Criminal Justice
Court clerk staffers in New Orleans dig through landfill to find wrongly tossed court records
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry speaks with reporters outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on March 18, 2024. (Photo by Francis Chung/Politico via the Associated Press)
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has ordered the Louisiana State Police to investigate why criminal court records were tossed into a landfill, forcing criminal clerk of court staffers to wade through the debris last week to recover them.
“This is a disgusting abuse of power and a slap in the face to crime victims,” Landry said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
NOLA.com has coverage.
Videos shared online show workers standing in debris while recovering mangled paperwork, the Associated Press reports. Darren Lombard, clerk of the criminal district court, said he worked with staff members to dig through the garbage, but not all the documents were recovered.
“The last day we were out there, it stormed a bit, so we recovered just about everything we could,” he told WWL-TV.
Lombard said the Louisiana secretary of state’s office has a process in place for missing or destroyed paperwork that will be used if a needed document can’t be found. The tossed documents were from the 1950s to the 1970s.
The tossed Orleans Parish documents included case appeals, docket books and evidence logs in cases of murder, rape and armed robbery, according to NOLA.com. Felony records must be permanently retained in the parish.
The documents were being placed inside trailers at a Department of Public Works maintenance yard because the criminal court clerk’s office doesn’t have sufficient storage, said Joe Threat, the New Orleans chief administrative officer, in an interview with NOLA.com. The documents were discarded when public works staffers were cleaning out the trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The city has reached a lease to buy agreement for a new site to store all court documents, Threat said.
GETTING HANDS DIRTY:
These are videos of Orleans Parish Criminal Clerk Darren Lombard’s staff
…digging through a landfill…
For court records that city employees wrongly dumped last week.@FOX8NOLA pic.twitter.com/WTvZI86U4c
— Chris Joseph (@ChrisJosephNews) August 5, 2025
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