Louisiana Voice

That Jackson Parish sheriff’s race is turning out to be quite the typical Louisiana political campaign as Interim Sheriff Brent Barnett faces opposition for the office is seeking for a full four-year term.

It seems that former Sheriff Andy Brown may have hired Theresa Burris who stole more than $50,000 from the Town of Arcadia while she was employed by the city as a clerk.

Brown pleaded guilty to felony theft in 2014, the same year she was hired by Brown. In 2017, while working for the Jackson Parish Sheriff’s Office, she was sentenced to four years in prison with three years suspended, and was ordered to pay restitution.

Ms. Burris confirmed to LouisianaVoice that she is the same Theresa Burris who worked for the town of Arcadia “many, many moons ago.”

She continues to serve as an administrative assistant to Barnett.

Those who read this post regularly know of my disdain for candidates for judge falling back on party loyalties and devotion to partisan politics as qualifications to wear a black robe, sit on an elevated platform looking all-wise as they decide the fate of those appearing before them—based largely, by the way, on which attorney involved kicked in the biggest campaign contribution.

I’ve harped ad nauseam on the lack of commitment to the rule of law in favor of trying to convince voters that being “a Republican longer than Donald Trump” and dedication to conservative principles were somehow qualifications for a judgeship–as with the case of First Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Blair Downing Edwards who is seeking promotion to the Louisiana Supreme Court in this Saturday’s primary.

I have also written extensively about the national problem of child sexual abuse, even to the point of authoring a book about the epidemic entitled The Dinosaur Club. No one, it seems, is immune from the scandal which seems to be growing exponentially: priests, preachers, deacons, cops, celebrities, politicians, even judges–everyone, curiously, except the LGBTQ crowd which tends to mind its own business and asks only to be left alone.

In Amite, for example, a judge last year awarded full custody to a man who had raped the child’s mother, impregnating her, when she was a minor. Moreover, the child told a teacher that her father, John Barnes, had abused her both physically and mentally.

Despite all that, 21^st Judicial District JUDGE JEFFEY CASH awarded Barnes full custody of the child.

Now, let’s jump over a couple of parishes to the west where one West Feliciana Parish judge, Sydney Picou Walker, inexplicably removed a “no contact” bond condition for a man, Jacob Mansell of St. Francisville, accused of sexually abusing a juvenile and later that same day, a second judge, Kathryn Jones, granted Mansell immediate TEMPORARY SOLE CUSTODY of three juveniles in a civil suit involving his ex-wife.

What in the name of convoluted, ass-backward reasoning is going on with these judges? Whatever it is, I sure as hell don’t want what they’re smoking. It was almost as though the two judges were working together in Mansell’s defense.

Along with these two cases, LouisianaVoice has been fielding an increasing number of complaints about family courts all over the state. The problem, it seems, is no matter what testimony may reveal to the contrary, judges are consistently disregarding or even disallowing testimony by one parent while blatantly favoring the opposing parent. Often times, the prevailing parent just happens to have the financial resources to simply outlast the other one, often forcing them into financial ruin while attempting to protect the children.

Making matters worse, family court records are usually sealed, preventing independent investigations of proceedings.

Only two days ago, LouisianaVoice published a story about a judge in TERREBONNE PARISH who, in his desire to hurry things along, simply refused to allow one side’s witnesses to testify and ruled in favor of the other parent.

LouisianaVoice will be taking a much closer look at family courts and readers are invited to relate their experiences for investigation. But please: no innuendo. Everything MUST BE SUPPORTED by documentation. That will be a difficult task, considering the practice of sealing records, but provide whatever documented information you can.

Send your information to: louisianavoice@outlook.com

Pattern for Louisiana Senate’s proposed redistricting map

Geographic illustration of redistricting efforts is more than a little interesting

Wow. Five former employees of the Catahoula Parish Correctional Center have been indicted and a sixth has already entered a guilty plea following an investigation into abuse of prisoners at the facility two years ago.

The ANNOUNCEMENT of last week’s indictments of the prison warden, assistant warden and other supervisors was made by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Western District of Louisiana. They are accused of abusing 13 handcuffed prisoners with an electric riot shield and for then attempting to cover it up (yep, another coverup). The identities and titles of those indicted include:

• Jeremy Wiley, 44 of Harrisonburg, the former warden of CPCC, was charged with 13 counts of abuse of rights under color of law for using the electrified riot shield to shock and crush the 13 handcuffed, non-resisting prisoners, on Feb. 1, 2024.
• Gary Allen, 57 of Winnsboro, CPCC’s former assistant warden;
• William Savage, 57 of Monroe, CPCC’s former colonel;
• James Wathen, 37 of Jonesville, CPCC’s former chief of security, were charged with 13 counts of abuse of rights for their failures to intervene to stop the assaults;
• Chad Littleton, 45 of Harrisonburg, a former Catahoula Parish sheriff’s deputy, was charged with one count of abuse of rights for striking a prisoner in the head and genitals.

All five men were also charged with conspiring to violate the rights of the prisoners as well as falsifying reports about the incident (the coverup). Allen also faces one count of witness tampering.

In addition, on April 14, Carl Michael Williamson, 40 of Jonesville, a former CPCC transportation officer, pleaded guilty in a related case to one count of abuse of rights under color of law for striking one of the inmates in the head and one count of falsifying a report which covered up the abuse of the 13 prisoners.

Sheriff Toney Edwards immediately held a press conference, complete with a lineup of four mute but attentive deputies, hands clasped in front of them, at which he proclaimed with some hint of righteous indignation that each of the individuals named in the 34-count federal indictment have been “suspended.”

Edwards added that he was committed to keeping all prisoners under his supervision safe and that “everything humanely possible is being done to protect the community and uphold the integrity of this office.”

But hold on just a cotton-pickin’ minute there, Sheriff. Does this STATEMENT by Eldred Roy, your former chief detective, look familiar to you?

And there’s this LOUISIANAVOICE STORYfrom almost exactly two years ago which called attention to reports of inmate deaths, stabbings, beatings, the arrest of corrections center employees for smuggling contraband into the facility, the use of inmate labor to cut firewood that a prison official sold for personal profit and the use of inmate labor to perform construction projects for private citizens.

Of course, the Louisiana Ethics Board, as might be expected since Bobby Jindal and Jeff Landry gutted it of any real enforcement powers, cleared Sheriff Edwards of all charges of ethics violations. Again, that’s par for the course in Louisiana.

And Edwards denied involvement in ANOTHER ALTERCATION at an ICE facility in Catahoula Parish way back in 2020—even though he did admit that he and his deputies were at the scene at the time of a protest that detainees say was broken up by sheriff deputies with pepper spray and projectiles.

Awful lot of coincidences there, Sheriff.

Y’know, Sheriff, Harry Truman had a little sign on his desk that said the buck stops with the guy in charge. That would be you.

So, it’s kinda difficult to see how you could be taking the high road here. In the end, you have to take responsibility for the actions of your employees. That’s just the way it works.

It appears that Roy is saying you were informed as far back as nearly three years ago of mistreatment of inmates. It appears from our vantage point that you had ample time to conduct your own investigation before the feds stepped in and necessitated that you become proactive.

You knew of beatings, deaths and other charges yet chose to do nothing until the federal indictments came down.

Afraid I gotta say this is on you, Sheriff.

Several years back, Fayette Tompkins, a co-worker from my days at the Baton Rouge State-Times newspaper, called me and asked if I’d like to meet him for lunch at the Florida Boulevard Piccadilly.

Sure, I said, and the two of us met that day and renewed a friendship that had lapsed after I left the paper in 1976 to become managing editor of the Daily Leader in my hometown of Ruston.

Thomas Wolfe, it turns out, was right. You can’t go home again. After living in Baton Rouge and working for The State-Times, I was bitten. I missed Baton Rouge, so I moved back to nearby Denham Springs.

That lunch with Fayette proved to be an indication of something more–a semi-regular event. The late Bill Bankston was the first to join us, making it a trio of State-Times alumni and the lunches quickly morphed into a monthly event, though Bankston, unfortunately, passed away soon after.

When I drove Fayette to the hospital for surgery, I was just helping a friend with no expectations of reciprocity. But days after he was back home, I received an Amazon package. I knew I had not ordered anything from Amazon but in that package was a Kindle reader he’d ordered as a gift for me. That was just Fayette being Fayette—generous to the core.

And those lunches soon became a new tradition of former employees of both The State-Times and The Morning Advocate. As more members joined the group, we continued congregating monthly for lunch. Only the location changed. We moved to the Piccadilly on Sherwood Boulevard and word spread as we invited any and every former employee of the two publications.

Now a full-blown tradition, we began calling ourselves (only half-jokingly) The Dinosaurs. Most of us, after all, are either approaching or already past 80 years of age. Our numbers ebb and flow from one month to another but the number consistently hovers around 12 to 15 attendees. Mostly, we just laugh as we reminisce about some of our adventures at the papers—like the one reporter who, fed up with the sticking keys on his typewriter, dumped it into a trash can, poured lighter fluid on it and set it afire. Or about the meeting of an area city council when the mayor, responding to criticism of some official action from a member of the audience, said, “Well, sir, that’s your derogatory” (funny, I suppose only to those who were there). Or any of a dozen other episodes that made work at the paper enjoyable and memorable, like when Edwin Edwards took a pair of scissors and lopped off about half of Mayor Woody Dumas’s tie. Of course, politics and LSU and Southern University football are also hot topics at the table.

For the most part, the food is just an afterthought; it’s the camaraderie between people who genuinely care for each other, enjoyed working together and continue to enjoy the fellowship that make the gatherings a monthly highlight.

There are no officers in The Dinosaur Club. We’re all equal, no one more equal than anyone else but there was never any question that it was Fayette who came up with the idea of a monthly get-together and he scheduled each month’s meeting faithfully—until he couldn’t.

You see, Fayette was deaf in one ear from birth, which made conversations with him difficult at times. But then his hearing got progressively worse, his eyesight began to fail him and he eventually labored to even walk. Then one of the cruelest maladies of them all—dementia—began to take a toll and though Linda Lightfoot would pick him up and drive him to the lunches, he eventually quit coming altogether. He couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, he explained, and he felt left out of the conversations. It had to be a lonely feeling.

But his condition kept deteriorating and it was discovered he had a brain tumor that was adversely affecting his eyesight, hearing and balance while putting dangerous pressure on his brain stem. It proved to be benign, but that didn’t lessen the frustration and it led to frequent falls.

Last week, he underwent brain surgery to remove the tumor. They got about 90 percent of it. But then, he suffered a stroke that further sapped his energy and the decision was made to move him to hospice. Last Friday, at approximately 7:40 a.m., Fayette, a native of Homer in Claiborne Parish, passed away. He was 79.

The tradition of The Dinosaur Club lives on and today (Monday, May 11, 2026), Advocate retiree Katheryn Flournoy proposed a toast and 15 Dinosaurs quietly raised a glass in honor of Fayette, the one who brought us all back together. It was a fitting tribute and a fitting place and time to give it.