Louisiana Landmark Legal Settlements
SAF settles New Orleans lawsuit
Second Amendment defenders in 2008 reached a settlement deal with the City of New Orleans in a 2005 federal lawsuit that stopped the city from seizing firearms in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
The lawsuit was jointly filed by the Second Amendment Foundation and the National Rifle Association in September 2005 after police and National Guardsmen began confiscating firearms without warrant or probable cause from citizens during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
Under terms of the settlement, the city attempted to return all firearms that were seized from the gun owners.
Louisiana settles lawsuit over juvenile prison conditions
The conditions in Louisiana’s juvenile prisons had been described as hellish. Teen inmates were beaten and raped by fellow prisoners. Incompetent guards with prison records roughly abused their charges.
And a 2000 settlement of a lawsuit between the U.S. Department of Justice and the state of Louisiana improved conditions for the 1,700 teen offenders in the state’s four juvenile prisons.
The lawsuit, filed in 1998 by the U.S. Department of Justice, painted a picture of a violent and abusive prison atmosphere, claiming young inmates were beaten by guards and attacked and sexually assaulted by other inmates. The landmark settlement put strict limitations on when corrections officers can use force, established a database to track abusive guards, and ensured that an abuse hotline worked.
Judge ends school desegregation case dating from 1956
It was the U.S.'s longest-running active lawsuit against racial segregation in schools. And it finally ended after 47 years when a federal judge signed a settlement agreement in 2003 and dismissed the case.
The lawsuit was filed in 1956 on behalf of 37 black schoolchildren who had been denied entry to Baton Rouge schools because of Louisiana’s segregation laws.
In the decades since the suit was filed, middle-class whites largely abandoned the city's school system. The settlement included formulas to parcel out the few remaining white students in the school system and hopefully to attract more.
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