THE city of Abbeville, 20 miles south of Lafayette in the lush flatness of Acadiana, is known for a pretty Catholic church beside Bayou Vermilion and some slap-up oyster restaurants. It is the sort of small town in which the same surnames, many of them Cajun, recur among prominent business-owners and officeholders. It was also, until recently, home to a fearsome gang, known as the Gremlins—at least, so say the local prosecutors. That view of the group has yet to be endorsed by a trial, and, on current form, it seems unlikely to be. The Gremlins, and the limbo in which they are sunk, epitomise deep problems in the criminal-justice system of Louisiana, and not only Louisiana.

At first they instead seemed proof of the virtues of all-action policing. In February 2016, Clay Higgins, then spokesman for the sheriff of nearby St Landry Parish, denounced them in a Crime Stoppers video as “animals” and “heathens”. Sporting body armour and a rifle, and backed by a phalanx of officers, he told the Gremlins they would “be hunted”, railing in particular against one “uneducated 125-pound punk” whom he vowed to meet “any time, anywhere…You won’t walk away.” Such ultimatums earned Mr Higgins the nickname, “the Cajun John Wayne”.

By then, and before the indictment was announced the previous December, most of the 17 supposed Gremlins were in custody. Their alleged crimes were indeed alarming: one murder, several attempted murders and drive-by shootings—though there were lots of routine drug offences, too. They were also accused of colluding in a “criminal street gang” and “racketeering enterprise”—which is where the trouble, and the lessons, begin. As Ronal Serpas, formerly police chief of New Orleans, says, racketeering laws are meant to target big-time mafiosi. Here, says G. Paul Marx, chief public defender for the district that includes Abbeville, “They’re all dirt poor.”

Moreover, he says, there is no evidence of the co-ordination or leadership that such an enterprise requires. Many of the alleged gangsters—all but one of whom are black—were barely born when the racketeering is said to have begun, in 1997. Their supporters insist the Gremlins tag referred not to a street gang but to a rap group, some of whose members posted ill-advised videos on YouTube that feature inflammatory lyrics. “They’re no saints,” says Coretta Williams, whose son, Gene Williams III, is among them, “but they’re not the sinners they’re claiming them to be.”

Those who built the case are now reluctant to discuss it. Tony Hardy, Abbeville’s police chief, pulled out of an interview with The Economist; although most of the accused come from his town—from a neighbourhood where lawns and pretty porches give way to trailer homes and ramshackle yards—a sergeant said Louisiana’s state police had prime responsibility. The state police, the head of which recently retired amid a scandal over a tax-funded jolly to Las Vegas, say “multiple agencies” took part. Roger Hamilton, the prosecutor, declined repeated interview requests; cornered in Abbeville’s white-columned courthouse, his boss Keith Stutes, the district attorney, maintained that while the racketeering charges may “seem unjust” to those affected, they “fit the circumstances”.

He and others cited the ongoing legal proceedings in refusing to say more. That seems plausible, yet the reticence contrasts strikingly with the hoopla over the arrests and indictments. It wasn’t only Mr Higgins. “This group of individuals have plagued the city of Abbeville,” Chief Hardy said then. Grandstanding is a common feature of gang prosecutions, says Alex Alonso of California State University, Long Beach. The benefits to police and prosecutors go beyond PR, he says. The gang label helps to persuade juries when evidence is weak, and carries extra jail time—perhaps, for the “Gremlins”, an extra 40 years. Police departments can apply for federal gang-related grants; some in Abbeville think that was an incentive in this case.

Mr Marx, the public defender, is trying to have the racketeering charges quashed. But otherwise he has made only one argument: that those defendants deemed indigent, and so notionally represented by his office, have been denied due process of law. Because, although some have been locked up for over a year, he says his team is able to help them in only a limited, cursory way. They are thus being denied a right that the constitution supposedly guarantees—as are hundreds of others in Louisiana and across America.

Throw away the key

Given the risk of conflicts, each “Gremlin” requires his own counsel. Three have private lawyers; the trouble for the others is that Mr Marx does not have the manpower to serve them. They are not alone. As of the beginning of March his office, which covers three southern Louisiana parishes, counted 746 individuals who had been charged but lacked representation—a big backlog but only a third of the total at the start of last year. That was when the chronic funding problems of Louisiana’s public defenders became a crisis, and offices across the state began refusing new clients. Some judges dragooned private lawyers, some of them ill-qualified, to act pro bono. Other defendants, such as those “Gremlins” unable to post bail—hard to contest without a lawyer —were left to stew in jail.

In January, in a suit brought in New Orleans, a federal judge agreed that the state was “failing miserably” in its duty to indigent defendants—85% of the total—but ruled that fixing the problem was the legislature’s job. (A similar suit is pending in state court.) It is true that the basic problem is political: specifically, the mismatch between Louisiana’s appetite for prosecutions and legislators’ reluctance to pay for them. The state has the highest incarceration rate in the country, but the most cockeyed system for funding public defenders, who rely for two-thirds of their income on local court fees and fines, principally traffic tickets, an erratic source of revenue.