Charles Elloie, who rose up from the Lafitte public housing development to start a key black political organization in the city before retiring from the Criminal District Court bench in scandal in 2007, has died, friends said. He was 82.
The cause of Elloie’s death on Sunday was not immediately known. Friends said he had diabetes, was bound to a wheelchair from a leg amputation and had deteriorated over the past few years.
Long before he was accused of a dangerous pattern of freely giving recognizance bonds or bond reductions to felons, Elloie was a veteran attorney for the poor.
He ran a failed bid for the state House of Representatives in the late 1960s. That campaign morphed into formation of the Community Organization for Urban Politics, or COUP. The 7th Ward political organization would grow into a powerful vote machine in the black community, next to the larger Southern Organization for Unified Leadership, or SOUL.
Elloie, who graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, Dillard University and Southern University Law School, would join forces with Judges Herbert Cade, Kern Reese and others to flex their muscle behind candidates that included some white political hopefuls, including Moon Landrieu.
“He was one of Edwin Edwards’ first supporters down here, when nobody else would touch Edwin,” said veteran defense attorney J.C. Lawrence, a close friend.
Retired Criminal District Judge Calvin Johnson said Elloie brought his passion for the people – “coming to it with some agendas, keep in mind” – to the court when he won massive support in his run for the Section A seat.
“This was a guy who was embedded in the black community in New Orleans, back to the '60s,” Johnson said. “Charlie was an educator. Charlie was a teacher. He was all of that.”
That devotion translated into a whopping 98,000 votes for Elloie in 1996, a figure far above most winning bids for the criminal court bench, and one that Elloie wielded as a trump card of sorts.
“Charlie was proud of saying to all of us other judges – and I’m going to say it in the fashion in which Charlie would say it: ‘I got more (expletive) votes than all y’all,” Johnson said. “And that’s absolutely true. People loved Charlie.”
But Elloie’s penchant for releasing arrestees on recognizance bonds or lowering bonds for felons arrested on violent crime charges made him a favorite target of critics such as former District Attorney Harry Connick, who would rail over such releases and ultimately filed a misconduct complaint against Elloie.
Elloie, suspended a year earlier, retired in 2007 with 10 years on the bench, effectively ending a probe into his penchant for reducing bail far beyond that of any other judge in the courthouse.
The state Judiciary Commission had called Elloie’s practice “a substantial threat of harm to the administration of justice and the public as a whole.” In one study by the Metropolitan Crime Commission, Elloie was found to have granted nearly half of all recognizance bonds among the 13 judges in the courthouse, while dominating even more in bond reductions.
More recently, at the aborted trial of convicted unlicensed bail bondsman Rufus Johnson, witnesses testified that Elloie took gifts, in the form of lottery tickets and McDonald’s breakfast delivered to his chambers, from bondsmen.
Elloie was found to have sidestepped required hearings and taken other shortcuts to get people out. These days, in an era when bail reform has gained national momentum, some judges and attorneys think Elloie was before his time.
“The low bonds that we enjoy right now, he was the person who would in fact do that,” Lawrence said.
Criminal District Judge Laurie White, who won the seat that Elloie vacated, agreed.
“He was ridiculed and slammed and removed ultimately for low bonds he set, that ultimately became the cry for all judges to be setting lower bonds, emptying the jail,” White said, "and the press and criticizers called it corrupt.”
Elloie’s close association with bail bondsmen contributed to his notoriety, she said.
John Fuller, a prominent New Orleans criminal defense attorney, cut his teeth in Elloie’s courtroom as a young public defender. He and others said Elloie had an extraordinary photographic memory.
“To the point where if he were to walk in a room with 50 people and introduce himself to each one, he would remember every single person’s name on the way out,” Fuller said. “As a judge, what I learned from him was compassion. He exhibited so much compassion toward nearly every defendant that was before him.”
Johnson recalled walking into Elloie’s courtroom one day and watching his fellow judge breaking down when a drug-court defendant was ready to surrender.
“She’s telling Charlie, literally, ‘F--- you. I’m not going to do that. Put me in jail. Let me do my time,’” Johnson recalled. “Charlie gets to talking to her, and he literally starts to beg her to change her life. He literally starts to cry. Because that’s who Charlie was; he’s this guy who truly cares about those people who were coming in and out of that room.”
Fuller recalled Elloie as a sharp dresser who favored hats and seersucker suits. He said he would often find Elloie reading his Bible before court in the morning.
“Judge Elloie was extremely spiritual. I think his spirituality allowed him to accept that man-made controversy with ease,” Fuller said. “The entire city knew him. He’s going to be sorely missed.”
A group of judges, current and former, gathered with Elloie last year to unveil his courthouse portrait. Elloie’s hope, friends said, was to get well enough to walk back into the courthouse that he left in scandal.
He still would have been welcomed by his base, Fuller said.
“It had no effect on his perception in the black community and really only solidified the black community’s faith in him,’” Fuller said of Elloie's downfall.
Asked if Elloie could have been re-elected by popular vote afterward, Fuller replied, “In a landslide.”
