A data report filed in March raises crucial questions about the data behind proposed legislative cuts to the Orleans Parish judiciary.
The data report, filed to the Supreme Court by the Orleans Parish District Clerk of Court on March 2, 2026, shows that the legislature is considering only half of the defendants who move through the courthouse at Tulane Avenue and Broad Street. Because of those much smaller numbers, those who championed the cuts to Orleans were able to argue that Orleans is a bloated court that needs to be “right-sized.”
Sen. Jay Morris, a Republican from Monroe who authored the legislation, had proposed the cuts based on data he’d pulled from a “Orleans Parish Court Weighted Case Counts” report from the Supreme Court, he told his colleagues during a March 31 Senate Judiciary committee hearing.
But a comparison between the Supreme Court report used by Morris and the data reported by the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court for 2025 shows that the Supreme Court report captured only 4,109 “filings,” while Orleans data shows that the court handled roughly twice as many defendants: for a total of 8,009. The chart below also shows the gaps in those totals and within the felony and misdemeanor levels.
The differences in the data help to explain why the 12 Orleans Parish judges are shocked at the legislature’s sense of their workload, while legislators look at Orleans and see a courts system that is “out of whack” with the rest of the state, as one senator described it.
The Orleans judges who testified at the legislature described the lengthy dockets they face every weekday and the long hours they spend on the bench, actively handling cases, often until late in the afternoon. Only once they leave the bench are they able to read court filings and write decisions, they say.
And on weeks that they have trials, the judges and their staffs often have to focus for an entire week on a single case. Across the court, data shows that criminal-court judges handled 137 trials in 2025, nearly one trial per judge per month.
The newly revealed defendant totals raise larger questions about those caseloads.
At the very least, the questions seem to call for measured analysis and planning, not a rammed-through proposal to cut judges and a clerkship, critics say. The legislators are pushing to make sure the bills are signed before May 4, when Calvin Duncan is slated to be sworn in as the clerk of Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. If Duncan starts his four-year term, the logic goes, the clerk’s office merger cannot take place for four more years.
In Orleans, four other levels of judges are also facing cuts. It’s unclear whether the data Morris used was similarly flawed for those other branches of Orleans judiciary, because Morris said in committee testimony that he consulted no Orleans judges or judicial administrators. “No one wants to reduce their fiefdom,” he said.
Most of the Orleans Parish criminal-court data for 2025 counts defendants, not filings.
But there are apparent apples-to-apples comparisons — with wildly different counts.
For instance, the Supreme Court reported 4,109 filings for the court. But the Orleans Parish clerk’s own data for filings showed a total of 7,556 filings, a total 84% higher than the totals Morris used.
In some ways, this is an old problem. Because of the divergent ways in which state courts tally caseloads from parish to parish, the legislature has had long difficulty making direct comparisons between courts in different parishes.
The Supreme Court’s “weighted caseload” calculation was an attempt to address that problem, in a way that allowed the legislature to more fairly compare caseloads between other parishes and Orleans, which has a much higher rate of complicated felony cases than anywhere else in the state.
But the weighted caseload analysis may be irrelevant if the caseload count itself is in question.
‘When do you determine that a case exists?’
The Orleans clerk’s report represents all court defendants, starting from shortly after arrest, when they make appearances in the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court’s magistrate division, said Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Clerk Darren Lombard, who discussed the data discrepancies with The Lens. By comparison, the Supreme Court’s weighted-caseload report only reflects cases if the district attorney accepts the charges, moving the defendants into a trial section — a move that typically happens months after arrest, after the defendants have made multiple magistrate-court appearances.
“The question is, when do you determine that a case exists? said Lombard, whose office submitted the count of defendants to the Louisiana Supreme Court on March 2, 2026. The March report was marked “amended” on the top in large black handwritten script because it represented data gathered from the clerk’s new computer system, Clerk Connect, instead of the hand-counted totals that the clerk had long submitted to the Supreme Court using its office’s old IBM AS/400 computer system.
It’s unknown how the Supreme Court viewed the amended report it received from the Orleans clerk and why that wasn’t incorporated into the weighted-caseload analysis. The Supreme Court spokesperson did not return repeated queries from The Lens about the report.
In the end, because the Supreme Court opted not to count any magistrate cases with charges that were ultimately refused by the district attorney, the March 2 report is now perceived as what Lombard described as a “computer glitch.”
But the overall data seems crucial to the debates happening in Baton Rouge.
“The whole crux of the matter is that the Supreme Court has not assigned a uniform way of counting for all clerks … so we are not counting our numbers the same,” Lombard said. “Some parishes give a case number for every arrest. But if the Supreme Court told everyone, ‘we are only going to count those case filings that are actually billed by the DA,’ then we’d all be on equal footing.”
It does feel like there should be some kind of acknowledgement of cases that go through courthouse that don’t make it up to a trial court section, he said. “Because that’s resources right there. Sometimes it takes a long time to make it up to trial court or get it refused.”
It’s such a distinct workload, in fact, that the criminal court clerk — which is based out of offices on the courthouse’s second floor — has a separate suite of rooms on the first floor, devoted to the magistrate clerk’s office.
Confusion about Supreme Court reports
Even during the recent Senate judiciary committee hearing, on March 31, there was some confusion about what Morris based his cuts on. At first, some of Morris’ Senate colleagues read a different Supreme Court workpoint report and disagreed with Morris’ conclusions about that report. “What I find incredible is that you sat at the table and said that an expert Louisiana Supreme Court report recommends reducing the number of judges,” said Sen. Gary Carter, a Democrat from Algiers who sits on the Senate judiciary committee. “But I read the report and it doesn’t say that.”
“It’s not that report, it’s this report,” said Morris, referring Carter back to the “Weighted Caseload” study that contains the numbers analyzed by The Lens. “The Supreme Court issued this report; they sent all of you one,” Morris said, picking up the report during his Senate Judiciary committee testimony and showing it to Carter.
Morris said that his focus was to address the “bordering-on ridiculous number of judges in Orleans” when compared to similar courts in the state and the nation. “If you have twice as many judges as you need, why wouldn’t you reduce some?” Morris asked.
But, some might ask, if Orleans Parish criminal court actually has twice as many defendants, does it need to reduce any?
The Orleans Parish clerk’s own data for filings showed a total of 7,556 filings, a total 84% higher than the totals Morris used to devise cuts for four judges and the clerk’s office within the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.
Looking at subcategories, such as felony and misdemeanor, the overall impression is, again, that the Supreme Court numbers are an undercount. The Supreme Court reported 1,218 misdemeanor filings for Orleans while the amended clerk’s data shows 3,046 misdemeanor defendants with a total of 9,631 charges filed. For felonies, the Supreme Court report reflects a total of only 2,732 case filings while the amended clerk’s data shows 4,963 defendants with a total of 20,716 charges filed.
In total, Morris’ bills propose to slash 11 judgeships across Orleans Parish judiciary and eliminate the criminal-court clerkship that Calvin Duncan was slated to step into in May, after being elected by 68% of the New Orleans electorate in December.
The Senate passed Morris’ trio of bills last week: Bill 256 would merge the clerk’s offices from civil and criminal court into one Orleans Parish clerk’s office. Senate Bill 197 cuts two of the 12 judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.. Senate Bill 217 cuts a total of nine judges; four of 12 judges in the Orleans Parish criminal court, two of 14 from civil court, two of four from municipal and traffic court; and one of four from juvenile court.
The bills could be heard in the House next week for final approval and then would move to the governor for his signature.
Below are the two documents in question, the Supreme Court’s weighted-caseload report and the amended data for the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.
