Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office

The Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office was the local prosecuting agency in the criminal case arising from patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina. Its role was contested from the outset: the investigation had been led by the Louisiana attorney general's team, while the district attorney's office faced the decision whether to bring charges. The office’s eventual use of a special grand jury ended in a refusal to indict Anna Pou, but left a sharp dispute over what evidence the jurors had heard and whether the public would ever learn what happened.

Structure and the Memorial investigation

The office generally did not join an investigation conducted by police unless the investigative agency requested prosecutorial involvement. That practice differed from the attorney general’s Medicaid fraud unit, where investigators and prosecutors worked together as a team. The attorney general’s office did not bring Michael Morales into the Memorial investigation during its yearlong development, even as Rick Simmons, Pou’s lawyer, periodically sent him courtesy copies of court filings. Morales had been following the case’s legal pleadings, but he had not been part of the evidence-gathering effort.

When the matter reached him, Morales was a young homicide prosecutor with about two years of homicide experience, working in a city with a high murder rate and a poor record of bringing offenders to justice. The Memorial case soon consumed much of his time. The office itself was operating from a temporary suite after Katrina’s floodwaters damaged its building; stained carpets and folding tables marked the makeshift workspace. Morales regarded even those surroundings as an improvement on the old office, where duct tape had held the carpet together.

A reluctant prosecutor amid competing pressures

Morales understood why the deaths warranted investigation, but did not see them as ordinary homicide cases. The city had experienced a breakdown in order, and military forces had been deployed. He was uneasy about applying civilian criminal law to conduct during what felt to him like a war zone. His uncertainty was also colored by another post-storm case: a former student clerk, by then a New Orleans police sergeant, was under investigation in connection with the Danziger Bridge Shootings. Morales thought that good people might do bad things in a crisis without necessarily deserving prosecution.

The district attorney, Eddie Jordan, also faced political pressures. He had taken office as the first African American district attorney in Orleans Parish in 2003 and was then fighting a federal judgment against him for racial discrimination. Public criticism of the Memorial case reached Jordan, who was receiving hostile letters because of his association with it. The case also brought influential interests into conflict: Tenet had investments in local politics, while Pou’s lawyer and several Tenet lawyers, like Jordan, were former U.S. attorneys. Charles Foti, the attorney general, had staked his reputation on the arrests; Jordan, by contrast, stood to gain if the case simply disappeared. Morales later acknowledged that the office was not eager to prosecute Pou, but also said it would not abandon its duties after a judge had signed an arrest warrant and witnesses were prepared to testify.

Jurisdictional conflict and the grand jury

Tension between the district attorney’s office and the attorney general’s investigators became explicit when Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer subpoenaed Pou’s outspoken boss, Dan Nuss. Morales regarded that move as an encroachment: as the prosecutor, he believed subpoenas should be issued under his authority. Because the attorney general’s office had excluded the district attorney’s office from the investigation, Morales drafted a letter from Jordan asking Foti’s office to stop investigating until the grand jury process began. The order was a serious setback for Rider and Schafer, who had hoped to continue pursuing other possible participants, corporate responsibility, and additional witness cooperation.

In 2007, Morales planned to use a newly selected special grand jury as an investigative tool. Rather than simply present a completed case and ask for an indictment, he intended to let jurors work with the district attorney’s office to decide what evidence they wished to consider, citing the case’s complexity. The office also compelled Cheri Landry, Lori Budo, and Memorial nurse manager Mary Jo D’Amico to testify without counsel before the grand jury. The district attorney had decided not to prosecute the three women, and their testimony was protected from use against them, subject to exceptions for false statements or noncompliance. Their lawyers nevertheless challenged the subpoenas through the state supreme court, warning that the women could still face future prosecution based on other evidence.

Dispute over what jurors heard

The attorney general’s team later protested that the grand jury’s exposure to the case was incomplete. In a letter drafted for Foti, Julie Cullen and other officials argued that jurors had not heard from LifeCare witnesses who could describe efforts to evacuate their patients and the confusing directions received from Memorial. The letter also raised the absence of expert testimony, family members including Carrie Everett, Angela McManus, and Kathryn Nelson, and Horace Baltz, a doctor who had supported the case. Virginia Rider, the lead investigating agent who knew its details, was not called to summarize the evidence, even though such summaries were common and hearsay was admissible in grand jury proceedings.

The same letter said jurors had not been told about Memorial’s sedative-administration policy, which called for a physician’s assessment, informed consent, a recorded medical order, and monitoring with emergency equipment available. It also disputed a picture of LifeCare staff as having abandoned their patients, pointing to communications about evacuation efforts that the attorney general’s team believed had not been presented. These were the investigators’ criticisms of the proceeding; the office’s grand jury presentation and the jurors’ reasoning remained secret.

Public pressure grew as the grand jury considered the case. Pou’s supporters argued that prosecuting her would discourage health professionals from volunteering in future emergencies, while the attorney general’s staff maintained that essential evidence was being overlooked. The conflict was not only about the strength of particular forensic conclusions; it also concerned which witnesses and records would shape the jurors’ understanding of the evacuation, patient care, and deaths.

Decision and aftermath

The special grand jury declined to indict Pou on any of the ten counts read aloud by Judge Calvin Johnson. Jordan said the office respected and agreed with the decision. Cullen, speaking for the attorney general’s side, maintained that the deaths were homicides. The contrast between those public positions reflected the divided response to the case, while the sealed grand jury process left the public without a full account of what jurors had considered.

For Morales, the outcome coincided with the end of his work as a New Orleans homicide prosecutor. His unit had been disbanded, and he was reassigned to other felonies. He said he did not feel strongly about the grand jury’s decision, but identified advance evacuation before future storms as the lesson he carried from the case. He also believed the jurors knew what had happened at Memorial, while wishing the collected information could be made public; he later reflected that a congressional hearing might have offered a more open forum. The office thus closed its criminal role without resolving the larger public dispute over responsibility, evidence, and the limits of prosecution in a disaster.