When she arrived at the justice of the peace court on a rain-soaked morning, Marchana Watts hoped she could fight off her landlord’s push to evict her and her five children from their trailer home on the outskirts of Baton Rouge.
Watts, a careful record keeper who earned $20 an hour as an insurance analyst, came to Justice Tracy Batieste’s small courtroom with receipts. They showed she had paid her $950 monthly rent for the past year and a half, she said.
But when her case was called, Watts said in a complaint to the state judiciary commission, her evidence was “COMPLETELY IGNORED by the ‘judge’. She did not print out all of my documents and didn’t allow me to properly present them.”
Within a few minutes, Watts recalled in a later interview, Batieste moved to the issue of a court fee, instructing the manager of her trailer park to pay up.
He handed the justice a folded bundle of cash with a hundred-dollar bill on top, Watts said. “She stuck it in her robe … And then she was like: ‘You have 24 hours to move.’”
Watts had been evicted from her home by a little-noticed judicial system that orders thousands of evictions in Louisiana each year.
Inside Louisiana’s justice of the peace courts, evictions often move swiftly, landlords rack up wins, some judges earn outsized incomes – and housing advocates say tenants’ fundamental rights are at risk.
The state’s 390 justices of the peace work part-time – ruling on evictions, small claims and wage garnishments as well as, in happier moments, performing weddings. They are required to have only a high school diploma and their courts do not need to keep detailed records or follow standard rules of evidence. They are paid directly by the fees their court charges, including court costs in eviction cases that can total $150 or more.
In court documents and interviews, tenant advocates and legal experts say the interplay between fees and justices’ personal income creates conflicts of interest that can incentivize them to evict tenants and win the favor of landlords who bring in cases and fees.
“Why would landlords prefer to go to a justice of the peace court?” said Bradley Benton, a former legal aid attorney who has defended Louisiana tenants in eviction cases. “It’s faster. It’s cheaper. And it’s easier to evict.”
Eviction fees helped the justice of the peace in one part-time suburban court earn more compensation last year – over $400,000 – than the chief justice of the US supreme court earns.
That justice of the peace is one of five who earned more than $220,000 in a single year from filing fees, much of it derived from eviction cases. Renters are frequently compelled by their leases to pay court costs back to a landlord following evictions.
One longtime justice of the peace calls some of these courts “big business”. A clerk for another justice told a tenant’s lawyer that “we are a for-profit court”. A legal expert described a justice of the peace court in a New Orleans suburb as an “eviction mill”.
The Guardian’s nine-month investigation draws on analysis of more than 11,000 pages of eviction records and 3,400 financial disclosure forms as well as deposition testimony, recently unsealed investigative evidence and documents released under public records requests. The reporting also draws on dozens of interviews with justices, tenants and housing attorneys, and the observation of eviction hearings at five justice of the peace courts in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans metro areas and in St Tammany parish.
“I believe this system is blatantly unconstitutional,” said Lisa Foster, a retired California appeals judge and the former director of the office for access to justice at the US Department of Justice. She pointed to a more than century-old US supreme court precedent, which found that a defendant’s rights were violated if their case was heard before a judge with a direct financial interest in the outcome. “Without question, the Louisiana justice of the peace system has failed its citizens, yet no one seems to be taking action.”
This scrutiny comes as Louisiana’s state government has quietly backed this court system with new laws that expand these justices’ authority, while at the same time passing a law that carries possible jail sentences for homeless people.
In Louisiana and across the US, millions of tenants are struggling as the overall cost of living continues to soar – and rents and junk fees charged on top of rents have surged amid shortages of affordable housing. Roughly one out of every 13 renter households faced eviction filings in 2025, according to research by Princeton University’s eviction lab covering 10 states and dozens of metro areas.
When landlords seek eviction, renters are often at a disadvantage because of their limited finances, lack of understanding of the eviction system and, frequently, lack of legal representation. Studies around the country often show that less than 5% of tenants have lawyers to fight for them in eviction cases, while more than 80% of landlords typically have attorneys on their side.
Uneven playing fields in the eviction process can put additional strains on renters already struggling to get by – piling on court fees, moving charges and other costs and, studies show, harming families’ mental and physical health.
Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the US, offers some of the weakest legal protection for renters in the nation. A first-of-its-kind data analysis conducted by the Guardian found that the eviction filing rate within the jurisdiction of the busiest justice of the peace court was nearly three times the national average. The rate of legal representation for tenants in this court, according to documents reviewed by the Guardian, could be as low as 1%.
The Louisiana Justices of the Peace & Constables Association and the state attorney general’s office did not answer a series of detailed questions from the Guardian for this story.
In a recent public statement, the Louisiana attorney general, Liz Murrill, said the state’s justices of the peace “play a vital role in serving our communities and upholding the rule of law” and “providing access to justice close to home”.
After the short hearing in Justice Batieste’s court concluded in July 2024, Watts left in tears.
She had moved into the three-bedroom trailer home after the death of her sister to be closer to her only remaining sibling. It was cramped and damp. But it was a stable place to live.
The eviction order, tacked to her door earlier in the month, had come as a shock. She had tried to find free legal representation, but Louisiana’s eviction process – which generally requires just 72 hours notice before an eviction case can be heard in court – was so fast she did not have enough time.
Black women, like Watts and the majority of renters interviewed for this series, face greater risk of eviction than any other demographic group, according to numerous studies.
Watts said she suspected her eviction was an act of retaliation. Her property manager, who had stood before her in court that day, had made continued, unwanted sexual advances via explicit images sent over text message and knocks at the door past midnight, according to Watts and records seen by the Guardian. In her written complaint – which was part of a tranche of recently unsealed records obtained by the Guardian – she told the state judiciary commission that the manager had “emotionally and mentally abused me”.
There was no chance to discuss that in court.
Batieste did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Guardian. In an interview with the judiciary commission in February 2025, she asserted that when she ruled on Watts’s case there were “some materials that were missing that kind of had a question mark on them”.
Under state law, Watts had 24 hours to vacate her home. She borrowed money to book a removal van and rent a storage unit to keep her possessions. She found a place for her boys to stay, moving 50 miles south to the rural town of Donaldsonville, which sits on a stretch of the Mississippi River and is surrounded by chemical plants.
For the next four weeks she slept in her car, parked nearby in the driveway of her late grandmother’s abandoned home. She prayed for strength each night before falling asleep in the back seat.
“It was a lot,” she recalled. “But I had to stay strong for my sons.”
Justice Chuck Cusimano II’s courtroom sits off a tight corridor on the sixth floor of a tall government building in the New Orleans suburb of Harahan. A slight man with wavy gray hair, he has been the elected justice of the peace for Jefferson parish’s fifth district for almost 20 years. He previously served as a district court judge and a state legislator.
Eviction hearings begin promptly at 9.30am on Tuesdays and Thursdays, usually wrapping up before midday. A large clock adorns the left-side wall of the courtroom and wooden public benches are separated by sheets of hard plastic.
On a recent June morning, as the clock ticked a few minutes before 9.30am, a cluster of landlords and property managers lined the benches, waiting to appear before the judge.
“He’ll be done with this whole docket in 30 minutes,” quipped one representative for a local leasing company. “He’s fast!”
“I love that!” replied a property manager, also awaiting her turn.
The Guardian observed five separate eviction dockets at Cusimano’s court throughout June and July, witnessing the speed with which cases were heard, almost always resulting in a judgment ordering a tenant to vacate their home within 24 hours.
On that morning in June, Cusimano ran through 11 cases in 14 minutes. Two days later, on 18 June, the morning after a tropical storm hit New Orleans, flooding parts of the city and downing trees across roadways, he heard 86 cases in 36 minutes. All but one resulted in a judgment of eviction.
Over the sessions observed by the Guardian, the tenants ordered to leave their homes included single moms, cashiers, healthcare workers and law enforcement professionals. Some had fallen behind on rent because they had been laid off from their job or missed time from work because of illness.
The majority of the cases, though, resulted in default rulings in favor of the landlord after a tenant did not appear in court. Louisiana, like nine other states, allows landlords to issue leases that waive a tenant’s right to a notice period following a missed rent payment, meaning an eviction summons can be filed almost as soon as someone falls behind. In contrast, Washington DC requires 30 days’ notice and Vermont 14 days – providing tenants more time to find legal representation, scrape together additional funds or negotiate payment plans with their landlords.
After Cusimano had issued several judgments at a hearing on 2 June, he joked with the landlords in the public benches: “No more tenants? Then we’re winning!”
The small group of renters who showed up at Cusimano’s court on the morning of 18 June included Leroyalnika Pierre, a 24-year-old single mother who works at a Waffle House and as a part-time hair stylist. She sat in the waiting area, holding her two-year-old son, waiting for Cusimano to call her name. It was her first time facing eviction and she did not know what to expect.
As she heard her name called, amid the flurry of activity, the case began before she had even made it to the judge’s bench.
“Did you pay your rent?” Cusimano asked, after the court heard from a property manager at a rental company named 1st Lake Properties, who said she owed $1,395.
“No,” she replied, her voice barely audible. “I was waiting on them to fix my place.”
Justice Cusimano immediately ordered the eviction, informing Pierre she could not withhold payment over the conditions of her apartment, but could sue 1st Lake, one of Louisiana’s largest rental firms, separately over the issue. Pierre, like almost all others that day, had no attorney. Her hearing lasted less than a minute.
“He wasn’t even trying to hear the reason why I hadn’t paid,” she said later. Her apartment wa…
… Trimmed for readability. Visit the source for the full article.
Extracted and lightly reformatted for readability. · Source: pt