Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams drew a line with Eric Matthews.
At a June hearing, Williams’ office fought Matthews’ bid for a new trial over the 1994 beating death of a 2-year-old girl with a belt.
But by then, the civil rights division that Williams created in 2021 -- soon after taking office as a progressive reformer -- had cleared a path to the courthouse for Matthews.
Thirty years after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder, Matthews' attorneys and lawyers in the civil rights division teamed up on language to waive time limits and other legal obstacles. That allowed Matthews to argue that his defense lawyer failed him.
Wiliams’ office had second thoughts, but Judge Leon Roche vacated the conviction anyway. Matthews is now out on bond awaiting a retrial.
His case is among hundreds touched by Williams’ civil rights division, which has come under fire recently as critics question the lengths it has gone to help shorten or end the sentences of long-serving prisoners.
That work, and just where Williams' office draws the line on post-conviction relief, will be under a political spotlight Thursday at the state Capitol. Williams is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee, looking to head off further attempts to curtail work he has portrayed as righting the wrongs of a troubled past.
The 9 a.m. hearing is slated to kick off with a presentation by Attorney General Liz Murrill’s office, which recently announced a review of at least 40 recent cases in which Williams’ office facilitated relief for prisoners.
Williams recently defended the civil rights work, while boasting of a mandate to correct injuries that he said the Orleans Parish justice system had unleashed over decades.
“I cannot turn a blind eye when evidence is presented in a court of law to an injustice or violation of the Constitution that must be dealt with,” he said.
Murrill has suggested that Williams’ office has taken that mission to an activist extreme.
“Post-conviction relief is not a mechanism for revising a sentence that is long final, simply because the District Attorney has a difference of opinion with the legislature and reviewing courts on criminal justice policy,” Murrill said in a statement.
It remains unclear if Murrill could reverse any of those deals, each of which a judge approved.
Former prosecutors also are scheduled to testify at Thursday’s hearing. Laura Rodrigue, a former Orleans Parish prosecutor and the daughter of former two-term Orleans Parish DA Leon Cannizzaro, said she expects to appear.
Rodrigue and others have accused Williams’ office of pushing breaks for a flurry of long-serving inmates before a change in state law went into effect Aug. 1 aimed at restricting the practice. The legislature this year curtailed the power of district attorneys and judges in Louisiana to reach post-conviction plea deals, while also empowering the attorney general to challenge them.
State prison data show that just shy of 300 prisoners from Orleans Parish have had their sentences reduced since Williams took office in early 2021. About four in five of them have been freed, according to the data, which does not reflect a surge this year in those releases.?
Sen. Jay Morris, R-West Monroe, who chairs the Senate Judiciary C committee, has said he expects Thursday’s hearing to be the first of several.
Morris has pressed a national agenda by Republican leaders to find ways to rein in progressive-minded Democrats elected to city prosecutors’ offices. This year, he pushed a constitutional amendment to allow the attorney general to step in when a local district attorney “goes off the rails.”
That effort ran afoul of the powerful Louisiana District Attorney’s Association, however, and it failed in the statehouse.
The association has remained largely quiet as Murrill and Williams have sparred over post-conviction deals from New Orleans.
District attorneys statewide have confected post-conviction deals to a far lesser degree over many years, and Morris has acknowledged that some district attorneys outside of New Orleans have expressed concern at the impact of any new attempts to handcuff Williams.
