Law360 (August 28, 2026, 5:08 PM EDT) -- Two former Louisiana inmates accused the state's correctional department of illegally incarcerating people for days, weeks or months after their lawful release dates, according to a putative class action filed on Friday in federal court in Baton Rouge.

In the complaint filed by The Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans-based legal and racial justice organization that fights against mass incarceration, plaintiffs Lisa Andres and Jaren Brignac said they were detained without a legal basis even after they had served their time. They accused Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary Gary Westcott of doing nothing to stop the practice, known as overdetention, which they say happens routinely.

"On the day a Louisiana judge tells a person that their sentence is complete, that person expects to walk out the courthouse door. Instead, routinely and systematically, they are handcuffed, returned to a cell and unlawfully imprisoned," the complaint says. "The department has unlawfully held thousands of people whom it has no authority or right to detain, robbing them of their liberty, precious time with their families, job opportunities and a myriad of other experiences."

Andres was ordered released on May 30, 2025, after she pled guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to time served, though a separate parole hold remained. By July 7 of the same year, when her parole was revoked, she had served all the time she owed on that matter as well. Yet she was held in jail for 101 additional days for no apparent reason and freed the day after the DOC computed her release date, according to the complaint.

"It's obvious that nobody in [the] DOC actually cares about this issue. When I would tell them that I was not supposed to be in prison, everybody treated me like I was crazy," Andres said in a press release after the filing. "Every hour that I was wrongly imprisoned was time that I could have been working and caring for my family. They can't keep getting away with this."

Brignac was released on June 27, 2025, nine days after a judge accepted his guilty plea, sentenced him to concurrent terms with credit for time served and ordered his release. By then, he had served all the time he was supposed to, including a one-year sentence for which the good-time release date had passed more than six months earlier.

"Jail is a terrible place to be," Brignac said in the press release. He was forced to remain confined in a facility where violence was commonplace and where he had been stabbed in the past, according to the complaint.

In both Andres' and Brignac's cases, and allegedly those of many other similarly situated people, no legal determination was made to keep them locked up. Rather, they were held because of unexplained delays in processing release paperwork and practices the plaintiffs accuse Westcott of failing to change, according to the complaint, which PJI filed alongside firms Most & Associates and Loevy & Loevy.

The proposed class includes all people remanded to DOC custody since Aug. 29, 2024, who were entitled to release at the time but were kept incarcerated for more than 48 additional hours as a result of the DOC's alleged failure to process releases in a timely manner. Overdetention data DOC collects show that over 1,200 individuals have been kept unlawfully incarcerated from that date to Dec. 31, 2025, alone. 

"It doesn't matter what your politics are in this country — I think that all Americans can agree on the principle that when a person has served their sentence, they should be released," Cecelia Kappel, a deputy director of litigation at PJI, told Law360. "This case is about enforcing that fundamental promise of our justice system and holding the government accountable when it fails to do so."

Kappel described Louisiana's overdetention problem as longstanding and systemic.

She said the DOC has known about it since at least 2012, when, after conducting its own study, it concluded it was overdetaining over 2,000 people each year by an average of nearly 72 days. Much of the delay was attributed to the excessive time — 79 days on average — spent calculating a prisoner's release date even after having obtained all necessary documents.

State agencies have continued to document the issue, while individual prisoners have successfully brought federal lawsuits and obtained settlements.

PJI filed two other class actions against Louisiana in recent years challenging the practice of overdetention. Humphrey v. LeBlanc, filed in 2020, sought damages for every day that Brian Humphrey and a class of people were overdetained. Giroir v. LeBlanc, filed the following year, sought an injunction to stop the practice of overdetention altogether. A federal judge certified both classes in September 2025, and the state has appealed the certifications to the Fifth Circuit.

Kappel said discovery in the older cases shows DOC has made some changes, including adopting a new electronic system, yet the issue is far from resolved.

"We have seen no evidence that the overdetention problem has ended or has even gotten better," she said.

The new lawsuit, filed one day before what Kappel said was the expiration of a two-year statute of limitations, targets Westcott's tenure. Gov. Jeff Landry appointed Westcott, who took office Aug. 29, 2024.

In addition to depriving people of their freedom, overdetention wastes the state's resources, according to the complaint filed on Friday. According to a 2023 report by the U.S. Department of Justice, the Louisiana DOC paid parish jails at least $850,000 over a four-month period to house people after their lawful sentences had expired, for a total of approximately $2.5 million each year.

"Depriving people of liberty beyond the government's legal authority to incarcerate highlights Louisiana's loose concern for its citizens, the incarceration crisis in the state and underscores its perpetual identity as the most incarcerated state in the country," Samantha Kennedy, PJI's executive director, said in the press release. "Louisiana continues to strip people of their freedom, not just through wrongful conviction and extreme sentences, but through failure to release people from prison when it's their time to go home. The state should agree that this is a crisis, but instead, victims of overdetention are forced to sue them in order to fix this."

A representative for the state DOC declined to comment.

In an email to Law360, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill described the three lawsuits as "nothing more than an attempt at a money grab."

"My office has worked with the Louisiana Department of Corrections tirelessly for several years to build and implement a new system, train staff, train sheriffs, and train court and clerk staff across our state," Murrill said. "The activists behind these suits do not want progress and actively obstruct it. That's a shame because LDOC continually works at improving its systems. Calculating time is a complex task due to the plainly evident fact that detainees do not come into state custody legally or physically until after they are sentenced."

The plaintiffs are represented by Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel, Samantha Pourciau, Michael Allen and Hacer Kandara of The Promise of Justice Initiative, Brian Morris of Loevy & Loevy, and William Most and Caroline Gabriel of Most & Associates.

Counsel information for Westcott was not immediately available on Friday afternoon.

The case is Andres et al. v. Westcott, case number 3:26-cv-00926, in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana.

--Editing by Philip Shea.

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