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How does lame duck legs. and former sheriff Steve Pylant spend his time? Conducting armed traffic stops, of course

Posted in Corruption, Courts, Crime, Ethics, Legislature, Legislators, Politicians, Uncategorized on December 3, 2019| 8 Comments »

It seems I owe Steve Pylant an apology.

I left him out of my book Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption.

Please know it was an oversight and was never an intentional slight of the former three-term Franklin Parish sheriff and current lame duck state representative.

Please consider this my feeble attempt to atone for that glaring omission.

After all, his voting record in the House was consistently that of a staunch law-and-order, lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key hard-liner.

Except, of course, when he decided to come to the rescue of four former meth felons caught with weapons in neighboring Catahoula Parish.

In case you may not remember that story I wrote last January, you can read it HERE.

But my reason for bringing him up again is not only to express my contrition for omitting him from the book.

My reason this time concerns a couple of incidents just a couple of months ago which might leave the mistaken impression that Pylant is still the high sheriff—or thinks he is.

Pylant apparently feels he has the right to attempt to enter private property and question occupants without a warrant or even a badge.

In fact, he seems to feel he can even brandish a weapon and force two women driving alone at 10 p.m. to pull over on a darkened Franklin Parish roadway.

April Franks says she and her friend, Amber Conley, were stopped by Pylant and a man named Steve Drane, 50, of Gilbert on the night of Oct. 16. “It was a dark road,” said Franks, who said she believed Pylant, who was waving a gun, was drunk. “[He] grabbed the door window and slammed his pistol against it, telling us we could not leave.”

Drane was one of four convicted felons for whom Pylant secured a $90,000 property bond to spring them from jail in Catahoula Parish in December 2018. Another of those arrested for hunting on private property in Tensas Parish on that occasion was Michael Linder, whose brother, Bryan Linder, was—and still is—an employee of the Franklin Parish Sheriff’s Department.

Each of the four men had prior drug convictions as well as other assorted convictions spread among them and each was armed at the time of the arrests even though convicted felons are prohibited by law from possessing firearms.

None of which deterred Pylant from stepping in to conduct his own traffic stop despite lacking the proper credentials to do so.

“He had no right to pull us over,” Franks said. “He and Steve Drane were sitting in a curve 200 yard from where we pulled out – right past the boat landing they had been watching us from for two hours. He was in the middle of the road waving his hands in the air and was holding a pistol. We had no choice but to stop. Amber, my friend, was driving and thought they must need help …. that was not the case at all. In the video I sent you he (Pylant) is saying he didn’t ‘point the pistol as us I had it in the air.’  He was visibly and audibly drunk that night.”

Franks said she subsequently called the police department and “told them some man stopped us with a pistol and was drunk and they told me that there was already an officer out there to talk to him.

“A few days later, I went to get a copy of the police report and (Deputy) Bryan Linder (brother of Michael Linder) took me to his office, acted like he was looking for it and then told me that he didn’t have one, that he doesn’t require his officers to write up every little call and if I didn’t like his response, I could go across the hall to (Sheriff) Kevin Cobb’s office and talk to him.”

No record of a report of a man waving a gun and pulling motorists over in the middle of the night? Seriously? That begs the question of just what would a person have to do to generate an incident report? Once, when I was running police beat for the Baton Rouge State-Times, I saw an incident report of a “deceased chicken.”

Cobb, of course, was Pylant’s chief deputy before succeeding his former boss as sheriff.

The traffic stop by an unauthorized individual brandishing a weapon (drunk or sober) would be bad enough but just minutes later, Pylant and Drane appeared alongside a houseboat on the Tensas River owned by Frank’s friend Amos “Gene” Kenney of Gilbert.

Pylant, claiming he smelled meth cooking. Kenney responded that he was running trot lines and was cooking only beans on his boat.

Pylant then referred to another boat in the river, indicating the smell was coming from that direction. “It may be,” Kenney said, “but that ain’t my boat. This is my boat here and I’m cooking a pot of beans.”

Pylant insisted on searching the boat but Kenney demanded to see a search a warrant, which, of course, neither he nor sheriff’s deputy Brandon Boxx, who eventually showed up on the scene, happened to have on them. When Franks alluded to Pylant’s pointing a pistol at her car earlier, he denied it, saying, he was holding the pistol “in the air.”

At one point, Pylant said to Franks, “I’m gon’ tell you, baby, you piss on somebody’s foot…” Without completing what almost certainly was a profound thought, he switched gears, telling “Baby”, “I been in law enforcement for 30 years. I was sheriff here a long time.”

Pylant, harking back to his glory days as sheriff of Franklin Parish, boasted, “I was sheriff here a long time. I been retired eight years. I been in the state legislature.” Claiming he knew what meth smells like, he said, “I took the first meth lab down in northeast Louisiana in 1996 and I know what it smells like.”

Then he said, “I’m interested in seeing what we gonna find on that houseboat out there ‘cause I done seen y’all go back and forth out there twice.”

“We were on a trot line,” Franks protested.

“Naw, you wasn’t on no damn trot line,” Pylant said. “Somebody’s probably still in the houseboat.”

“I hope so,” Franks said. “Then there won’t be any question.”

“Well I heard y’all get out and get on it and ever’thang,” Pylant said.

After more back and forth accusations and denials, Franks said, “Well, I’m not going to argue with you…”

“There ain’t no need,” Pylant said, sounding like a true southern redneck sheriff that he seemed to think he still was. “It’s a damn shame,” he said, “a damn shame.”

I couldn’t have said it better, Rep. Pylant.

The folks in House District 20 must be so very proud.

And folks dare wonder why our legislature is so dysfunctional?

For your viewing enjoyment:

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Pretrial intervention programs are cash cows open to abuse—and will be protected against legislative regulation by DAs

Posted in Budget, Corruption, Courts, Crime, Ethics, Fraud, Legislature, Legislators, Media, Public Records, Revenue, Transparency on November 23, 2019| 4 Comments »

Pre-trial intervention (PTI) programs, in theory at least, are designed to give those charged with a first offense—such as driving while intoxicated (DWI), for example—to keep the conviction off their record by participating in a program of community service or a series of classroom sessions, usually extended over a period of several weeks.

The purpose of the programs, again in theory, is that not every person charged with an offense should be subjected to criminal prosecution and that there are those who can be prevented from becoming repeat offenders through proper intervention.

The problem with Louisiana’s PTI programs is that there is no uniform application or oversight, allowing local district attorneys complete autonomy in how the programs are administered.

Instead of serving their intended purpose, many local PTI programs have morphed into cash cows and as such, lend themselves to widespread abuses at the expense of other programs such as indigent defender boards and local law enforcement.

In May 2018, former Baton Rouge Advocate (now Associated Press) reporter Jim Mustian wrote an excellent story that illustrated that very point. His entire story may be seen HERE.

Mustian showed that from 2012 to 2017, two parishes in particular had taken advantage of the program to create a lucrative source of income for prosecutors while a third did even better during the years from 2012 to 2017.

Calcasieu Parish District Attorney John DeRosier saw income for his office increase threefold, from $556,000 in 2012 to $1.65 million in 2016. Jefferson Parish did even better with its income from PTI programs increasing four times, from $335,000 to $1.37 million during the same period.

But Rapides Parish DA Phillip Terrell has turned the practice into an art form, boosting his PTI revenue by a factor of seven, from $302,000 in 2012 to a mind-blowing $2.2 million in 2017.

Still, that influx of new dollars didn’t keep Terrell from requesting more than $2.5 million in parish funds for his office in 2018 despite a looming budgetary shortfall of $427,000 for the parish.

That was enough to attract the attention of online publication Politico, which normally devotes its attention to stories of national and international significance than to the budgetary problems of a parish situated in the middle of Louisiana. Politico’s story can been read in its entirety HERE.

Rapides Parish Treasurer Bruce Kelly wondered why the DA’s office was suddenly asking for more funds than at any time in his 30 years in the parish treasurer’s office knowing, as he did, that the DA had a new fleet of vehicles with leather seats.

He soon learned why.

Pre-trial diversion, otherwise known as pre-trial intervention, or PTI.

The DA’s income from court fines had dropped by nearly half, from $900,000 to $500,000 over the past three years. That corresponded with a similar drop in traffic tickets issued—from 12,000 per year to 7,000.

At the same time, however, Terrell’s office had significantly increased its PTI program, allowing offenders to pay money to the DA in exchange for charges being dropped and their cases dismissed, thus keeping their tickets or arrests off their records as though they never happened.

Offenders were charged dismissal fees ranging from $250 for traffic tickets, $500 for misdemeanors and as high as $1,500 for felonies.

And Terrell’s office, Kelly learned, was keeping that money for itself—money that should have gone into the parish’s general fund to be shared with indigent defender offices and the sheriff’s office.

Believing Terrell was depriving the parish of fine money to which it was entitled, Kelly and the parish leadership filed suit against Terrell’s office in an effort to get the court to force the DA to share its PTI revenue.

Terrell responded that he could make as much as he wanted through PTI because…well, because the law didn’t say otherwise.

And he was right in the assertion that there were no statewide standards to the implementation and operation of PTI programs and thus, no restrictions as to his ability to exploit the program.

To make his case, he brought in a hired gun in the person of Hugo Holland, a prosecutor who normally works only as a prosecutor in criminal cases and who appears to be on the payroll of several parish district attorneys simultaneously, from Caddo Parish in north Louisiana to Calcasieu Parish in the state’s southwestern extreme.

The battle between Terrell and Rapides Parish Police Jury took on true Trumpian overtones when Holland threatened the police jury members with investigations into their own use of funds if they did not agree to drop their fight with his client. When that tactic failed, Terrell filed a countersuit arguing that he did not owe any money to the parish and calling the police jury’s lawsuit “politically-driven.”

It’s easy to see why Terrell is so possessive of his sudden stream of income—and why similar battle lines could be drawn between prosecutors and parish governing bodies as more and more DAs are made aware of the untapped revenue windfalls currently available to them.

It’s also pretty easy to predict an intense lobbying campaign by the Louisiana District Attorneys Association (LDAA) to protect PTI programs from regulation should some state lawmaker have the temerity to introduce legislation to rein in such a lucrative enterprise.

I’m willing to bet even money that Arkansas would have a better chance of beating LSU today than any such bill would have of making it out of committee.

 

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Calcasieu judges order end to defendants’ purchase of gift cards for DA office in exchange for reduction of sentences

Posted in Corruption, Courts, Ethics, Judges, Media on November 21, 2019| 4 Comments »

There’s been a major rule change to Calcasieu Parish District Attorney John DeRosier’s Monopoly game.

Defendants in the 14th Judicial District Court may no longer pass Go by purchasing Get Out of Jail Gift Cards.

Okay, in the parlance of the classic board game of my youth, that’s something of a mixed metaphor. Anyone over 65 who has played the game knows that you collect $200 for passing Go and a Get Out of Jail Free card comes with the luck of the draw when you land on Community Chest.

But as it applies to past practices of DeRosier’s office, the metaphor is justified—and appropriate because DeRosier does run something of a monopoly and cards were certainly involved.

You may recall the LouisianaVoice STORY of Nov. 6 in which we called attention to a Nov. 1 story in a slightly more widely-read publication, the WASHINGTON POST (sorry, but if you don’t have a subscription the Post has a pay wall that only allows subscribers to access its stories—so you’ll just have to take my word for it), which described an ongoing scam over in Calcasieu whereby those arrested in the parish could buy their way to a reduced sentence by purchasing gift cards and donating them to the DA’s office.

Well, after the Post story and after our punctuation mark five days later, the district judges of the 14th JDC have abruptly put the quietus to the practice.

While it would appear highly unlikely that the good judges could have been unaware of the ongoing practice, there’s nothing like a little publicity to bring everyone around to the realization that even the appearance of a little not-so-subtle coercion, i.e. extortion, is never a good thing, especially when carried out in the name of law and order.

So, the obvious thing to do would be to stand tall for right and justice—‘cause now, folks are looking.

In the wake of the Post’s story and two days before LouisianaVoice came along with our reminder, DeRosier sent out a one-sentence memo to parish probation officers.

The memo, dated Nov. 4, read:

  • “Any defendant on Misdemeanor Probation who desires to change or modify any terms Misdemeanor Probation will be required to present such request to the court for its consideration. Only after response from the court will this office take any action to modify any term or condition of Misdemeanor Probation.”

Well, not so fast.

Click HERE to read DeRosier’s memo.

On Monday (Nov. 18), 14th JDC Judge W. Mitchell Redd, in a letter to DeRosier on which all the 14th JDC judges were copied, wrote:

  • “This confirms our recent meeting in which you informed us of the District Attorney’s program that had been allowing criminal defendants to purchase gift cards and give the gift cards to your office as a means of reducing up to one-half of their community service obligation.”

(Notice how Judge Redd was careful to note that DeRosier had only recently “informed” the judges of the program. That might be construed as deniability by someone more skeptical than I.)

Judge Redd continued:

  • “You asked the Court to advise you on whether or not the Court wished this program to continue as to criminal defendants who have been sentenced by the Court to community service.”

One might normally think the DA would have cleared this with the judges before the program was ever implemented and not as an afterthought—or more correctly, after the bright glare of light shone on it by the Post.

One might also have reckoned that the good judges would not have waited more than two weeks after the Post story or waited until after their “recent meeting” with DeRosier to issue its directive.

Finally, Judge Redd concluded his letter to the DA:

  • “Please be advised that the Court has discussed the matter and agreed not to allow gift cards to be substituted to any degree (emphasis mine) for our court-ordered community service. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. We appreciate you taking your time to discuss this with us.”

Click HERE to read Judge Redd’s letter to DeRosier.

The only question not addressed by the judges is what to do about the gift cards defendants already purchased and gave to the DA’s office which were supposed to be used for charitable purposes such as purchasing toys and gifts for underprivileged children but which in some cases were used instead to purchase gifts for staff members, their grandchildren and other relatives—and to DeRosier’s friends and political supporters and even journalists.

But then, that little matter probably didn’t come up in DeRosier’s “recent meeting” with the judges.

 

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What price justice? Case of Mangham contractor taking on ugly face of a judicial conspiracy against individual rights

Posted in Contracts, Corruption, Courts, Ethics, Judges, Lawsuits, Transparency on November 18, 2019| 1 Comment »

The saga of Mangham contractor Jeff Mercer is taking on all the ugly characteristics of a conspiracy between the state, the 4th Judicial District Court, and the 2ND Circuit Court of Appeal.

Mercer is the contractor who was forced out of business by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) when DOTD withheld more than $11 million he was owed when he resisted SHAKEDOWN EFFORTS by a DOTD inspector who demanded that Mercer “put some green” in his hand and that he could “make things difficult for mercer.”

He is also the man who dug his heels in and sued DOTD, eventually winning a staggering $20 million JUDGMENT after a jury trial in Monroe’s 4th JDC.

And he is the man who saw his verdict overturned by the 2nd Circuit.

It’s not like LouisianaVoice didn’t obtain INTERNAL DOCUMENTS from DOTD that supported Mercer’s claim that he was owed the money. They did. In spades.

But then, more information became public. This time, it was about 2ND Circuit Court Chief Judge HENRY N. BROWN, who assigned the case to himself despite his ties to DOTD.

Brown subsequently wrote the opinion which reversed the unanimous state district court verdict. Subsequent to that adverse opinion, Mercer learned of Brown’s ties to DOTD and filed an application for rehearing and a motion to recuse and vacate the panel’s opinion which, of course, was denied.

But then even more damning information surfaced, including reports of ex-parte communications, unauthorized computer accessing, and apparent falsification of discussion of an alleged DE NOVO REVIEW by Brown of Mercer’s trial court record.

A year after Mercer’s motion to recuse was denied, Brown and his law clerk were gone. Brown was FORCED TO RESIGN after being suspended for his alleged behavior toward colleagues who were considering an appeal involving a close female friend of Brown’s.

So, Mercer did what anyone so aggrieved would do: He filed a 71-page PETITION TO ANNUL the 2nd Circuit Court’s judgment.

And that’s when the appearance of a tight-knit conspiracy begins to take shape.

The petition to annul was filed in 4th JDC in Monroe on September 27 but now the 2nd Circuit Court, which is not even a party to the original lawsuit, has jumped into the fray in an effort to seal documents sought by Mercer.

If that seems a bit confusing, it is. The 2nd Circuit’s MOTION, itself under seal, seeks an ex parte order to seal documents of the 2nd Circuit which Mercer feels would demonstrate rampant corruption in the 2nd Circuit which would in turn, justify overturning the appeal court’s reversal of his trial court verdict.

In a head-scratching claim in its decision to reverse the lower court verdict, the 2nd Circuit said Mercer had not proven the DOTD official had acted with malice or had prevented him from submitting contracts to the state.

No malice? Shakedown attempts? Withholding $11 million owed Mercer (which had the effect of preventing him from bidding on future contracts).

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what would constitute the definition of “malice” in the eyes of the 2nd Circuit if such intimidation didn’t do the trick.

If all that isn’t bizarre enough, motions are scheduled to be heard Thursday by 4th JDC Judge J. Wilson Rambo.

Rambo, of course, was a central figure in another case involving the DESTRUCTION OF DOCUMENTS in a lawsuit by developer Stanley Palowsky, III.

The words of a judicial CONSPIRACY first appeared in connection to that case and nothing we have heard or read since then has removed the cloud over the entire 4th JDC.

Documents the 2nd Circuit seeks to seal include objections to jurisdiction as well as internal documents, bench memos, and drafts of opinions.

“If the judge (Rambo) seals it (the record), they’ll bury this,” Mercer said.

His words could well be prophetic.

Which would justifiably raise the question: What price justice?

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Alleged victim of sexual abuse by Baton Rouge physical therapist accuses DA, sheriff’s office of dragging heels

Posted in Boards, Courts, Ethics, Senate on November 8, 2019| 4 Comments »

A Baton Rouge physical therapist has been formally charged with inappropriate touching of female patients and inappropriate comments about their bodies, but the bill of information from the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s office might never have been submitted had it not been for the dogged pursuit of one woman who refused to allow her complaints to be ignored despite the best efforts of the DA’s office and East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s investigators to do just that.

Physical therapist Philippe Veeters, doing business as Dutch Physical Therapy, was first arrested last February on the basis of complaints by several of his female patients, but East Baton Rouge Parish DA Hillar Moore didn’t get around to submitting a bill of information against Veeters until Nov. 1.

The woman, who requested that her identity not be revealed, says she was assaulted by Veeters on June 7, 2018, said, “After dealing with the sheriff’s office for months, I contacted the FBI with all my documentation showing how the police kept lying to me and changing their stories. they did try to investigate them. However, Mr. Hillar Moore apparently invited himself to that meeting and shut that meeting down. Moore told the FBI that it is just too hard to go against a doctor,” she said. “This was disturbing and sickening, knowing Mr. Veeters had already admitted to the detectives within one week what he did to me without consent—trying to pretend it was a normal Medical procedure.

“I have since learned another victim went to the sheriff’s office in 2012…but no one ever took her seriously or even investigated her assault,” the woman said. “I had to fight so hard against the people who should be protecting us. They had his admission on tape, they had others who reported it to them and the board yet they kept lying to me. Why?”

She said sheriff’s office investigators initially were supportive and told her she was doing the right thing in filing charges against Veeters. But then she said authorities suddenly began “to tell me different stories and start(ed) deflecting when we question(ed) them on things” and opened and closed her case three times. “I now know why victims do not come forward. It takes so much power and strength to report something like this and you aren’t allowed to heal and push the memory away as quick (sic) as you would like.”

She said she and her husband met with sheriff’s office investigators but got no answers.

“I also have emails dating back to July 2018 between Hillar Moore and myself—where I’d share things with him about the sheriff’s office,” the woman said, “and from July 2018 until January 2019 he would tell me he’d get with them and they’d get back to me. He never got back to me!! It was almost comical. I went from patient to angry that someone didn’t want to protect the women in our community. He completely stopped responding to me once I told him I learned who Floyd falcon was. Never heard from him again!

“When I finally met with the assistant DA in May 2019, she claimed they were protecting me. I have no idea what they were protecting me from nor do I believe her. Considering they wanted all my medical records from the board and were upset my mental health records were not obtained, I doubt they were protecting me from anything.”

She also was critical of George Papale, legal counsel for the Louisiana Physical Therapy Board, which had received complaints of sexual abuse by Veeters from at least half-a-dozen women. The board finally got around to continuing a prior nine-month suspension handed down on Oct. 5, 2018, suspending Veeters indefinitely on September 13 of this year, seven months after his arrest.

The consent decree signed by Veeters and his attorney, Floyd Falcon, noted that “This is not the first disciplinary action” taken against Veeters “for related professional misconduct and sexual misconduct of a physical therapy patient.”

The board did not recommend disciplinary action on a similar complaint in 2012 and in January 2014, placed Veeters “on notice,” but took no formal disciplinary action against him.

The board’s reluctance did not deter Papale from firing off a 24-page letter of complaint to State Sen. John Alario in which he asked for an investigation “on behalf of the citizens of Louisiana” of actions taken by the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee during and following a May 15, 2019 hearing relative to the board, which Papale termed “unlawful and unprofessional.”

Papale, who no longer represents the board, complained that committee chair Karen Carter Peterson and Sen. Jean-Paul rebuked the board “with callous disregard for the truth” by repeatedly mischaracterizing the adjudication of a complaint by saying “a person who is under nine counts of sexual assault charges is under probation with the board” and “this guy got a nine-month slap on the wrist.”

His letter also accused the committee of threatening and attacking board members, its employees and contractors and of saying the board was failing the citizens of Louisiana “without investigation into the validity of the complaints, nor a basic understanding of administrative laws, processes, or procedure.”

To read the full text of that 24-page letter, go HERE.

Consent agreement of OCTOBER 5, 2018

Latest CONSENT AGREEMENT

 

 

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