.

Schwartzmann’s ACLU of Louisiana represented the teachers’ federation with Yigal Bander. A federal consent decree filed in May 2009 ended automatic post-accident testing. Teachers could be tested only when the school system possessed reasonable suspicion of intoxication.

The remedy inserted a reasoned decision before the collection of biological evidence. Employment by a public school no longer meant surrendering bodily privacy every time a teacher was hurt at work.

Found Incompetent, Left in Parish Jail

Louisiana courts had found more than one hundred pretrial detainees incompetent to stand trial and ordered inpatient restorative treatment. Feliciana Forensic Facility was full. People who had not been convicted of a crime remained in parish jails for months or years without the treatment needed to understand the proceedings or assist their lawyers.

The Advocacy Center and an individual detainee sued state officials with the ACLU of Louisiana and a Kirkland & Ellis pro bono team. Schwartzmann represented the plaintiffs with Barry Gerharz, Nell Hahn, Miranda Tait, Conception Otero, Marjorie Lindblom, Maura Klugman, Adam Humann, and other counsel.

In August 2010, the federal court ordered transfer to Feliciana within twenty-one days. Limited funding did not justify continued detention without trial and with almost no restorative care.

Two Days for an Emergency, Thirty Days for Treatment

The 2011 consent decree converted the initial injunction into a treatment system. Detainees with emergency mental-health needs had to be transferred within two working days after assessment. Other urgent cases required transfer within ten working days. Inpatient treatment had to begin within thirty days of a finding of need.

Adequate testing and continuing reports allowed the parties and federal court to measure compliance. The deadlines connected due process to medicine: a prosecution could not remain suspended indefinitely while a presumptively innocent person deteriorated in a jail unequipped to restore competency.

The Empty Watch Post

William Goetzee entered the Orleans Parish jail in August 2011 after an apparent suicide attempt. The forty-eight-year-old Coast Guard reservist exhibited suicidal behavior. Jail policy required continuous observation, but the deputy assigned to watch him left the post.

Goetzee died in his cell while the responsibility for his safety rested entirely with the jail. Schwartzmann represented his family with other civil-rights lawyers in Nagle v. Gusman.

Three days before the scheduled March 2016 trial, the defendants agreed to a $1.75 million settlement. The deputy had already pleaded guilty to malfeasance in office. The jail was operating under a federal consent decree addressing broader dangerous conditions.

The lawyers showed what “continuous observation” required in practice: a designated employee at an occupied post who could see the detainee and respond in time.

Ramon Torres’s Immigration Hold

Ramon Torres had been a United States citizen for nearly a decade when Ascension Parish jail staff kept him after a court ordered his release. He possessed a Louisiana driver’s license, a United States passport, a Social Security card, and work-security credentials.

Jail staff placed Torres on an immigration hold because they suspected he was undocumented. He remained detained for three days after the release order and four days overall. A staff member told him that the jail called ICE on Hispanic people.

Schwartzmann and Bruce Hamilton represented Torres with cooperating lawyer James Bullman. The Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment action challenged detention based on perceived ethnicity rather than lawful immigration evidence.

In February 2021, the court approved a settlement requiring Ascension Parish to pay Torres $50,000 in damages plus attorney fees. Torres remained jailed despite his passport, driver’s license, Social Security card, work credentials, and a court order requiring release.

Four Hundred Cameras and a Public Map

Orleans public defender Laura Bixby obtained crime-camera footage in a client’s case and sought a map showing the locations of approximately 400 publicly visible cameras in New Orleans’s Real-Time Crime Center network.

The City withheld the map under an exemption for equipment and security information related to terrorism prevention. Bixby argued that the cameras were being used in ordinary criminal investigations and that defense lawyers needed the same opportunity to identify footage that could establish innocence or challenge an official account.

Bixby’s appellate team included Schwartzmann, Bruce Hamilton, and lawyers from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The trial court issued mandamus, ordered disclosure, and awarded fees and costs. In December 2019, the Louisiana Fourth Circuit affirmed.

The court ordered the City to disclose the camera map so defense lawyers could identify footage that might support or undermine the prosecution’s account.

Ten Hours in Jail for an Information Table

Environmental activist Luke Fontana set up a table for Save Our Wetlands during the 2018 French Quarter Festival. Police arrested him under New Orleans’s “clean zone” rules. He was injured during the arrest and spent ten hours in jail for distributing information in a public space.

Schwartzmann’s ACLU team filed a First Amendment action in April 2019. Two days later, the City agreed not to harass or arrest Fontana for Save Our Wetlands speech at that year’s festival while the broader challenge proceeded.

The consent agreement was interim protection rather than a final merits judgment. The agreement allowed Fontana to distribute information at the 2019 festival while the broader First Amendment claim continued.

Louisiana Leadership and National Civil-Rights Work

Schwartzmann served as legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Louisiana office, and director of Tulane Law School’s First Amendment Clinic before joining Protect Democracy as Special Counsel.

Her Louisiana work also challenged unrestricted public grants to favored churches and secured a settlement permanently stopping the challenged earmarks. In Leonard v. Louisiana, she and Nelson Cameron obtained summary judgment protecting an incarcerated man’s access to The Final Call as a religious publication.

At Protect Democracy, Schwartzmann now litigates federal-force and protest-rights questions, including the Gray’s Landing challenge to chemical munitions entering residential property. Her earlier Louisiana matters established enforceable limits on fake subpoenas, suspicionless employee testing, prolonged competency detention, immigration holds, and secrecy surrounding public surveillance.