New Orleans’ district attorney, Jason Williams, will face a hearing this week at the state capitol as he becomes the latest Democratic district attorney to face pressure for “soft on crime” policies. 

Mr. Williams ran in 2020 on broad changes to the criminal justice system including bail reform and emphasizing the need to make the legal system “an instrument of progress, not an instrument of oppression.” He has come under increasing scrutiny in recent months from lawmakers and the state’s attorney general, Liz Murrill, for his office’s liberal use of post-conviction relief. Mr. Williams’s office has reduced or eliminated hundreds of sentences by allowing judges to consider new evidence in old cases that he believes were decided unjustly. 

Mr. Williams’s focus since his campaign in 2020 has been on creating a civil rights division for the purpose of “reckoning with the sins of the past,” especially cases that were convicted by non-unanimous juries, as the Gambit notes. 

The hearing comes among national pushback to the sweeping criminal justice reforms of 2020, as some cities and states are shifting to the right on urban crime and public safety issues. Philadelphia’s far-left district attorney, Larry Krasner, has faced criticism for lack of prosecutions, even as the city’s mayor cracks down on crime.

At San Francisco, voters in recent months have approved ballot measures to increase police surveillance and require drug-screening for welfare recipients, and a court cleared the way this summer for the city to start cleaning up homeless encampments. Oregon this week brought back criminal drug penalties for illicit drug possession, ending its four year experiment with drug decriminalization, as the Sun reported. 

At Louisiana, a hearing on September 5 before a state senate committee says it will include testimony by “District Attorney Jason Williams relating to post conviction” and relief of people convicted at Orleans Parish. The hearing also comes shortly after a new state law went into effect that increases the attorney general’s oversight of cases involving post conviction relief. 

Attorney General Murrill has said she is reviewing cases where post conviction relief was granted. 

“Post-conviction relief is not a mechanism for revising a sentence that is long final simply because the District Attorney has a difference of opinion with the legislature and reviewing courts on criminal justice policy,” she said in August. “I am reviewing the cases from January through the end of July where relief was granted. There are more dating further back, but I am starting with a close look at the files for these 40.”

It’s not the first time that Mr. Williams has faced scrutiny — in his first year on the job, less than one in five felony cases ended with a felony conviction. And between 2020 and 2021, “the violent felony refusal rate increased from 25 percent to 46 percent and the violent felony case dismissal rate increased from 17 percent to 54 percent,” a Metropolitan Crime Commission report indicates. 

Mr. Williams’s office did not respond to a request from the Sun for comment. In a recent press conference, he said the use of post conviction relief was to amend for the wrongs in the criminal justice system in the past. 

“New Orleans has been a national outlier in defective convictions for decades,” he said. “For decades this city has had the highest imprisonment rate, the highest wrongful incarceration rate, the highest life without parole rate and the highest exoneration rate of any other city in the country.” 

He said the work his office is doing is “not new.”

“I campaigned on this issue,” he said. “I was clear that this office is going to be more open to reviewing past defective cases.”