Louisiana Voice

At any given time, between 2 percent and 10 percent of convicted persons in U.S. prisons are innocent. With 2.3 million people incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons and jails, that means that anywhere from 46,000 and 230,000 who were wrongfully convicted.

Louisiana, which is in head-to-head competition with Oklahoma for the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world, presently has 58,000 persons in prisons and jails. That means that between 1200 and 5800 could have been wrongfully convicted.

I have just published my 10^th book, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana that examines how 101 persons got convicted of crimes they did not commit. The costs of these wrongful convictions ae incalculable not only in terms of the hundreds of years in cumulative time spent behind bars unjustly and the shattered lives and families, but the astronomical financial cost, as well.

The 101 wrongfully convicted individuals profiled in this book received more than $60 million in compensation for sloppy prosecutorial work, shoddy police investigations, mistaken eyewitness identification, uncaring judges and junk science that resulted in their convictions. And that doesn’t even count the cost of housing, feeding and caring for the prisoners, the salaries paid cops and prosecutors for inadequate investigative and prosecutorial work, or the cost of trials to put them away. Add to all that the fact that when the wrong person is convicted, that means the state has spent hundreds of millions of dollars for “justice” but the real perpetrator is still out there.

The book sells for $25.00, including shipping. To order your copy, click HERE to pay by credit card. You will see a message that you’re making a donation to LouisianaVoice. That’s because this is a link to LouisianaVoice. DO NOT, however, check the square indicating a monthly donation; that’s for our regular donors. If you prefer, you may just send a check for $25.00 to me, Tom Aswell, 107 North College West, Denham Springs, LA. 70726.

Be sure to include your full name and mailing address so that I may send you the book.

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The Sundance Film Festival kicked off last Thursday in Park City, Utah, and will run through Sunday.

Why is this of interest to LouisianaVoice?

Well because this year there is a documentary that features Livingston Parish school librarian Amanda Jones and her ongoing fight with those who would censor reading material available from public libraries.

Those who would swoop into a community like the Lafayette organization that calls itself Citizens for a New Louisiana are not locals but they are insisting on dictating that you can read. Of course, they don’t call it censorship. But neither did they in Texas where a state representative has submitted a list of more than 800 books he wants banned.

But back to Sundance.

Sarah Jessica Parker is the executive producer of a documentary premiered at Sundance that examines efforts to censor libraries – not just in Livingston Parish, but in other areas as well.

Parker recently sat down with several local librarians, including Jones, to discuss the efforts by those who would ban books. To watch the video of their conference, click HERE, HERE  and HERE.

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Don’t ever say you weren’t warned. You were. Over and over and over…

You were told that Donald Trump was a shyster, a con-man, a grifter, a buffoon, a clown…well, everything but a statesman. That, he is not.

Today (Jan. 28) der Führer ordered a freeze on all federal grants and loans (an order that was promptly shot down by U.S. District Judge Loren Alikhan, at least until Feb. 3) without so much as a thought about the ramifications of such a move.

Just like the manner in which he issued blanket pardons to even those who assaulted police officers on Jan. 6, he opted out of doing actual work that would entail making surgical cuts of wasteful expenses and instead, just said, “Hell, cut everything.”

That’s also the way in which he offered a buyout of all federal employees, never mind the inconvenient fact that many of those are responsible for collecting taxes and even more bear the responsibility of sending out Medicare, Social Security payments and tax returns for tens of millions of Americans.

But here’s the hidden kicker.

If der Führer le Orange is ultimately successful in stopping federal grants and loans, the repercussions will be widespread and will affect every single living American – including the “poorly educated” MagHats whom he professes to love.

But you were warned.

He fired inspectors general across the board so now there’s no one to keep tabs on the Gang of Idiots he’s appointed to head various departments and agencies. No guardrails to keep these clowns from taking bureaucratic action to enrich themselves – and they most assuredly will.

Cutting off federal grants and loans will adversely affect every victim of floods, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, train derailments, major industrial accidents and any other natural disaster you can imagine. Remember the flood of 2016? Lots of folks didn’t carry flood insurance. Had it not been for the Small Business Administration and its 1-pecent home loans to rebuild, there would be a lot more homeless in South Louisiana today. Were it not for FEMA, even with all its warts, a lot of hurricane victims in North Carolina, Louisiana, Florida and Texas would be in much worse shape.

Those are the most obvious effects but let’s dive a little deeper.

The federal government invests $149 billion per year in America’s colleges and universities, of which $41 billion is in the form of grants which constitute a form of financial assistance to individuals or organizations to fund RESEARCH AND PROJECTS. Another 65 percent of that $149 billion, or $97 billion, goes to student aid, including scholarships, work-study and student loans.

Now we already know about the skyrocketing costs of higher education, thanks in no small part to Bobby Jindal’s repeated cuts to higher ed budgets. But, unfortunately, that’s the story everywhere. So, with ever higher tuition now comes the very real threat of the elimination of the one lifeline that lower- and middle-income students could grasp: student loans and scholarships.

Take that away, and overnight the dream of a college education vanishes for a large segment of American society. And I’m not just talking about minorities, though they would be among the hardest hit; it also affects the kids of Joe the plumber and Sam the electrician who were counting on that scholarship or that student loan.

Suddenly we will have an exclusive higher education system available only to the elite, which is quite possibly exactly what the Repugnantcans want.

And the most tragic part? It was all spelled out in Project 2025 for us to see.

All these things occurred in just his first week back in office. Imagine what’s in store for the remaining 207 weeks.

I’ll even go out on a limb and make a new prognostication: All these marks (that’s what they call the targets of con-men) will rush to invest in Le Orange Trumpo’s magic cryptocurrency only to one day see it collapse under its own corrupt weight. People will end up destitute, losing every possession because they sunk their hopes in a snake oil salesman but the snake oil salesman will walk away a richer man, having bamboozled the faithful yet again. Can you say Enron?

And now you’ve been warned.

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A few years back, there was a student newspaper at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. That’s where I worked as a student journalist (I also wrote for The Shreveport Times and Monroe Morning World simultaneously).

Wiley Hilburn was head of the school’s journalism program and faculty advisor to The Tech Talk, the student newspaper to which I alluded in the first paragraph. I remember Wiley telling me more than once that Tech President F. Jay Taylor had instructed him (Wiley) to allow the paper to report any and all news about Tech – good, bad or indifferent. To Taylor, a free press, even a student-run free press was absolutely essential and he gave the paper free rein. He was strictly hands-off.

But as I said at the onset, Tech had a newspaper “a few years back.” That’s because there is no longer a Tech Talk at Louisiana Tech.

You see, the paper, its editors and reporters were well aware that all was not well on the Tech campus, that on-campus sexual assaults were grossly under-reported. And it said so.

BAM! No more Tech Talk.

Jeff Landry, when he was attorney general, did his damnedest to get  BOB MANN fired as faculty advisor to the LSU communications department because Mann was critical of Landry’s sending a flunky to a campus discussion of Landry’s opposition to the coronavirus vaccine and masking mandates in 2021.

Mann remained at his job until Landry got himself elected governor. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Mann resigned but that apparently has not ended the rancor between the LSU student paper, the Reveille. and Landry.

Today, ANDREW SARHAN, a mass communication freshman at LSU, penned an op-ed piece in the student newspaper calling Landry “the worst governor in history” and that he should be impeached.

Ouch.

Landry is not only small in stature but awfully thin-skinned to boot. He doesn’t cotton to criticism, especially from upstarts in academia.

Sarhan is a lowly freshman, Landry is governor.

The governor controls – and I do mean controls – the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Sarhan is to be commended for his courage but if he thinks that Landry will sit still for being called the sorry-assed governor that he most surely is, the young man is in for a rude awakening.

As might be the entire mass communications department at LSU, not to mention that given what happened to the Tech Talk (and Landry wasn’t even governor then), the future for the Reveille might not be to bright itself.

I mean, if they can do it to libraries, then squashing a student newspaper is a simple matter. And the precedent has already been set up in Ruston.

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The late Republican Senator Lowell Weicker, Jr. would never recognize today’s Republican Party. Weicker, who died in 2023, did live to see some radical changes – enough so that he pulled out of the party and was elected governor of Connecticut as a third-party candidate.

Before that, he served two terms in the U.S. Senate and sat on the historic Senate Watergate Committee chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin, Jr. of North Carolina.

Attempts by social conservatives to advance their agenda — whether through enacting legislation regarding prayer in public schools or restrictions on abortion rights — drew Weicker’s particular ire, who saw the increasing power of the Christian right in his party as a grave threat to its future.

“No greater mischief can be created than to combine the power of religion with the power of government. History has shown us that time and time again.”

Sen. Lowell Weicker

It was during testimony by White House counsel John Dean that the nation first learned that Republican President Richard Nixon kept an “enemies list.” Following is Weicker’s response to that revelation:

“I say before you and before the American people that I’m here as a Republican and I think I express the feelings of the 42 other Republican senators and the Republicans of Connecticut and the feelings of the Republican party far better than those who committed illegal, unconstitutional and gross acts.

“Let me make it clear, because I have got to have my partisan moment: Republicans do not cover up; Republicans do not go ahead and threaten; Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts; and, God knows, Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed.’’

All of which seems to beg the question: what the hell happened to the Republican Party?

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