Orleans, June 15, 2004
Pardeep Sharma
Victims advocate, Bernadette D'Souza, a lawyer and a longtime advocate
for domestic violence victims, has announced her candidacy for the Division
M judgeship of Orleans Civil District Court.
If elected in the Sept. 18 primary, she pledged to remain in the domestic
relations section, which deals with divorce, custody and protection
orders, and not move into a general docket position when a new judge
arrives, as is the custom. In the past, at least one judge has chosen
to stay in the section, said Walt Pierce, public information officer
for the court.
D'Souza said she would work to establish a family court where judges
would specialize in family and domestic violence cases. She is a member
of the family courts committee of the Louisiana State Bar Association,
a group that has been promoting the concept with Orleans Civil District
Court judges.
D'Souza, 50, an Uptown resident, is running for the seat vacated in
October when the Louisiana Supreme Court ousted C. Hunter King for lying
under oath about coercing his staff to work on his re-election campaign.
Goa-born Bernadette D'Souza was brought up in Mumbai and came to the
U.S. in 1978, has been Managing Attorney with the Domestic Violence
Unit of New Orleans Legal Assistance and seen things first-hand.
A graduate of Bombay University, D'Souza got her Juris Doctor in 1992
from Tulane University and is a member of the Louisiana State Bar Association.
She was a lecturer in law at Tulane Law School and has given several
seminars on the subject of domestic violence.
She has been on the staff of the nonprofit New Orleans Legal Assistance
Corporation for more than a decade, working in recent years on domestic
violence cases. D'Souza had opted to stay home with her and her husband's
three children when they were young and to enter law school later.
In 2000, D'Souza was standing outside the Jefferson Parish court complex
in Gretna with a client, Jacquelene Seal Gersfeld, when Gersfeld was
fatally shot by her estranged husband, after winning an injunction against
him.
Statistics given out by D'Souza's campaign platform show that in New
Orleans domestic violence has gone up by more than 300 percent from
1998 to 2003. The elections for D'Souza's run for judgeship for Division
"M" are scheduled for Sep 18, along with School Board and
other local elections. If she ties with any of the other candidates,
there will be a runoff on Nov 2. The election will be held throughout
Orleans Parish, comprising about 475,000 residents, 65 percent of them
African American.
The experience only strengthened her commitment to domestic violence
victims, D'Souza said. That year, she joined the Mayor's Domestic Violence
Advisory Committee and remains a member. She is also the chairwoman
of domestic violence groups at the local YWCA and Catholic Charities.