Louisiana Voice

Judge John Reeves is for sale but don’t worry, he’s cheap.

Reeves is a judge in the 7^th JDC which encompasses the parishes of Concordia and Catahoula and for a paltry $100, he’ll supposedly sign any document you stick in his face without bothering to actually read it.

Well, at least that’s what he did in one case when he signed a court order that (1) had not even been filed and (2) had not been assigned to his division, a document which gave the generous donor control of the bulk of his late mother’s estate.

That little transaction ended up costing Reeves a 20-DAY SUSPENSION and $3,100 to foot the cost of the Louisiana Judicial Commission’s investigation.

Wait. What? A 20-day suspension when some poor slob unfortunate enough to try to sale an ounce of weed to an undercover cop could end up behind bars for life? That’s justice? No, that’s the very definition of injustice, tilting the playing field, letting them that’s got the gold make the rules.

Bottom line: Judge John Reeves is for sale—but he’s been marked down by K-Mart. He’s a bargain-basement judge. But damnit, a bribe by any other name is still a bribe (I think Shakespeare wrote that in Romeo and Juliet).

In any case, judging from the decision handed down by the Louisiana Supreme Court, punishment is meted out by the degree of crime. In other words, the severity of the punishment is solely dependent upon the severity of the crime—if you are someone of social standing and not unfortunate enough to be some unemployed father trying to pilfer food for the family ‘cause that’s another story, fella.

But there’s more to this little saga than has been widely reported. Reeves claims he read the document brought to him by said bagman while a witness, who works for another judge in the 7^th JDC, says, Uh-uh, he most certainly did not. He thumbed right to the final page and affixed his signature to the order without reading its contents, the witness attested in a sworn affidavit.

Reeves also claimed he told the donor he would contribute the C-note to his church, but never seemed to get around to doing so. So, now we have him using the church as a crutch to justify a payoff. Justice for sale. Nice.

“I have an unbelievable record, and this is not like me,” he told commission members at his hearing, insisting that his pocketing the money was out of character for him.

Yeah, well there’s this:

• Reeves in 2024 allegedly authorized court commissions for two court staff members as sheriff’s deputies so they could carry concealed weapons in the courthouse only to have the badges rescinded when a defense lawyer sought to recuse Reeves, alleging an appearance of bias toward law enforcement.
• In 2021 when he ordered a deputy to pick up a child caught in a heated custody dispute and deliver the boy to his terminally ill grandfather who attended high school and played football with Reeves. He ordered four hours of visitation on his own motion, only telling attorneys after the fact (hey, easier to ask forgiveness than permission, right?). Reeves recused himself from that case when the boy’s mother complained.
• Reeves was also charged with issuing an illegal verbal order over the phone in, again in 2024, for a law enforcement search of a home.
• Finally, he’s accused of signing arrest and search warrants for a “longtime personal friend” and his property before stepping off the case.

He declined comment through an assistant, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, because, he said, judicial canons prohibited it.

So now he invokes judicial canons. Good to know he still has something of a passing familiarity with those canons. Too bad he hasn’t been exactly a paragon of virtue when it comes to their application.

But sadly, misfits in the judiciary are all too common and most of us are blithely unaware of the damage they’re doing to our system of justice.