Who Was Billy Sothern? Cause Of Death, Obituary, Funeral

Billy Sothern, a dedicated capital defense lawyer and essayist who defended some of New Orleans’ most prominent figures while writing about hopelessness and government failure following Hurricane Katrina passed away on Friday. He was 45.

Cause of death and funeral:

Sothern passed away at home in Massachusetts, where he’d lately relocated but kept up his job in the Louisiana courts. Billy’s wife Niki said that he died as he did suicide and had already been dealing with thyroid cancer, major depressive order, and Covid. Funeral plans will be revealed later.

Early Life:

Southern, a native of New York, relocated to New Orleans with his family in 2001 to defend people facing the death penalty in the “death belt,” as he refers to the area in his 2007 book “Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City.”

Career as an attorney:

As a staff attorney at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, the deputy director of the Capital Appeals Project, and most recently in private practice, Billy Sothern has twenty years of experience representing people facing the death penalty in state and federal court in Louisiana and the South.

While attending NYU Law School, he worked on death penalty cases during internships at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is one of the Reprieve’s co-founders (US). Billy Sothern participates in the Criminal Justice Act Panels for Louisiana’s Western, Middle, and Eastern Districts.

He has presented arguments in various severe and complex cases at the Louisiana Supreme Court and the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He was a legal team member in the Kennedy v. Louisiana case, in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is unconstitutional in circumstances of child abuse other than homicide. He had spent the previous year working as an attorney for the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project. He is the author of Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City and has contributed articles on criminal and social justice problems to the New York Times, the Nation, and Salon (UC Press, 2007).

Amelia Warner

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