Louisiana Voice

This a story of your tax dollars at work.

Back in March 2019, the Southern University system-wide grievance committee was hearing an appeal by four professors who had been terminated by the school. Their names are Elaine Lawnau, Christy Moland, Terrilyn Gillis and Marilyn Seibert.

They requested that the hearing be conducted in open session. That is their right. It’s written in Louisiana’s Open Meeting Statutes.

But committee chairperson Maria Dickerson announced that she had met privately with all committee members beforehand and it was agreed that the hearing would be closed to the public.

There were at least four laws broken with that decision:

Meeting “privately” with committee members beforehand was itself a violation of the Open Meetings statutes;

The professors who were filing grievances, not the committee, has the final say under those same statutes as to whether or not the meeting should proceed in open or closed session – and they chose open;

There was never a formal motion to enter into executive session – also a requirement of the law;

There was never an official vote taken by the committee to enter into closed session – again, a require…well, you get the picture.

Because of the flagrant violations, the four professors and I, as a journalist covering the hearing, filed suit against Southern.

The school’s defense attorney, Winston Decuir, Jr. was questioning me during the subsequent trial and he asked, “Mr. Aswell, how many events have you covered at Southern?”

I suppose he was trying to imply that I was there only to serve as some sort of rabble-rouser, neglecting a fine point of law which says that it is irrelevant how many times I have graced Southern or anywhere else with my appearance to cover a meeting.

State District Court Judge Richard “Chip” Moore found Decuir’s lame argument that the university’s grievance committee did not constitute a public body so embarrassingly weak that he LEVIED A FINE of $1,000 per plaintiff ($5,000 total), plus $8,400 in attorney fees to Baton Rouge attorney J. Arthur Smith, III, who was representing the professors and by extension, me. More also ordered Southern to pay $638 in court costs.

I recently (recently being a relative term) made a public records requests for an accounting of how much the school paid Decuir’s firm to represent the school in this dog of a case.

The records I received earlier this week reflect that up and including the trial in 19^th Judicial District Court on the open meetings violations, Southern paid Decuir $12,600.

When Judge Moore handed down his decision in May 2019, Decuir appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeal where he lost again. For his work on the appeal, Southern paid Decuir an additional $5,462.50.

With two strikes against him, Decuir then took the matter up on writs to the Louisiana State Supreme Court, which simply refused to hear the case – but not before Decuir was paid another $3,782.50.

The final accounting provided by Southern shows that from start to finish, Decuir was paid $22,276.85 for the hearing and the ensuing legal work.

Now, any math whizzes reading this will be quick to realize there’s a $20 discrepancy in the accounting. Just so you know, I am attaching a link to the tabulations provided by Southern. Perhaps you can find the extra twenty bucks. I can’t.

But the point of all this to show that Southern was hit for $22,276.85 (or $22,256.85, depending on whether or not you can find the elusive $20) to keep from paying a $14,038 judgment – $9,145 of which was spent on fruitless appeals that any first-year law student could have said was an exercise in throwing good money after bad.

And while I can’t speak to whether or not the plaintiffs’ attorney fees and court costs have been paid, I can state with certainty that the $5,000 judgment in favor of the five plaintiffs has not been paid.

I wonder if there’s a provision to require attorneys to pony up funds for continuing to bleed a client after losing a case more obvious than Donald Trump’s bogus election claims?