Recently it was reported that the office of the district attorney of Orleans Parish is arresting and incarcerating victims who get scared and refuse to come to court to testify. Court Watch NOLA, a community group of volunteers who monitor New Orleans’s criminal courts, issued a report showing that in 2016 alone, our prosecutor arrested and jailed six victims after they refused to come to court to testify for the prosecution. Four of these victims were survivors of attempted murders, one victim was a rape survivor, and the last survivor had a gun aimed at her. Our district attorney’s office tried to arrest nine other crime victims for failing to cooperate, but could not find them.

Image Deborah Cotton self portrait Credit... Deborah Cotton

Arresting victims for failing to testify for the prosecution fosters a sense of powerlessness by further victimizing the person. And it is a show of aggression by our elected officials who are supposed to be the authorities we turn to so that our sense of stability in our community can be restored. These old-school tough-on-crime prosecutors are behind the times. They approach crimes with a heavy-handedness. They ignore feedback from the community on what type of recovery is needed.

New Orleanians have legitimate cause for concern when reporting a crime. Our police department has been under a federal consent decree since 2012, which means our police department’s track record for civil rights abuses has been so bad that the federal government has had to intervene. If we can’t depend on our police force and our prosecutors to not attack or take advantage of us, how are we supposed to trust them with the “who did it” information that could get us killed?

The district attorney in New Orleans is not the only prosecutor jailing crime survivors when they get too scared to testify in court. The district attorney of Harris County, Tex., arrested and incarcerated a rape victim for failing to return to the stand to testify against her assailant. The rape victim had a mental breakdown when she was forced to testify in court; her trauma and fear were just too overwhelming, the support she was offered by the prosecution insufficient. That district attorney lost her re-election in part for jailing that rape victim. Harris County’s new district attorney, Kim Ogg, was elected based on her promise to never arrest victims for failing to come forward.

When it came to my own cooperation with the prosecutor, I was reluctant. I’d finally clawed myself out of a pit of grief, despair and PTSD and I wanted to live again. Why should I risk my health to testify for the prosecution? In my case, there were more witnesses and victims than normally would agree to cooperate. The outrage caused by perpetrators opening fire into a crowd of innocent New Orleanians on Mother’s Day broke down the community’s reluctance. Additionally, our United States attorney, not our local district attorney, prosecuted the case. That made a difference, too.