common ground legal collective

The legal team of Common Ground seeks to provide free legal assistance to residents as they begin rebuilding their lives after the recent hurricanes. We provide a free legal clinic every Saturday with volunteer lawyers from Louisiana Legal Aid, Loyola Law Clinic and volunteer Common Ground lawyers. We also help document police misconduct and unsafe prison conditions. Every day, we have volunteers posted outside the Orleans Parish Prison to meet with released arrestees. The volunteers collect interviews, connect people with legal assistance if possible, share resources and translate – our volunteers are virtually the only assistance that post-Katrina arrestees have access to at this time. We also have volunteer lawyers and legal assistants that are taking cases, developing potential lawsuits and participating in civic action.

We work as part of the New Orleans Legal Action Workers (N.O.-L.A.W.) to challenge police misconduct and ensure safe return for the residents of the communities in which we are working.

Our plan is multifaceted: providing immediate legal assistance to those in need through our law clinics and legal assistance, putting pressure on proper authorities to re-focus onto a relief and rebuilding effort and away from the harassment and violence that has typified the police response to this crisis, and building civic responsibility within the communities where we are working.

We have a three-fold plan to deal with the ongoing crisis in New Orleans:
1. Providing immediate legal assistance to those in need.
-We will continue and expand our legal clinics every week, having more clinics available
in different locations throughout the week.
-With the help of more lawyers, we can take to court some of the cases our legal assistants and volunteers have been compiling and documenting
-We will continue to assist and document the cases coming out of Orleans Parish Prison every day
2. Putting pressure on proper authorities to re-focus onto a relief and rebuilding effort, instead of criminalizing, harassing and demonizing the post-Katrina New Orleans population.
-Our effort includes being a ‘police watchdog’ organization and pressuring the city to develop an independent civilian oversight and ombudsman.
-We have initiated an investigation of the New Orleans Police Department by the U.S. Justice Department, and an internal investigation of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department for their collusion in illegal evictions in that Parish.
- We will also be helping to put together several class action lawsuits challenging post-Katrina police behavior and prison conditions, the illegal actions of several landlords in collusion with the Jefferson Parish Sheriffs Department, the abandonment of citizens in the Superdome and Convention Center, and other aspects of the disaster.
3.Developing civic responsibility in the communities where we work. The work we do to fight evictions is tenant-initiated and tenant-led, as is the police accountability project and the rebuilding effort itself. We are working on programs within the community where citizen leaders are developing to self-organize, and build up the kind of structures necessary in a bottom-up fashion.
-The public housing residents we have been working with have been successful in using legal tactics to fight evictions, and are developing a strategy to pressure HANO (the Housing Authority of New Orleans) to reopen public housing. We are assisting in this effort by providing resources, contacts and legal support as necessary.
-The newly-formed tenants’ association in one of the apartment complexes we have been working to defend is planning a lawsuit against their landlord for theft, illegal eviction and harassment. We are providing legal assistance, advice and resources for this case – which hopefully will be an example case to challenge landlords across the city who have taken to using ‘bullying’ tactics to remove unwilling tenants illegally.
-The police accountability project is being led by local residents who have been harassed by ‘problem officers’ that we are helping to identify, document and challenge using both internal police department investigations and litigation against the police departments involved.

We are currently seeking a Volunteer Resident Attorney!
The Common Ground legal team office is currently housed in the Community Media Center Office on Franklin and Robertson Sts. in the 9th Ward in New Orleans. We share this space with a radio collective and other media activists and some of the Common Ground organizers. It also provides some sleeping quarters on the floor for volunteers in the back room and on the ground around the perimeter of the building in tents. It has a kitchen where some food is prepared by the various staff volunteers, and full meals are available at the main Common Ground distribution and community center several blocks away. This building is right on the line between the 8th and 9th ward. These are the two hardest hit wards in the city. The attorney that comes will walk in streets piled with debris and with electric wires hanging from houses. Trees are down and buildings have collapsed, yet people are working hard and beginning to move back into their homes. Our existing phone system consists of individual hand held cell phones – there are phones designated for each of the teams, including the legal team, but it would help for the visiting attorney to have their own phone. We have a satellite internet connection and a high-level computer workstation designated for this visiting attorney.