Court clerk staffers in New Orleans dig through landfill to find wrongly tossed court records

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Court docket clerk staffers in New Orleans dig by means of landfill to search out wrongly tossed courtroom data

By Debra Cassens Weiss

August 14, 2025, 9:26 am CDT

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has ordered the Louisiana State Police to analyze why prison courtroom data had been tossed right into a landfill, forcing prison clerk of courtroom staffers to wade by means of the particles final week to get better them.

“It is a disgusting abuse of energy and a slap within the face to crime victims,” Landry mentioned on X, previously often known as Twitter.

NOLA.com has protection.

Movies shared on-line present employees standing in particles whereas recovering mangled paperwork, the Related Press stories. Darren Lombard, clerk of the prison district courtroom, mentioned he labored with employees members to dig by means of the rubbish, however not all of the paperwork had been recovered.

“The final day we had been on the market, it stormed a bit, so we recovered nearly the whole lot we may,” he informed WWL-TV.

Lombard mentioned the Louisiana secretary of state’s workplace has a course of in place for lacking or destroyed paperwork that will likely be used if a wanted doc can’t be discovered. The tossed paperwork had been from the Fifties to the Nineteen Seventies.

The tossed Orleans Parish paperwork included case appeals, docket books and proof logs in circumstances of homicide, rape and armed theft, based on NOLA.com. Felony data should be completely retained within the parish.

The paperwork had been being positioned inside trailers at a Division of Public Works upkeep yard as a result of the prison courtroom clerk’s workplace doesn’t have adequate storage, mentioned Joe Menace, the New Orleans chief administrative officer, in an interview with NOLA.com. The paperwork had been discarded when public works staffers had been cleansing out the trailers from the Federal Emergency Administration Company.

The town has reached a lease to purchase settlement for a brand new web site to retailer all courtroom paperwork, Menace mentioned.

GETTING HANDS DIRTY:

These are movies of Orleans Parish Prison Clerk Darren Lombard’s employees

…digging by means of a landfill…

For courtroom data that metropolis workers wrongly dumped final week.@FOX8NOLA pic.twitter.com/WTvZI86U4c

— Chris Joseph (@ChrisJosephNews) August 5, 2025

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