Louisiana Voice

Lots of finger-pointing and yet, no one – and everyone – is to blame for the release of a man convicted in Ascension Parish of murder.

Everyone from the local district attorney to state officials in Baton Rouge to a sheriff in northeast Louisiana has been accused of being asleep at the wheel when Michael “Ma-Man” (seriously, can you think of a less original nickname?) LeBlanc was turned out of jail because his sentencing was “overlooked” for five years?

Wow. Talk about the unqualified leading the inept into the abyss…

At the same time, a sheriff’s deputy who was clocking along at 85 mph when he rear-ended a stalled vehicle, killing a mother of four, has entered a plea of no contest after being charged with careless operation when John Q. Public would in all probability have been arrested for negligent homicide.

The presiding 21^st Judicial District judge slapped Winburn with a 10-day parish prison sentence, suspended, of course, on condition that the deputy fork over $300 in fines. DA Scott Perrilloux’s office noted that $300 is the standard fine in careless operation cases. He neglected to inform us as to the penalty for killing another driver.

When DEPUTY CORY WINBURN crashed into the car being driven by Christinia Estave, 33, on July 15, it was the second time he had rear-ended another driver. The first one resulted in a lawsuit that was subsequently dismissed (we take care of our own in Livingston Parish – provided you have the right connections). In 2018, Sheriff Jason Ard fired Winburn but rehired him in 2020 after he spent about a year in exile, working for the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office.

What makes the Winburn case even more curious is that for nearly a month after Estave’s death, Ard steadfastly refused to release any information about the accident – not even Winburn’s identity. Ard has never explained his secrecy surrounding the accident.

We don’t even know for certain if Winburn has his emergency lights on at the time. He was said to be responding to a call about a shooting around 1 a.m. when the collision occurred. Is there dash cam footage? We just don’t know.

We do know that neither driver was wearing a seat belt, a violation considered even more severe on Winburn’s part since law enforcement officials, who routinely conduct seat belt checks on civilian drivers in Livingston Parish, are, or should be, held to a higher standard. After all, they do set the bar, in theory, anyway.

But returning to the issue of where’s Waldo LeBlanc? Ascension Parish Sheriff Bobby Webre would like to know but he has split for parts unknown after failing to show for a required 48-hour check-in with his parole officer. So, Webre got a piece of paper called a warrant. That’ll show him.

Department of Corrections officials in Baton Rouge said that without the formal procedure of sentencing by the court, the state had no legal authority to hold him. Natalie LaBorde, executive counsel for DOC, said LeBlanc was looking at mandatory life in prison for his 2014 second-degree murder conviction. But when a sentence is not imposed, she said constitutional- and statutorily-imposed structure, calls for the state agency to take control of a prisoner, but not until sentencing has been imposed. Because that had not taken place, she said state corrections officials had no legal authority to hold him once he completed a sentence for a previous gun possession conviction, also in Ascension Parish.

Confusing? You bet. But it gets better.

Once he completed the gun possession sentence in May, he was turned over to the custody of Madison Parish jailers and once he received credit for time owed in that parish (he seems to have been rather busy in his spree), he was released.

Ricky Babin, district attorney for the 23^rd Judicial District, which includes the parishes of Ascension, Assumption, and St. James, laid the blame at the feet of state corrections officials for failing to process paperwork from Ascension, a responsibility LaBorde had already swatted aside.

Nope, said Babin, even sans sentencing, Ascension paper, aka a detainer, should have kept LeBlanc in the custody of state officials if state officials had only followed their own procedures. “If he has a detainer…they should send him back to the parish prison in which he’s detained.

But Madison Parish officials, who hold many state inmates, had the Ascension detainer and when the errant LeBlanc was transferred to Riverbend Detention Center to face the Madison charges after the state gun charge sentence ended, it was up to local authorities who run that jail to follow the detainer, state official said, deftly slipping Ascension’s counter jab.

Now it really gets dicey because East Carroll, which sits atop Madison in extreme northeast Louisiana, actually houses Madison Parish’s pre-trial defendants but for some reason that remains unclear (naturally), did not do so and released LeBlanc.

The trail grows cold there, however, because East Carroll Parish Sheriff Wydette Williams was not available for comment. (With a name like Wydette, I’d probably be unavailable, too.)

So, there you have it: a couple of examples of our fine system of justice hard at work to serve and protect.

I hope this has cleared everything up for you.