I almost left New Orleans without having visited the lower Ninth Ward, where the devastation of Hurricane Katrina reaches truly cataclysmic proportions. Fully immersed as I was in the process of interpreting docket reports, it was difficult for me to put down the case I was working on that Thursday afternoon in order to seek out and bear witness to the site of one of our nation's greatest tragedies. Somehow, it seemed that interrupting work that might actually produce some positive effect in order to join a voyeuristic pilgrimage was unjustifiable, unconscionable.

Yet, truth be told, the docket master reports themselves were rife with profound tragedy, where the most notorious varieties were ones of ommission - missed court dates, no access to legal counsel, even lack of a formal charge. It was our job on the Right to Counsel Project to identify and summarize the legal procedures that had effectuated each prisoner's detention in prison since the disabling effects of Katrina arrested the functions of the Louisiana court system. The prevalence of these omissions revealed a social and legal system that has ritually disregarded the rights of its citizens both before the devastation of the hurricane and in its aftermath. Yet in the Right to Counsel Project, we perceived these tragedies through the process of deductive reasoning involved in interpreting the sequence, and ultimately, the legitimacy of the legal process being afforded to the prisoners held in detention in the wake of Katrina.

Knowing that there remained only one more day to work on the project, a small, yet anxious group of us set out from the courthouse and drove down to the Ninth Ward during our lunch break. What we saw there exceeded the power of description by either language or any other medium of communication. Yet stated simply, the totality of the loss there amounted to complete annihilation. You, too have seen such images yourselves in newspapers, television, this blog: the media has slain the sensibilities of the public with them. Yet even these photos depicting the empirically accurate perspectives of the damage do not themselves succeed in conveying the whole truth in its focus and its scope.

During the months following Katrina up to our spring break trip down to the Gulf Coast, I, like the rest of the nation, gleaned my information and knowledge about the hurricane's consequences to the city of New Orleans snapshot by snapshot, image by image, producing an ultimately fragmented testament of the damages and the victims. The images never coalesced as a whole. Yet the whole does coalesce in the Ninth Ward.