Nelson v. Constant

The City of Gretna orchestrated the over-enforcement and excessive charging of non-violent misdemeanor offenses to fund the city’s budget. The MacArthur Justice Center is fighting on behalf of Gretna residents to ensure that local governments are not able to over-police vulnerable communities for financial gain.  

The City of Gretna, Louisiana, has no separate judicial branch. Instead, violations of the Gretna Municipal Code come before the Mayor’s Court, which is completely under the control of Mayor Constant. Under her leadership, the Gretna Police Department maintained a quota of arrests and citations, with the express purpose of generating revenue. Individuals appearing before the Mayor’s Court were prosecuted by an employee of the Mayor in a court overseen by an employee of the Mayor and then made to pay a fee, collected by the Police Department at the direction of the Mayor, to help fund the same system and its actors. Furthermore, the plaintiffs alleged that the city prosecutor operated a “deferred prosecution program,” in which a person’s charges would be dismissed so long as they paid a sum of money to the city.

Between 2000-2014, the Gretna Police Department’s arrests increased by over 480%, despite a simultaneous decrease in violent crimes. A staggering 65.8% of the arrests were of Black residents, yet only 35% of Gretna’s population is Black. By 2015, an average of 1 in 2 households contained an individual with criminal charges.

The MacArthur Justice Center (MJC) filed a federal class action on behalf of the residents of Gretna.

UPDATE

The district court denied plaintiffs’ claims that the Gretna Mayor’s Court suffered from a financial conflict of interest that violated the due process rights of defendants in that court. But the City of Gretna agreed to a settlement of the plaintiffs’ claims regarding the operation of the Deferred Prosecution Program, reforming the system to ensure that people could participate in deferred prosecution regardless of whether they could afford to pay a fee.