a Better Bubble™
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
In February, a prosecutor from a rural area outside Baton Rouge asked members of Louisiana’s Senate judiciary committee to imagine a frightening scene: You are home with your wife at 4 a.m. when suddenly a 17-year-old with a gun appears. The teenager won’t hesitate, District Attorney Tony Clayton said. “He will kill you and your wife.”
According to Clayton, teenagers were terrorizing the state without fear of consequences. The only way to stop them was to prosecute all 17-year-olds in adult court, regardless of the offense, and lock them up in prison. Law enforcement officials from around the state made similar arguments. Legislators quickly passed a bill that lowered the age at which the justice system must treat defendants as adults from 18 to 17.
But according to a review of arrests in the five months since the law took effect, most of the 17-year-olds booked in three of the state’s largest parishes have not been accused of violent crimes. Verite News and ProPublica identified 203 17-year-olds who were arrested in Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes between April and September. A total of 141, or 69%, were arrested for offenses that are not listed as violent crimes in Louisiana law, according to our analysis of jail rosters, court records and district attorney data.
Just 13% of the defendants — a little over two dozen — have been accused of the sort of violent crimes that lawmakers cited when arguing for the legislation, such as rape, armed robbery and murder. Prosecutors were able to move such cases to adult court even before the law was changed.
The larger group of lesser offenses includes damaging property, trespassing, theft under $1,000, disturbing the peace, marijuana possession, illegal carrying of weapons and burglary. They also include offenses that involve the use of force, such as simple battery, but those are not listed in state law as violent crimes either, and they can be prosecuted as misdemeanors depending on the circumstances.
In one case in New Orleans, a boy took a car belonging to his mother’s boyfriend without permission so he could check out flooding during Hurricane Francine last month, according to a police report. When the teen returned the car, the front bumper was damaged. The boyfriend called police and the teen was arrested for unauthorized use of a vehicle. In another case, a boy was charged with battery after he got into a fight with his brother about missing a school bus.
In July, a 17-year-old girl was charged with resisting arrest and interfering with a law enforcement investigation. She had shoved a police officer as he was taking her older sister into custody for a minor charge resulting from a fight with another girl. None of those defendants have had an opportunity to enter a plea so far; convictions could result in jail or prison time of up to two years.
In juvenile court, teenagers facing charges such as these could be sentenced to a detention facility, but the juvenile system is mandated to focus on rehabilitation and sentences are generally shorter than in adult court, juvenile justice advocates said. And in the juvenile system, only arrests for violent crimes and repeat offenses are public record. But because these 17-year-olds are in the adult system, they all have public arrest records that can prevent them from getting jobs or housing.
Rachel Gassert, the former policy director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, said there was one word to describe what she felt when Verite News and ProPublica shared their findings: “Despair.”
Eight years ago, Gassert and other criminal justice advocates convinced lawmakers to raise the age for adult prosecution from 17 to 18 years old, pointing to research that shows that the human brain does not fully develop until early adulthood and that youth are more likely to reoffend when they are prosecuted as adults. The law enacted this spring was the culmination of a two-year effort to reverse that.
“The whole push to repeal Raise the Age was entirely political and all about throwing children under the bus,” Gassert said. “And now we are seeing the tire treads on their backs.”
Gov. Jeff Landry’s office, Clayton and state Sen. Heather Cloud, R-Turkey Creek, who sponsored the bill to roll back Raise the Age, did not respond to requests for comment. The Louisiana District Attorneys Association, which supported the bill, declined to comment.
The whole push to repeal Raise the Age was entirely political and all about throwing children under the bus. And now we are seeing the tire treads on their backs.
—Rachel Gassert, former policy director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s RightsLouisiana is the only state to have passed and then fully reversed Raise the Age legislation. It’s one of four states, along with Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin, that automatically prosecute all 17-year-olds as adults. In other states, 17-year-olds can be prosecuted as adults only in special circumstances, such as when they are charged with a serious, violent crime like murder.
Landry and his Republican allies argued that Raise the Age and other liberal policies were responsible for a pandemic-era uptick in violent offenses committed by juveniles in Louisiana. They said juvenile courts, where a sentence can’t extend past a defendant’s 21st birthday, are too lenient.
Juvenile justice advocates argued that the law would cause teenagers to be prosecuted as adults for behaviors that are typical for immature adolescents. These 17-year-olds would face long-lasting consequences, including arrest records and prison time. And the harm would fall largely on Black children. Nearly 9 out of every 10 of the 17-year-olds arrested in Orleans and East Baton Rouge parishes are Black, Verite News and ProPublica found. (A similar figure couldn’t be calculated for Jefferson Parish because some court records weren’t available.)
Opponents of the law also pointed out that the data didn’t show a link between enacting the Raise the Age legislation and a surge in violent crime. In 2022, when then-Attorney General Landry and others first tried to repeal the law, crime data analyst Jeff Asher said in a legislative hearing that Louisiana’s increase in homicides during the pandemic was part of a national trend that began before Raise the Age was passed.
“It happened in red states. It happened in blue states. It happened in big cities, small towns, suburbs, metro parishes,” Asher told lawmakers. Starting in 2023, data has shown a significant drop in homicides in Louisiana and nationwide.
Conservative lawmakers dismissed Asher’s numbers and instead cited horrific crimes committed by teenagers, such as the brutal killing of 73-year-old Linda Frickey amid a surge in carjackings in New Orleans in 2022. In that incident, four teenagers between 15 and 17 years old stole Frickey’s SUV in broad daylight. One of them kicked, punched and pepper-sprayed her as he pulled her out of the vehicle, according to court testimony. Frickey, who had become tangled in her seat belt, was dragged alongside the vehicle. Landry argued that teenagers who commit such heinous crimes must be punished as adults.
Opponents said the Frickey case instead showed why the law wasn’t needed: District attorneys in Louisiana have long had the discretion to move cases involving the most serious crimes out of juvenile court, which is what Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams did. Three girls who took part in the carjacking pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were each sentenced to 20 years in prison; the 17-year-old who attacked Frickey and drove her car was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
After the attempt to repeal the Raise the Age law failed in 2022, lawmakers passed a bill in 2023. It was vetoed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. “Housing seventeen year olds with adults is dangerous and reckless,” Edwards said in a written statement at the time. “They often come out as seasoned criminals after being victimized.”
This year, with Landry in lockstep with the Republican supermajority in the Legislature, the law sailed through. For Landry, who was elected on an anti-crime platform, the law’s passage fulfilled a campaign pledge. When the law took effect, he declared, “No more will 17-year-olds who commit home invasions, carjack, and rob the great people of our State be treated as children in court.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry speaks before lawmakers in Baton Rouge. (Michael Johnson/The Advocate via AP)Now these teenagers are treated as adults from arrest to sentencing. In New Orleans, that means that when a 17-year-old is arrested, police no longer alert their parents, a step that department policy requires for juveniles, according to a department spokesperson. It’s not clear if law enforcement agencies elsewhere in the state have made a similar change.
All 17-year-olds arrested in New Orleans are now booked into the Orleans Parish jail, where those charged with crimes not classified as violent have spent up to 15 days before being released pending trial. Though the jail separates teens from adults, it has been under a court-ordered reform plan since 2013 after the Department of Justice found routine use of excessive force by guards and rampant inmate-on-inmate violence. Federal monitors said in May that violence remains a significant problem, although they acknowledged conditions have improved somewhat. The sheriff has agreed with this assessment, blaming understaffing.
Most of the cases involving 17-year-olds in Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes are pending, according to court records and officials in those offices. Several defendants have pleaded guilty. Prosecutors have declined to file charges in a handful of cases. Many defendants are first-time offenders who should be eligible for diversion programs in which charges will eventually be dropped if they abide by conditions set by the court, according to officials with the Orleans and Jefferson Parish district attorneys.
None of the DAs in Orleans, Jefferson or East Baton Rouge parishes took a position on the law, according to officials in those offices and news reports. Williams, the Orleans Parish DA, responded to Verite News and ProPublica’s findings by saying his office is holding “violent offenders accountable” while providing alternatives to prison for those teenagers “willing to heed discipline and make a real course correction.”
Margaret Hay, first assistant district attorney with Jefferson Parish, declined to comment on Verite and ProPublica’s findings except to say, “We’re constitutionally mandated to uphold and enforce the laws of the state of Louisiana.” East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore declined to comment.
Having a felony arrest or conviction on your record is like wearing a heavy yoke around your neck.
—Aaron Clark-Rizzio, legal director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s RightsEven those who avoid prison face the long-term consequences of going through the adult court system. Background checks can reveal arrests and convictions, which could prevent them from obtaining a job, housing, professional licenses, loans, government assistance such as student aid or food stamps, or custody of their children.
“Having a felony arrest or conviction on your record,” said Aaron Clark-Rizzio, legal director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, “is like wearing a heavy yoke around your neck.”
Marsha Levick, chief legal officer with the Juvenile Law Center, a nonprofit law firm based in Philadelphia, said that what’s happening in Louisiana reminds her of the late 1990s, when states toughened punishments for juveniles after a noted criminologist warned of a generation of “super predators.” That theory was eventually debunked — but not before tens of thousands of children had been locked up and saddled with criminal records.
Mariam Elba contributed reporting and Jeff Frankl contributed research.
Do you have a story to share regarding a 17-year-old facing criminal charges in Louisiana? Contact Richard Webster at Rwebster@veritenews.org.
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Women in Georgia can once again legally obtain abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, following a judge’s strongly worded order this week tossing the state’s ban. While Gov. Brian Kemp spoke out against the decision and Georgia’s attorney general quickly appealed it, providers told ProPublica they have immediately resumed offering such care.
Planned Parenthood’s four clinics in Georgia are fielding an influx of calls from within the state and those around it where most abortions remain banned, said Jaylen Black, vice president of marketing and communications for the organization’s Southeast region. Workers are also calling patients they have previously had to turn away. “We’ve been able to get them rescheduled,” Black said.
The new, if temporary, access is the latest in a wave of developments in the two weeks since ProPublica told the stories of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, Georgia women who died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state. A committee of maternal health experts, including 10 doctors, deemed their deaths “preventable,” shifting the discussion about such outcomes from hypothetical to a new American reality.
“This isn’t something that the state will easily be able to sweep under the rug,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the ban. “It is now a national issue.”
The women’s stories reverberated through the U.S. Senate, the vice presidential debate and a demonstration outside the Georgia Capitol. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to one of their families alongside Oprah Winfrey, then traveled to Atlanta to give a speech about them. “Now we know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know — here in the state of Georgia died — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” she told the crowd. Before launching into the details of the first, she led the crowd in a chant to “speak her name: Amber Nicole Thurman, Amber Nicole Thurman, Amber Nicole Thurman.”
Thurman died on Aug. 19, 2022, one month after Georgia’s law went into effect banning abortion before many women know they’re even pregnant. Thurman had traveled to North Carolina, where she obtained abortion medication, and had not fully expelled the fetal tissue.
She sought care for the rare complication at a suburban Atlanta hospital, where she was diagnosed with sepsis, a life-threatening infection. As her condition deteriorated, doctors discussed a procedure to empty the uterus called a dilation and curettage, or D&C; the state had recently attached criminal penalties to performing it, with few exceptions. It took 20 hours after Thurman’s arrival for doctors to do so, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. It came too late.
Miller, who died Nov. 12, 2022, had lupus, diabetes and hypertension, and doctors warned another pregnancy could kill her. She ordered abortion pills online, but she also did not expel all the fetal tissue and needed a D&C. Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” Her children watched her suffer in bed for days, moaning in pain. She ultimately took a lethal combination of painkillers.
Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee, tasked with studying deaths of pregnant women and new mothers to recommend improvements in care, directly blamed the state’s abortion ban for Miller’s death, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity. The committee found that the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure on Thurman had a “large” impact on her “preventable” outcome. The hospital and doctors involved in her care have not explained the delay or commented on her case; an attorney hired by Thurman’s family said the hospital was within its legal rights to perform the procedure.
First image: Thurman and her son in a photo she posted on social media the year before her death. Second image: Miller with her husband, Alex Cardenas; son Christian; and daughter Turiya, whom she named after her sister. (Courtesy of Turiya Tomlin-Randall)While defenders of the ban have said it includes an exception to save the life of the mother, doctors have told ProPublica that the language doesn’t account for the fast-moving realities of emergency medicine or the complexities of maternal health.
Though Miller’s underlying conditions would have made her pregnancy riskier as it progressed, that alone did not qualify her for an abortion. And once she and Thurman needed a D&C to clear the fetal tissue, neither of their cases appeared to clearly fit the language of the ban’s exception allowing doctors to perform it.
It allows doctors to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth. Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous but the result of abortion pills. Most bans including Georgia’s also allow abortions “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There is no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors have told ProPublica — or how far gone a patient needs to be to qualify.
Forty-one senators introduced a resolution inspired by ProPublica’s reporting that calls on hospitals in all states to provide emergency abortion care when their patients need it. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregan Democrat who chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has a pending request for information from the hospital that treated Thurman to determine whether doctors violated a federal law that requires them to provide emergency care. (The hospital has not responded to ProPublica’s requests seeking comment on those questions about its adherence to the law.)
And in Georgia on Monday, Fulton County Superior Judge Robert C. I. McBurney struck down key parts of the state’s ban criminalizing nearly all abortions after about six weeks.
“It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb,” McBurney’s ruling states.
“The Court finds that, until the pregnancy is viable, a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and her health remains private and protected, i.e., remains her business and her business alone. When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”
In reversing the six-week ban, McBurney reverted to the state’s previous standard, which allowed abortion up until a fetus was deemed viable, at about the 22nd week of pregnancy.
Kemp, a Republican who said he was “overjoyed” when the ban first went into effect, said this week through a spokesperson: “Once again, the will of Georgians and their representatives has been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge.”
Brittany Smith, program director for SisterSong, one of the plaintiffs in the case against the ban, attended Saturday’s vigil for Thurman and Miller. “I think a lot of people are not making the connection that abortion care is health care,” she said. “Abortion quite literally saves lives. All pregnancies are not safe, and all pregnancies should not be carried all the way to term.” (Nydia Blas for ProPublica)The ruling marks the second time McBurney has blocked the state abortion ban.
In 2022, he issued a ruling that the law was unconstitutional when the state legislature passed it in 2019, frozen in the books until after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal constitutional right to abortion three years later. The state appealed, and its Supreme Court reinstated the ban until it could review McBurney’s ruling.
About a year later, with the ban still in place, the state Supreme Court rejected the argument, sending the case back to McBurney to consider the lawsuit’s underlying question: Whether the Georgia Constitution protects the right to privacy and, if so, if that right includes abortion. McBurney’s ruling Monday emphatically says it does.
While McBurney allowed abortions to resume in Georgia, the Supreme Court could, once again, stay the judge’s ruling until it takes up the case.
The last time it did so, the window of abortion access in Georgia lasted eight days.
The urgency and impermanence of this moment in Georgia was palpable in conversations with providers. “I think this type of moment definitely feels like a demand to provide a lot of care to as many people as possible,” said Kristen Baker, public affairs manager and lobbyist for the Feminist Women’s Health Center, which operates a clinic in Georgia.
Black said that Planned Parenthood staff is doing all it can — “for the time being” — to meet the demand and “getting people in our doors as soon as possible.”
Kavitha Surana contributed reporting. Mariam Elba and Cassandra Jaramillo contributed research.
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