Louisiana Voice

Would you care to hear a joke? Spoiler alert: it’s a cruel joke and you probably won’t get much of a laugh out of it.

Actually, I guess you might consider it a fox-guarding-the-henhouse kind of practical joke being pulled on Louisiana citizens. But then, there’s not much new about that; we’ve been the butt of these kinds of jokes perpetrated by our elected officials for generations.

Anyway, all that aside, here’s the joke:

Leon Cannizzaro, the former Orleans Parish District Attorney who concealed exculpatory evidence in criminal trials that sent innocent men to prison and who had a nasty habit of serving fack subpoenas on unwitting victims so as to expedite his idea of justice, HAS BEEN APPOINTED to the Louisiana Judiciary Commission, which is charged with conducting investigations of judicial misconduct.

Oh, yeah. That’s a laugh a minute. A scream, a real riot.

Cannizzaro, besides being a political pal of Gov. Jeff “Squeaky Toy” Landry and his sock puppet Attorney General Liz Murrill who just retired from the attorney general’s office last month, is also a former judge of 22 years in his own right before becoming Orleans Parish district attorney for 12 years, from 2008 to 2020.

Of course, it’s just a coincidence that his appointment comes in the wake of a turbulent legislative session during which judges came under withering criticism (and punishing legislation) from Republican legislative leader who said bad judges were not punished enough for incompetence. Anyone else see the irony here?

In my book 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana, Cannizzaro is cited several times for (a) withholding exculpatory evidence in cases where accused were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned, sometimes for decades, when that withheld evidence would’ve helped exonerate them at trial, (b) opposing pardons in the face of overwhelming evidence of innocence years, even decades, after those wrongful convictions, (c) issuing a flurry of FAKE SUBPOENAS which were neither issued nor signed by a judge and (d) jailing crime victims in order to expedite the turnstile system of justice by intimidating reluctant witnesses into cooperating with the DA’s office in criminal investigations.

The bogus subpoenas carried the ominous wording: “A FINE AND IMPRISONMENT MAY BE IMPOSED FOR FAILURE TO OBEY THIS NOTICE.” Problem was, the subpoenaes were not backed by something call law. Pretty serious oversight by a former judge/sitting district attorney. So now, Cannizzaro will sit in judgment of miscreant judges. What’s wrong with this picture?

The issue of the fake subpoenas was SETTLED in October 2021, a year after Cannizzaro left office, and PROF. KATIE SCHWARTZMANN, director of the Tulane Law School’s First Amendment Law Clinic, was appointed as court monitor to oversee that settlement.

For his part, Cannizzaro defended the practice and hotly disputed the terminology “fake subpoenas” by insisting his office was simply giving witnesses “district attorney’s notices, a practice he said dated back to the 1960s.

To-mae-to, to-mah-to. It’s all semantics. Fact is, the word in big, bold, all capital letters says “SUBPOENA” emblazoned across the top of the page, as my friend up in Ruston says, “bigger’n Dallas.”

So, the bottom line, a political ally of Landry and Murrill, who have already evidenced their disdain for the judiciary, and one who concealed evidence favorable to defendants, jailed innocent people and issued fake subpoenas (sorry, but there’s no other term for them) is now charged with ensuring judicial ethics are strictly adhered to.

What could possibly go wrong?