KEY TAKEAWAYS: Louisiana Supreme Court upheld Act 15, allowing consolidation of Orleans Parish civil and criminal clerk offices. The ruling blocks elected criminal clerk Calvin Duncan from taking office after winning 68% of the vote. Civil Clerk Chelsea Richard Napoleon will oversee both clerk offices under the new law. The decision ends legal challenges from New Orleans officials and voters who argued the law undermined election results.   The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled Monday in support of a new state law that eliminates one of Orleans Parish’s two clerk of court positions, blocking the wrongfully convicted man who was elected to the post from taking office. In a 4-3 decision covering two cases, justices upheld Act 15 to allow the consolidation of New Orleans’ criminal and civil clerks of court offices to move forward. The legislation took away the criminal clerk’s role just days before Calvin Duncan was set to take office May 4. The civil clerk, Chelsea Richard Napoleon, was put in charge of both agencies under the law. City leaders resisted the change, arguing the law created a new position that required an election be held to fill it. Rather than allow Napoleon to assume the criminal clerk’s duties, the New Orleans City Council appointed retired Judge Calvin Johnson to lead the office on an interim basis. Napoleon sued city officials to thwart Johnson’s appointment, and the justices ruled in her favor Monday. The court combined Napoleon’s case with another from Gary Crockett, a New Orleans businessman and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate. He argued Act 15 was unconstitutional because it defied the will of New Orleans voters who chose Duncan to replace incumbent criminal court clerk Darren Lombard. “The right to vote … is undoubtedly sacrosanct, but it is a right granted to our voters, not a mechanism to preserve offices for their elected occupants,” the court’s ruling reads. Associate Justices Cade Cole, Jefferson Hughes and Jay McCallum joined Justice Pro Tempore Allison Penzato — all Republicans — ruled in the majority. Chief Justice John Weimer, who doesn’t have a party affiliation, and Associate Justices Piper Griffin and John Guidry, both Democrats, sided with the plaintiffs. “The action by the Legislature to abolish a public office before the person elected to that office can assume the duties of the office makes a mockery of the electoral process by completely obliterating the constitutional effectiveness of the people’s vote,” Weimer wrote in his dissent. There was no immediate response on the ruling from Duncan, who was sentenced to life without parole at Louisiana State Penitentiary for a 1981 murder but consistently maintained his innocence. He was released in 2011 after pleading guilty to a lesser charge and exonerated 10 years later. The state law denying Duncan, who is Black, his ascent to elected office has reverberated racially in New Orleans, where Black Democrats make up the majority of the electorate. It took effect in the immediate aftermath of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that deemed Louisiana’s congressional district map an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The ruling prompted the legislature to create new boundaries that eliminated one of the state’s two majority-Black U.S. House seats, using a map crafted by Sen. Jay Morris, R-West Monroe, who also authored the measure to combine the court clerk positions. The clerk consolidation pit Gov. Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill against New Orleans leaders. As the lawsuits against Act 15 made their way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, Murrill threatened to remove Mayor Helena Moreno, District Attorney Jason Williams and five city council members from office for appointing an interim clerk and setting an election date to fill the position. “While I am disappointed in today’s ruling, we stood up for the voters of Orleans Parish and defended what many believed was their constitutional right to have the results of an election respected,” Moreno said in a statement. The mayor also noted the justices did not find that city leaders “usurped” power from the state when they appointed an interim clerk. In a social media post, Murrill said the ruling validates her belief that the legislature had the authority to combine the two clerks’ roles and put Napoleon in charge. “The Louisiana Supreme Court got this right,” Murrill wrote. After earning a law degree in 2023, Duncan chose to run for the office he had often criticized while trying to clear his name. He earned 68% support from New Orleans voters in the November election, scoring a victory celebrated in progressive criminal justice circles. As Act 15 neared final approval from the governor in April, a swearing-in ceremony was held for Duncan two weeks before he could officially take over from Lombard. A federal judge in Baton Rouge then ruled the clerk consolidation law was unconstitutional, and Duncan reported for his first day on the job May 4. But in the preceding overnight hours, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had suspended the lower court ruling in response to a request from Murrill. Duncan left his courthouse office just hours after his arrival. ...read more read less