Louisiana Voice

Before beginning our second installment, it might be appropriate to point out a couple of clarifications to our first story as provided by Ashton O’Dwyer, the victim of some especially roughshod justice meted out in the days and weeks following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

O’Dwyer was kind enough to inform LouisianaVoice that Chales Talley, one of his former law partners at Lemie and Kelleher, “unequivocally reported to me over the telephone during the week of the 11th, in a conversation which he initiated in order to attempt to intimidate me into silence, that I had, indeed already been suspended from the practice of law by Plattsmier.

“However, Talley said that the firm (Lemle & Kelleher) had ‘influence’ with [Charles] Plattsmier, and could get the suspension ‘lifted,’ but only if I quit giving interviews, surrender my weapons to ‘lawful authority’ (armed looters were still roaming parts of the City at this time, almost at will, without intervention by law enforcement), and vacate my property on St. Charles Avenue and join my law partners … wherever the heck they happened to be (other than in New Orleans). This same ‘message’ was delivered to me by Foti’s ‘hatchet man’ and Chief of the LDOJ Criminal Division, Burton Guidry, during his unannounced visit to my home on Saturday the 17th. However, during that visit, [Frank] Neuner, when asked, denied that I had in fact been suspended, proving that Talley was a liar. Plattsmier later (months later) confirmed to me that ‘Nobody has authority to use by name and the stature of my office without express permission,’ which he has never given to anyone (but Plattsmier’s a liar, too, about many other topics).

O’Dwyer also said that attorney Joseph Bruno “didn’t actually represent the State, like some of the others who Duval anointed to ‘control and manage’ the litigation. Bruno was ‘Plaintiffs’ Liaison Counsel,’ who was willfully doing the bidding of the real puppet masters, i.e., Calvin Clifford Fayard, Jr., Jim Roy of Domengeaux & Wright, Danny Becnel, and a host of others that I specifically named as defendants in what I have called ‘the biggest legal malpractice Class Action lawsuit in the annals of American jurisprudence,’ namely Civil Action No. 08-4728, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana on Oct. 23, 2008.

“Exactly two weeks to the day later, on Nov. 7, I was summarily suspended from the practice of law in Federal court by Judge [Ivan L.R.] Lemelle, and haven’t been able to practice law since.”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

At five minutes after midnight on Tuesday, Sept. 20, only 12 hours after O’Dwyer had filed his class-action lawsuit against the US, Gov. Kathleen Blanco, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, former New Orleans Police Superintendent Edwin Compass and Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman, and others, he was watching television and preparing to retire for the evening.

Suddenly, a dark SUV emblazoned with the Louisiana State Police (LSP) logo on its front doors blocked O’Dwyer’s driveway. Three individuals, believed by O’Dwyer to have been state troopers (they were clad in dark “swat-like” uniforms, he said, and armed with both pistols and automatic weapons, emerged and approached O’Dwyer.

O’Dwyer told the officers they were not authorized to be on his property and that they should retreat to the sidewalk. Instead, one of the officers replied, “Sir, you are coming with us. You can either come with us voluntarily or we will remove you from here by force. Now, what’s it going to be?”

O’Dwyer responded, “I will not resist, but you will have to remove me from my property by force.” He says he repeatedly asked officers what was going on, who sent them and was he under arrest and if so, what were the charges against him? The only response he received was, “Shut the f*** up.”

He was thrown face-down onto the ground and while he was in a prone position with his hands bound behind his back, one of the officers attempted to enter his residence but was blocked by houseguest Gerald Guice, who was visiting O’Dwyer at the time and had opted to spend the night rather than violate the 6 p.m. curfew. “The reasons for the officer’s attempt to gain entry into plaintiff’s residence were unknown,” O’Dwyer would claim in a subsequent lawsuit, “but the officer clearly had no legal right to enter plaintiff’s residence because he had no search warrant to plaintiff’s knowledge and no arrest had been made or announced.”

O’Dwyer sustained non-permanent but painful bodily injuries when thrown to the ground at his home and was under the impression that he was the victim of a cruel joke. But then he was taken to a remote area of the Union Passenger Terminal in downtown New Orleans, which had been converted into a holding area where, clad only in a pair of shorts and deck shoes, he was pepper sprayed “in the face and over his entire body” by who he believes was a member of the Donaldsonville Police Department. His protests were met with more pepper spray.

As he began to taunts officers, calling them “gutless dogs,” and not men enough to break his nose or jaw, one officer broke out a 12-guage, 18-inch barrel shotgun and fired several bean-bag rounds at his thighs.

Finally, at the end of his 16 ½-hour ordeal, Odwyer was given a slip of paper upon his release. The paper suggested that he had been arrested for “public intoxication,” which he said in his lawsuit “is a lie. Plaintiff does not allow himself to become intoxicated,” a condition he says “demonstrates a lack of character.”

When asked by LouisianaVoice to provide names of the state troopers who detained and/or tormented him, he identified Trooper John Nelson and Sgt. Christopher Ivy, both of the beleaugured Troop F, headquartered in Monroe.

He said the claims he filed against all defendants except State Supreme Court Chief Justice Catherine “Kitty” Kimball, Plattsmier and troopers Nelson and Ivy were dismissed by Federal District Judge Helen “Ginger” Berrigan.

“It was left to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to dismiss the claims against the remaining named defendants on the basis that [the claim] failed to establish ‘the requisite causal connection’ between the acts committed by them and the events of his arrest,” O’Dwyer said. “An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court also proved futile.

“In dismissing [my] claims, the federal courts established that no one involved in the administration of justice or law enforcement would be held responsible for the illegal abduction and torture of citizen Ashton O’Dwyer, and by extension, other critics of the government who might follow in his footsteps,” he said. “This is a characteristic of a police state.”

So, in recapping, we have an attorney who decided to remain in his home that suffered only minimal damage from Hurricane Katrina. He did so to protect his possessions from looters and he did so legally.

But then he was vocally critical of the federal, state and local governments’ responses to the storm and to make matters worse, filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Katrina victims, a move that upset the legal community, some of whom were already conspiring to file a $400 billion claim against the federal government. But because those lawyers were working with then-Attorney General Charles Foti, they were, in effect, representing the state in recovery efforts. So, when the federal government was determined to be immune under a 1928 law, they were precluded from suing the state.

To shut O’Dwyer up, they sent state troopers to bring him in. At least two of those troopers were identified as members of the infamous Troop F which is currently under a microscope for the beating of one African-American after a traffic stop and the death of another following a similar traffic stop a year before that.

And of course, the legal community, including state and federal judges, closed ranks to protect themselves from O’Dwyer’s wrath and the only way to do that was to suspend his license and to permanently disbar him, thereby not only “shutting him up,” but destroying his ability to earn a living at something he’d been doing for 35 years, destroy his marriage, cost him his marriage, his home, and robbed him of the only thing he had left: his dignity.

As a bitter footnote to all this, the paltry $20 MILLION SETTLEMENT eventually reached over the inadequate protections from Katrina, netted some claimants payments ranging from as little as $1 to $463, while attorneys representing the claimants got up to $3.5 million and an additional $2.4 million to $3.5 million was set aside for administering between 200,000 and 800,000 claims.

That’s the Louisiana political and justice systems in a nutshell, folks. If you’re politically-connected, you’ll do quite well. But cross the wrong people and you’ll pay the price.