It began as an ordinary school night in New Orleans. Second grade teacher Nziki Wiltz was grading math papers when her daughter burst in, clutching her phone. On the screen blared the headline from The Times-Picayune: “Six charged in racketeering indictment, accused of running drug trafficking enterprise.” Wiltz was one of those six.
In New Orleans, 85 percent of defendants are represented by the public defenders’ office, which has been chronically underfunded for years.
“When she showed me the phone, my whole life changed,” Wiltz recalled of that night in January 2019. Her teenage son had been in trouble with the police, but she never imagined that his actions would lead to her own entanglement in the legal system.
She was wrong. The next morning, the single mother of five learned that she had lost her job and that she and her son, who had recently turned eighteen, were being charged in connection with an alleged illegal narcotics trafficking operation.
Wiltz’s court-appointed lawyer “was talking all sorts of lawyer-talk that I couldn’t understand,” she recounts in an interview. She didn’t know where to turn for help. Even friends and family members avoided her, convinced she was a criminal. Wiltz began wondering if she had unwittingly done something wrong and contemplated pleading guilty in exchange for a ten-year sentence, even though imprisonment would tear her family apart, sending her children into the foster care system. “I never touched a gun or drugs in my life, but they convinced me that I might have,” she says.
Then an acquaintance told her about Participatory Defense NOLA.
Participatory defense is a community organizing model in which people facing charges, and their loved ones, learn how to participate in their own defense. The model began in San Jose, California, in 2007 and has since spread across the United States, where plea bargains make up more than 90 percent of criminal convictions and prison sentences. Across the nation, nearly three dozen grassroots groups have used a participatory defense model to push for reduced prison time or even a dismissal of charges.
“The only way to get sustainable, positive change is to create a social movement,” says Janet Moore, a University of Cincinnati law professor and former public defense attorney, who has co-written about participatory defense. The model enables individuals to draw on the collective wisdom of others who have had experience with the court system. “You’re being transformed from someone who’s isolated, scared, and confused to [someone] wrapped up in a powerful emotional support that comes with wisdom and the power to make change happen.”
Moore says participatory defense can allow individual defendants to demand better representation instead of accepting the first plea offer. When such demands are made repeatedly, they change the expectations for and quality of their legal representation. Moore calls it “a grassroots constitutionalism.”
According to the most recent data, Louisiana in 2018 had the nation’s highest incarceration rate, locking up 695 of every 100,000 state residents. The same Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that the incarceration rate nationally was 1.8 times higher for Black women, compared to white women, and 5.8 times higher for Black men than for white men.
In Louisiana, Black people comprise one-third of the state’s population, and two-thirds of its prison population.
In New Orleans, 85 percent of defendants are represented by the public defenders’ office, which has been chronically underfunded for years. The attorneys appointed to defendants, including Wiltz, often have heavy caseloads and little time to explain the court process, options, or even terminology.
“I didn’t even know what ‘racketeering’ was,” Wiltz recalls.
Participatory defense changes that dynamic, by bringing together the family members of loved ones facing or already convicted of criminal charges to learn the language of the courts, the nature of the charges, how the judicial system operates, and what they should and should not do.
In 1997, Fox Rich’s husband, Rob Rich, was sentenced to sixty years in prison for robbery. From prison, Rob filed legal challenges seeking to return earlier to his wife and six sons. Fox raised the couple’s children while advocating for her husband’s release.
Members of Participatory Defense NOLA gather for a parole revocation hearing. The Riches are in the front row.
In April 2016, Fox Rich became involved with the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. Members, many of whom had served time in federal prisons, had mounted a campaign to pressure the administration of President Barack Obama to grant clemency to women imprisoned under federal drug laws. Clemency can take two forms: a commutation, which shortens a person’s sentence, or a pardon, which overturns a conviction. A President can grant clemency to anyone convicted of a federal crime. A governor can do the same for those convicted of a state crime.
Encouraged by the council’s efforts, Rob Rich filed for clemency and in June 2018, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, signed his commutation papers, allowing him to walk out of prison forty years before his release date. Once Rob was freed, he and Fox could have focused solely on making up for lost time as a family. Instead, they decided to help others ensnared in the criminal justice system. The result was Participatory Defense NOLA, which launched in April 2019.
New Orleans resident Lisa Ellis attended the initial training to learn how to set up a participatory defense group. She soon put her new skills to use helping her son, Timothy Smothers, who was stopped by New Orleans police in July 2018. They found a gun in his possession. Smothers, who had a previous felony conviction, was charged as a “felon with a firearm,” which carried a mandatory minimum of ten years in prison. He didn’t tell his mother what happened until he was on the verge of signing a plea bargain for a five-year prison term.
“That’s how most people get convicted,” Ellis explains. “They look at the larger amount of time and say, ‘I can’t fight this. It’s the state against me. They got more resources.’ Sometimes people are truly innocent and [still] sign on the dotted line.”
But Ellis, having grasped the power of participating in one’s own defense, urged her son’s attorney to argue that police had conducted an illegal search. They took his case to the state supreme court, which ruled that, based on the police officer’s own testimony, the weapon was not in plain view and the officer had no probable cause to arrest him. The case was then sent back to the district court.
Participatory Defense NOLA members attended Smothers’s court dates to show the judge that the young man was not alone. Rob Rich recalls that they were “fifteen deep, all dressed in black” in the courtroom, and “when his name was called, we all stood up to acknowledge that he is here, his family is here, and the community is here as well.”
On July 2, 2019, the judge looked down from the bench and told Smothers that he was free to go. His supporters, the Riches recall, issued a collective gasp. As Smothers made his way past the benches and through the courtroom door, the black-clad members rose and followed him. Others in the courtroom for their own family members’ hearings joined the procession into the hallway to learn more about the group and how they could get involved.
After the charges against her were announced, Nziki Wiltz attended her first Participatory Defense NOLA weekly meeting. When she walked through the door and saw the people seated around the table turn to look at her, she froze. Then Fox Rich approached. “You’re in the right place,” she assured her, leading her to a chair.
The group’s set agenda fell away as members focused on the frightened newcomer. “That meeting turned into the Nziki Road Show,” Wiltz recalls. “Everyone wanted to know what I needed.”
The pandemic has heightened the urgency of participatory defense, as the nation’s jails and prisons have become hotspots for infection.
For Wiltz, who had felt abandoned, the attention released a floodgate. “I cried so hard,” she says, feeling that the burden of fighting these charges alone had been lifted. She went back week after week, talking about her case, asking questions, and getting support from other attendees, many of whom were also navigating the legal system for themselves or their loved ones.
About a month after Wiltz first shuffled in, Fox Rich pulled her aside and made a peculiar request: “I want you to change your walk.” That walk, Wiltz recalled, was that of a defeated woman—a slow shuffle with her head down. It was how she walked ever since she had learned about her indictment, and had her life upended. “I almost looked like a zombie,” she says.
The following day, Wiltz appeared in court. “I walked like Fox would have walked in—faster, with life, more confident,” she says. “Like ‘I’m not going to bow down to this. I’m not going to accept these charges.’ ”
And, importantly, Wiltz did not walk in alone. As they had with Smothers, Participatory Defense NOLA members accompanied her to court for every appearance. Some of her past students, as well as fellow teachers and school administrators, also came to support her, at times filling the benches so that there was standing room only. Many also called the court, urging the judge to dismiss the bogus charges against their beloved teacher.
Meanwhile, Wiltz studied her case, looking up the terms she didn’t understand and asking questions. She also joined Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), a grassroots organization dedicated to restoring the civil and human rights stripped away by incarceration in many states. VOTE members also began attending her monthly court dates.
Wiltz had been charged with racketeering based on circumstantial evidence. Her then-seventeen-year-old son, Dhaz, had been arrested and jailed three times on drug charges. Dhaz’s calls to his mother, like all jail phone calls, were recorded and the prosecution seized on some of her statements to bring charges against her.
For instance, Wiltz recalled one conversation when her son asked if she would put money in his jail account. “I need to wait for my little package,” she told him, a term prosecutors seized on as a reference to drug sales. But, explained Wiltz, “my little package” is a term commonly used among African Americans to refer to a paycheck, not a drug package. Her reference to wanting to buy her son new tennis shoes was also interpreted as being code for drugs.
Each time her son was arrested and jailed, Wiltz depleted her savings to post bond and bring him home. During one of those times, a Black female clerk warned her that, if she continued to post thousands of dollars to bring her son home from jail, the district attorney’s office might charge her as well. But Wiltz, scared for her son’s safety in jail with men who were older than her, ignored the woman’s advice. Not long after that, the indictment that named her along with Dhaz and four others was filed.
Wiltz’s trial was set to begin on February 3, 2020. That Monday morning, she strode into court ready to fight, even bringing the receipt for her son’s tennis shoes. Her attorney had surprising news—the district attorney was dropping the charges. Wiltz’s legal nightmare was over.
Wiltz continues to attend participatory defense meetings each week. She listens to other people’s cases, then explains what they need to do—and learn—before their next court date.
“I tell them to dress as if you’re going on a job interview,” she says. “I tell them to understand the different terminology. I get other folks to support them.” She asks Court Watch NOLA, a local group formed to help make the courts more accountable and transparent, for support. The group’s presence in the form of court monitors, with bright yellow clipboards and ID cards, helps keep the courtroom players on their best behavior.
“The day that Court Watch wasn’t there [in my case], I had the DA laugh in my face,” Wiltz says. “The whole attitude changed when Court Watch was there.”
But then, earlier this year, COVID-19 hit the United States. On March 22, Louisiana Governor Edwards issued a stay-at-home order. Participatory Defense NOLA meetings moved to Zoom, a video conferencing technology that many of those entangled in the criminal justice system either lacked access to or were uncomfortable using. Meetings dwindled to a small handful of people.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has heightened the urgency of participatory defense, as the nation’s jails and prisons have become hotspots for infection. Even with limited testing, more than 70,000 confirmed cases of the disease were reported in U.S. prisons through July 23.
Packed together in cramped cells and dormitories, incarcerated people are unable to socially distance. They continue to eat in crowded cafeterias and make calls from phone stations that are less than two feet apart. In some prisons, hand sanitizer is considered contraband because it contains alcohol.
An old friend asked Wiltz to help his cousin, Clarence Jackson—or “Big June,” as he was known to friends and family. Jackson had been in jail for two years awaiting trial. Thanks to her efforts, a judge agreed to set bail—the amount of money to be paid for his temporary release—at $35,000. Wiltz then helped the family raise the 10 percent necessary to bring Big June home, in mid-March.
But it was too late. By then, the sheriff’s department in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, where Jackson was being held, developed cases of COVID-19. (It is unclear whether staff who tested positive had worked at the jail.) Less than two weeks after walking out of jail and returning to his family, Jackson died. His death certificate lists his cause of death as “respiratory failure due to corona-19 viral infection.”
Now members of Participatory Defense NOLA are fighting to keep that same fate from befalling the state’s longest-serving incarcerated woman.
Gloria Williams, affectionately known as “Mama Glo,” was sentenced to life in prison in 1971. That year, she and two others, an adult man and a sixteen-year-old girl, attempted to rob a grocery store with a toy gun that belonged to Williams’s son. The store owner fought back and, during the struggle, the sixteen-year-old found a gun under the counter and shot him. He died. All three were convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole. The girl died while in prison, the man was granted clemency and released in 1987.
Williams has now served nearly fifty years in prison. During those decades, she became a mentor to many other incarcerated women, providing a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, and words of encouragement. On July 22, 2019, the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Parole unanimously voted to recommend that Governor Edwards commute, or shorten, her sentence to make Williams, by then aged seventy-three, immediately eligible for parole. That recommendation is still sitting on his desk.
In April, Williams contracted COVID-19, one of the first six confirmed cases at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women housed at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center. She began complaining about difficulty breathing and was taken to a Baton Rouge hospital, initially for pneumonia. There, she tested positive for COVID-19 and was placed in the intensive care unit. She remained in the hospital for two weeks, before being returned to the prison. By late June, the women’s prison at Hunt, which currently incarcerates about 200 women, had at least 165 confirmed cases, three-quarters of which were asymptomatic.
Participatory Defense NOLA has held socially distanced prayer vigils outside the prison, collected signatures in support of her release, and called the governor’s office to urge that he grant clemency. They even rallied outside his mansion. As of late-July, however, Governor Edwards had not yet made a decision about Williams’s application. Meanwhile, she remains in prison.
Participatory Defense NOLA members plan to restart in-person meetings once the court system opens up, as it is starting to do. Its members know firsthand how crucial it is for people to engage in their own defense rather than leave decisions in the hands of attorneys who are often underpaid and overworked.
“The participatory defense movement has always been about love,” Moore says. “It’s about bringing people out of these systems, bringing them home, keeping them home, and preventing the need for the criminal legal system to intervene in lives. Participatory defense has always been an abolitionist project. That’s always been their goal—a better future for everyone.”