New Orleans city workers search landfill for mistakenly discarded court
records
[August 07, 2025]
By JACK BROOK and SARA CLINE
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — New Orleans clerk of court staff stood ankle-deep in
a massive landfill, digging through mounds of trash, to salvage court
records that the city erroneously discarded.
As photos surfaced online — showing city staff scouring for the
misplaced documents among heaps of garbage — city and state officials
were outraged over the situation.
“This is unacceptable,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a
Wednesday statement. “I have questions. I’m going to ask the Clerk for
an explanation of how this happened and just what records were dumped.”
In a statement, Clerk of Criminal District Court Darren Lombard blasted
the city for an “egregious breach of responsibility and negligence" of
public records. Photos shared by the criminal clerk of court’s office
show city workers standing in debris beside an excavator and extracting
tattered papers from heaps of garbage earlier this week.
Lombard said he was notified last Friday that containers housing
official court documents had been relocated from trailers without his
knowledge and, in at least one instance, destroyed. He blamed the
Department of Public Works for moving the records and said he dispatched
city employees to recover what they could.
“What they discovered was deeply disturbing: one entire container –
filled with official Clerk records – had been dumped into a debris field
and mixed with general trash,” Lombard said. “Documents were strewn
across the yard, caught in the wind, and scattered beyond the secured
perimeter.”
Lombard said the records had been stored outside the clerk's office, in
trailers and containers, because of the “longstanding absence of a
secure, dedicated Clerk of Court storage facility” dating back to
Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Flooding from the collapse of the city's
levee system led to the destruction of thousands of criminal case files.
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Lombard, who took office in 2022, said he has repeatedly requested
funding for a secure storage facility.
The court records, many dating back to the 1950s through the 1970s,
included capital murder and aggravated rape cases, Lombard told
Nola.com.
Lombard said he has called for a city investigation.
New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams — whose main role is to
represent the government in criminal cases and decide whether to
prosecute individuals accused of crimes — stressed the importance of
“proper recordkeeping," saying that in order to “administer justice”
it is vital that there is “accurate maintenance of all information
associated with criminal cases.”
The Promise of Justice Initiative, an organization that advocates
for criminal justice reform, said that in its experience, even on a
“normal day,” case files can be hard to obtain. The organization
emphasized that such documents “represent human beings sitting
inside of prisons” and are the “vehicle” to freedom, once someone
has been convicted.
“The fact that the City can treat such life-saving and invaluable
property with so little care is a failure of their duty and a
violation of people’s rights, who have a right to their
information,” Renard Bridgewater, a spokesperson for the
organization, said Wednesday.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell's office released a brief statement, saying
that they were working with the Clerk's Office and the Department of
Public Works to “resolve this issue.”
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