Editor’s Note: The final story in a three-part series on police and prosecutors seeking harsh penalties for non-violent, low-level criminals.

Night falls on Chef Menteur Highway and with the darkness come the prostitutes — broken and addicted women willing to sell their bodies for cash to score their next fix.

A non-descript car crawls to a stop and the passenger window rolls down, a signal to the streetwalkers that the driver is ready for action.

The car door unlocks, the woman slides inside and the sting is on.

This is how the typical New Orleans Police Department undercover vice operation unfolds, according to the Orleans Public Defenders’ office.

At this point, an arrest is all but assured. But the woman’s future — the difference between her freedom and imprisonment — depends on the nature of the sex act offered to the police officer.

In Louisiana, if a prostitute offers intercourse, she will only be charged with a misdemeanor that carries no more than a $500 fine and up to six months in jail. But if she offers oral sex, it is considered a crime against nature. She will be charged with a felony, face up to five years in prison and, once released, be forced to register as a sex offender for the next 10 years.

Many in the criminal justice system describe this as a waste of public resources and a grossly disproportionate response to a minor crime based on a law first passed in 1805 that classified oral sex as unnatural carnal copulation, said Pam Metzger, an associate professor of law at Tulane University.

It also represents an abuse of the sex offender registry system meant to protect the public from predators, not prostitutes, she said.

The power to fix this “injustice” rests in the hands of District Attorney Keva Landrum-Johnson, said Steve Singer, chief of trials for the Orleans Public Defenders office. She has the discretion to refuse to prosecute crime against nature charges and reduce them to misdemeanor prostitution. By doing so she would allow police, public defenders, prosecutors and judges to focus on more violent offenders, Singer said. But Landrum-Johnson routinely accepts the felony charges on these non-violent petty offenses, despite the limited resources of the criminal justice system.

“This is the first time I can remember where there are numerous cases where the DA refuses to plead these down at all,” Singer said. “Most of the judges object to this as much as we do.

“The taxpayers want us spending our time getting the armed robbery, murder and rape cases ready for trial, not on something like this.”

Between Nov. 13 and July 18, the public defender’s office received 223 crime against nature cases and only 19 prostitution cases.

Landrum-Johnson was not available for comment but provided this statement: “As to prostitution and crime against nature acceptances, our records reflect that there is no statistically significant increase in the number of felony acceptances for crime against nature during the six months of 2008 compared to 2007. In 2008, we are accepting approximately the same percentage of felony crime against nature cases as in 2007.”

The DA’s office did not provide numbers to back up Landrum-Johnson’s claim. Last week, Landrum-Johnson won an Orleans Criminal Court judgeship when her opponent withdrew from the race.

Defining the risk

Louisiana is one of only seven states that still have a crime against nature law. The others are Idaho, Michigan, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Okalahoma and Virginia.

Crime against nature, as it relates to prostitution, is defined as the solicitation of unnatural carnal copulation, oral or anal sex, for compensation.

In 2003 Elizabeth Cole, a longtime New Orleans criminal defense attorney, challenged the crime against nature law and the sentencing disparities. The Louisiana Supreme Court rejected her argument, saying it was up to the Legislature to change the law. But Cole said she does not see the will among politicians to change a law that negatively affects only poor black women often suffering from substance abuse.

“Lawmakers are so entrenched in their ways and no one wants to stick their neck out for something like this,” Cole said.

“The DA’s office is in the best position to make a change because they decide how to charge these women. And I’m just shocked to hear that Keva hasn’t fixed anything.”

The reason DAs have insisted on prosecuting crime against nature cases is because it is an easy way to boost their felony conviction statistics, Cole said. Since there is never any evidence, the case boils down to the word of the police officer against the word of the prostitute and the prostitute rarely, if ever, prevails.

“I doubt this is how the people of New Orleans want their criminal justice system or public resources used,” Cole said.

Even if seen through the prism of public health, classifying the solicitation of oral sex as a more serious crime than the solicitation of intercourse still does not make sense, said Jean Redmann, director of education for NO/AIDS Task Force. Sexual diseases including HIV are easier to transmit through traditional intercourse compared with oral sex, she said. And oral sex will not result in unwanted pregnancies.

Resources off target

Critics of Louisiana’s crime against nature law agree street prostitution is a real problem in certain New Orleans communities, but no studies exist that prove the solution to the problem is imprisoning hookers who offer oral sex and then forcing them to register as sex offenders, said Tulane University criminologist Peter Scharf.

All that accomplishes is wasting the time of police, public defenders, prosecutors and judges, he said. And the public is forced to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the incarceration of a nonviolent offender who is almost always suffering from drug addiction and mental disabilities.

“This is a primer on what not to do,” Scharf said. “Louisiana and New Orleans have designed an approach based on worst practices. They’ve expanded the sex offender category beyond absurdity. And once you have the sexual offender jacket on, you almost never get out of it.”

Prostitution is a matter of supply and demand and the best way to attack the problem is by targeting “johns,” the men who solicit sex, Scharf said.

If law enforcement targeted the men in search of prostitutes, arrested and fined them, and published their names and photographs in the paper, demand would dry up because the johns typically have jobs and families to lose, Scharf said.

But hookers are almost always driven by addiction, said Ed Carlson, executive director of Odyssey House Louisiana, a drug treatment facility. If their addiction and mental health problems are not addressed, prostitutes will be back on the street perpetuating an unending cycle of crime and incarceration the minute they are released, he said.

Before the storm, Criminal Court Judge Lynda Van Davis operated a night court for women convicted of crimes against nature or prostitution. She provided drug and mental health treatment, case managers and classes to help them get back on their feet.

“A lot of these ladies suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from times they were abused by a family member which led to drug abuse and selling their bodies to supplement the drug abuse,” Davis said. “The program was clearly working. Many of the ladies came to visit me to say how much better they were doing and it was just because someone took an interest in them. But after the storm we ran out of funding.”

During her five years on the bench, Davis saw thousands of women charged with a crime against nature, but she can’t remember a single man who sought the services of a prostitute prosecuted for the same crime.

Some champions of Megan’s Law, the 1996 federal law that paved the way for the registration of violent sex offenders, find it hard to understand what Louisiana is doing.

Of the 7,986 sex offenders registered in Louisiana, 10 percent, 808, were convicted for a crime against nature and most likely are prostitutes, according to the Louisiana State Police.

In New Orleans, however, 41 percent of the 583 registered sex offenders are prostitutes.

To Marc Klaas, whose 12-year old daughter Polly was kidnapped and murdered in 1993, Louisiana’s use of its sex registry is an affront to all of the boys and girls who have suffered at the hands of sexual predators.

“This has never been about prostitution,” Klaas said. “Megan’s Law is about protecting people from sexual predators, pedophiles and psychopaths, nothing more, nothing less. What Louisiana is doing is nonsensical and counterproductive to the spirit of Megan’s Law and really to the spirit of a lot of things.”•

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