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Dear Justice Community and Stakeholders:

Effective February 10, 2009, Ilona Picou became the Executive Director of Juvenile Regional Services, Inc. (JRS), replacing Derwyn Bunton.  On behalf of the Board, I am thrilled to announce Ms. Picou’s position at the helm of JRS, which provides legal representation and sentencing advocacy for youth in trouble.   Prior to accepting the position, Ms. Picou spent three years as the Recovery Coordinator for the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court.

Ms. Picou brings an extensive background in juvenile defense and a long standing commitment to best practices for youth to the position.  She is a graduate of the Washington College of Law in Washington D.C. and began her career as a juvenile defender in clinic at WCL and through internships with the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia and the Office of the Public Defender for the State of Maryland. She later worked as a juvenile defender in Baltimore City, MD specializing in the representation of incarcerated youth from pre-disposition to post-disposition in the Detention Response Unit.

Directly out of law school, Ms. Picou worked as part of a national effort to bring best practices to juvenile indigent defense with the American Bar Association’s Juvenile Justice Center.  She has continued that work with the National Juvenile Defender Center, becoming an expert in state wide assessments of the quality of representation in delinquency proceedings.  This included working with the Louisiana Indigent Defender Board in 1999 to assess Louisiana’s juvenile indigent defense delivery system.  Later, she served as the Senior Fellow of the Southern Juvenile Defender Center and Director of the Mid-Atlantic Juvenile Defender Center where she authored assessments of Virginia and Maryland.

Ms. Picou served as part of a legal team post-Katrina who assisted the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court and the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) in representing, locating and reuniting youth evacuated to OJJ facilities after being trapped by floodwaters in the Orleans Parish Prison. 

Her work with the Orleans Parish Juvenile Court lead to her being commissioned to serve as the Recovery Coordinator for the court where she worked for three years to implement system and court reform, including implementing the Annie E. Casey Foundation Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiatives (JDAI) in partnership with a broad based stakeholder and citizen collaborative.  We are excited to have Ilona lead us as we embark on the future of juvenile indigent defense for New Orleans and in our role as a leader for the state.  Please feel free to contact Ms. Picou or me should you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Norris Henderson
President, JRS Board of Directors