The legislature has seen heated debate about the trio of bills poised to cut 11 Orleans Parish judges and its criminal-court clerk. To explain the rationale for the cuts, bill author Sen. Jay Morris and other legislators cite data collected by the Louisiana Supreme Court.
That seems to make sense. The Supreme Court is the designated keeper of Louisiana’s judiciary data, ostensibly the best repository for insight about the state’s 42 district courts. The court’s 2025 report also gives the impression that the district-court data can be analyzed as a whole, according to the data’s summary, which begins: “Louisiana District Courts reported an increase in total filings for 2025, increasing by 5% ….”
But pulling apart the data reveals a crazy quilt of court statistics that fall so short of apples-to-apples comparisons that some parishes don’t even seem to belong in the same produce section.
For instance, the 26th Judicial District Court recorded 8,468 criminal filings for 2025 for Bossier Parish, the 12th largest parish in the state. That’s more than double the 4,110 cases recorded by Orleans in 2025, though Bossier has only one-third of the population of Orleans.
Similarly outsized filing numbers can be found within the 4th Judicial District Court, the court that covers Morris’s home parish, Ouachita.
Ouachita, which is half the size of Orleans, recorded 18,266 criminal cases within the 4th Judicial District Court – near five times the Orleans case count.
That’s about one criminal-court case for every 9 people in Ouachita Parish and one for every 16 people in Bossier, a much higher ratio than Orleans, which recorded about one court case for every 87 people.
Each of the state’s big population centers – Jefferson, St. Tammany, and East Baton Rouge – had filings topping 6,000, far exceeding Orleans.
Caddo Parish, the 6th biggest parish, had 8,341 criminal cases, though its population is roughly two-thirds of Orleans. Other mid-size parishes like Calcasieu (4,657 cases) and Lafayette (4,350 cases) had fewer criminal filings – but enough to exceed the totals in Orleans, despite considerable population differences.
‘We’re not counting our numbers the same. That’s the crux of the matter.’
But the state’s filing totals have long been a challenge, the National Center for State Courts noted in a section entitled “data quality” within a 2014 report commissioned by the Louisiana Supreme Court.
“The Louisiana data in criminal cases suffer because of a lack of consistency in statewide rules for counting criminal cases,” the report section noted. “A single crime in which one defendant is charged with three charges might be counted in one jurisdiction as a single case, while in another jurisdiction it would be counted as three cases – making it hard to fairly compare judicial work.”
“It is a very common and widespread problem,” said Andy Davies, director of research at the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at the Southern Methodist University Court of Law in Dallas. “You have all these different agencies in the justice system, and they all track their work for different purposes. So it’s not surprising that the numbers don’t match up.” Still, it’s clear that Louisiana has been grappling with this issue for a long time, Davies said. “The fact that there’s a 10-year-old report saying, ‘You should fix this,’ is the smoking gun.”
It seems very possible that the court clerks in Bossier and Ouachita are counting every arrest, counting every charge – or just counting it however they see fit. “The Supreme Court does not have a uniform way that all the clerks are counting their numbers. We’re not counting our numbers the same. That’s the crux of the matter,” said Darren Lombard, the clerk of Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.
“Ultimately the (district) clerks count the cases based on their parish’s prosecution and docket-management practice and certify those numbers for us to publish,” spokesperson Trina Vincent of Supreme Court told The Lens. “Some jurisdictions may combine codefendants or combine felony and misdemeanor charges in a single case, while others create separate cases by defendant or class of charge.”
That makes comparisons between courts virtually impossible. Even seemingly objective measures like population and district case filings “do not accurately determine caseload,” said John Weimer, chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, during a January joint-budget committee hearing.
The Louisiana Supreme Court was once in the forefront of trying to ensure cases were counted fairly, as Weimer described in his January testimony. In the mid-1990s Hugh Collins, the court’s deputy judicial administrator, served on the advisory committee to a national research project on the matter. The court developed “work points” to describe the average amount of judicial time required for each of nine case types, ranging from traffic cases to felonies.
The method that Collins helped to develop was used to determine when parishes needed new judgeships.
But now legislators are trying to seize on data to reduce judgeships. For decades now, Republican legislators have believed that Orleans needs to cut its judgeships. Now their quest is backed by Gov. Jeff Landry.
The cuts may be necessary – or they may be a political necessity, according to those who want them. But legislators who see a greenlight for the cuts within the Supreme Court’s current data have been politely cautioned otherwise.
For instance, during the January hearing, Rep. Jerome Zeringue of Lafayette expressed frustration that a place like Terrebonne Parish was able to process thousands of filings with five judges while Orleans Parish courts staffed dozens of judges, to handle similar numbers of cases. “This thing is screwed up,” he said. “And we haven’t addressed it in decades and decades.”
“You have to go beyond the numbers,” Weimer advised. “Those are just the filings.”
These disparities can exist within any branch of the justice system as well. Several years ago, Davies, from the Deason Center, was hired by the New York state public defenders office to travel the state of New York, asking public defenders how they tracked their numbers. “They were all counting it differently,” he said.
Over a year’s time, Davies went from office to office. “I asked, ‘How do you do it? How do you do it? How do you do it?’” he said. After visits to each place, he started to understand data systems and capacities. And after his tour, the state issued uniform case definitions for public defenders and instructions on how to count them. “You have to get everyone on the same page and that’s a process,” he said. “It is difficult, but it’s certainly not insurmountable.”
