New Orleans Prosecutors Routinely Violate Defendants’ Right to Counsel to Keep Them in Jail

Summary: From the start,the murder that William Bonham was charged withlooked like a case of self-defense. Bonhamwas arrested for the stabbing death of his friend Kent “Frenchy” Brouillette in December 2015. The whole thing had started several months earlier, when Bonham, a musician who played gigs in New Orleans’s French Quarter, had $25,000 worth of instruments and equipment stolen from his room in a tenement house where both he and Brouillette lived.