Louisiana Voice

Private prisons operated by LaSalle Corrections of Ruston have seen more than their share of problems – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that inmates of the jails have seen more than their share of abuse and neglect at the hands of LaSalle.

We have already published stories about the treatment and agonizing deaths of MICHAEL SABBIE and HOLLY BARLOW-AUSTIN and before that, the sordid whistleblower complaint about unwanted HYSTERECTOMIES  being performed on female detainees without their consent at a LaSalle-run facility in Georgia.

In one case in Texarkana, negligence led to a LaSalle employee pleading guilty to manslaughter.

LaSalle, operated by an ordained Methodist minister and headquartered in Ruston, operates nine private prisons under contracts with local sheriffs in Louisiana. Those facilities and their bed counts include:

• Catahoula Correctional Center in Harrisonburg (835 beds);
• Jackson Parish Correctional Center in Jonesboro (1252);
• LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla (755);
• Madison Parish Correctional Center in Tallulah (334);
• Madison Parish Detention Center in Tallulah (264);
• Madison Parish LTCW (formerly the Louisiana Transitional Center for Women) in Tallulah (535);
• River Correctional Center in Ferriday (602);
• Southern Correctional Center in Tallulah (564);
• Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield (1576).

And while LouisianaVoice will be examining some of the Louisiana facilities in this series, there is yet another wrongful death lawsuit involving the Bi-State Jail in Texarkana, the same facility where Sabbie and Austin met their deaths. Because Texarkana sits on the Texas-Arkansas line, and parts of the city rest in each of the states, the jail takes prisoners from both jurisdictions.

On June 28, 2016, Morgan Angerbauer, a Type I diabetic, was arrested by Texarkana, Arkansas, police on an outstanding warrant related to a non-violent drug offense. She was transported to Bi-State where she was placed in a cell.

Because she had been previously incarcerated at the jail, medical records there noted her diabetic condition. At 11:15 a.m. on June 29, her blood sugar was tested on an Accu-Chek blood-testing device which indicated her blood sugar was above the testing range of 55 mg/dl, meaning her blood sugar was four-to-five times higher than normal. She was administered 15 units of injectable insulin but was not given any intravenous fluids.

At 1:45 p.m., her blood sugar still registered 487 mg/dl and she was given another 10 units of injectable insulin but again, no intravenous fluids. At 2:35 p.m., her blood sugar was 178 and she was not tested again until nearly 13 hours later, at 3:20 a.m. on June 30 when it again tested high.

She was given another 15 units of insulin and no intravenous fluids and was tested again at 5:30 a.m., again registering high. She was not tested again until 10:30 a.m., when her blood sugar was shown to be 74. No follow-up test was done to ensure the result was accurate.

At 4:30 p.m., duty nurse Tiffany Venable wrote that she “refused” to test her blood sugar and Venable left her shift without requiring a test. It should be noted that Venable was also a defendant in the wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of Michael Sabbie, which was eventually settled before trial.

Less than an hour later, at 5:15 p.m. Angerbauer began beating on her cell door and pleading to be tested, pleas that were ignored, according to the LAWSUIT filed by Victoria Leigh, administrator of Angerbauer’s estate.

Angerbauer spent the next several hours pounding on her cell door and pleading for a blood sugar test, all to no avail, until at 4 a.m. on July 1, a jail trustee called for help when she was observed apparently unconscious on the medical observation cell floor. It had been more than 17 hours since her blood sugar had last been tested.

Licensed vocational nurse Brittany Johnson, a named defendant in the lawsuit, attempted to take a blood sugar reading at 4:14 a.m. and received a reading of “E-3” on multiple tests, a reading that means the patient’s blood sugar is extremely high.

Yet, surveillance camera video shows that it was another 40 minutes before Johnson began CPR or calling 911. During that time, Johnson “inexplicably gave Ms. Angerbauer glucose rather than insulin,” the lawsuit says, noting that glucose “causes blood sugar levels to rise, not fall.

Within minutes, Angerbauer was dead. The state crime lab attributed the cause of death to diabetic ketoacidosis. Her blood sugar at the time of her death was 813.

As in the Sabbie litigation, in which training shortcuts by LaSalle were revealed to be the norm, the Angerbauer lawsuit also shone a harsh spotlight on LaSalle in the aftermath of her death.

“LaSalle performed an ‘internal investigation’ into Ms. Angerbauer’s death in which defendant Johnson fabricated a story that omitted her refusal to test Ms. Angerbauer’s blood sugar between 5:15 p.m. on June 30 and when Ms. Angerbauer was found unresponsive on July 1, 2016.

“LaSalle employee signed off on Johnson’s report,” the suit claims. “The entire ‘internal investigation’ took about an hour, contained no attempts by investigators to compare statements to the video evidence. This resulted in LaSalle employees signing off on investigative reports that contain outright fabrications that attempted to absolve LaSalle and all its personnel of any liability.” (emphasis mine)

“Multiple LaSalle employees, including defendant Johnson, made false written statements that defendant Johnson entered the medical observation cell at 4:40 a.m. on July 1, 2016. As noted…she entered the cell at 4:14 a.m. and did not call for an ambulance to be summoned until almost 5 a.m., some 46 minutes later. Multiple LaSalle employees falsely state the time line in an unlawful attempt to protect defendants from liability in this matter.

“Defendant Johnson’s report (as well as other statements of LaSalle employees) was contradicted by the Texarkana, Arkansas Police Department investigation of Ms. Angerbauer’s death, which ultimately led to the arrest of Johnson on charges of negligent homicide,” the petition says, adding that Johnson entered a guilty plea to negligent homicide in November 2017.

Texarkana attorney David Carter, who represents Leigh in the lawsuit and who represents Barlow-Austin’s mother and husband in their lawsuit, claims in Leigh’s petition that the failure to secure medical care for Angerbauer “was motivated by unconstitutionally impermissible profit-driven reasons. The corporate defendants (LaSalle entities Southwestern Correctional, dba LaSalle Corrections, LaSalle Management and LaSalle Southwest Corrections) also failed to train their corporate nursing staff concerning contacting emergency medical services in a timely manner when a patient had become unresponsive…”

The lawsuit said the need for training was even more acute because “LaSalle staff(s) the Bi-State Jail with licensed vocational nurses rather than registered nurses and it was foreseeable that such training deficiencies would cause harm to inmates/detainees.”

Moreover, as with the Sabbie litigation, the Angerbauer lawsuit said that an investigation by local law enforcement officials “revealed that LaSalle employees pre-completed the cell check log for the medical observation cell. According to the document, LaSalle staff was logging cell checks on Ms. Angerbauer two hours after she died. This is yet another example of the corporate defendants’ pattern, practice and custom of falsifying records…”

The lawsuit says that LaSalle “negligently contracted with a doctor who was located over a two-hour drive away from Bi-State Jail; who did not oversee medical treatment at Bi-State Jail in any meaningful way; who did not have control or supervisory ability over any of the nursing staff at Bi-State Jail; and who was inadequate to fulfill the requirement that LaSalle maintain a contract with a doctor for medical car at Bi-State Jail.”

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“The Ebola doctor who just flew to N.Y. from West Africa and went on the subway, bowling and dining is a very SELFISH man – should have known!”

—Donald Trump tweet, Oct. 24, 2014, critical of Dr. Craig Spencer who developed symptom of Ebola after returning from Guinea. [But of his mini-motorcade around Walter Reed, Trump told Americans not to be afraid of coronavirus. Nothing selfish about that – no indeed.]

“He’s not even pretending to care now.”

—Secret Service agent, following Trump’s impromptu trip outside Walter Reed to wave at his fans.

“Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential ‘drive-by’ just now has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater. This is insanity.”

—Tweet by James P. Phillips, George Washington University professor and a doctor affiliated with Walter Reed.

“Now that the virus has reached them, maybe they will have to know what our world feels like.”

The Guardian columnist Moira Donegan.

“He’s willing to do anything he can to fundamentally undermine democracy, any sense of integrity, any sense of decency, any sense of anything that any normal human being would think is acceptable in a real country,”

—LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

“Ballots are being mailed out NOW and people are voting in Tennessee. We need YOU to ensure that you will be securely receiving your ballot to make sure that YOUR vote counts. We can’t stress enough how important it is that you’re ready to vote the SAFE way this Election, so make sure you’ve requested your ballot TODAY!”

—Email received by one of one of our yellow-dog Democrat* readers in Tennessee. [But…but…but we thought voting by mail was fraudulent! Trump even said so – at least a thousand times this election season alone. Guess the fraudulent ones would be the ones who vote for Biden.]

*(Harry Truman’s mother coined this term when she once said she’d vote for a yellow dog before she’d vote for a Republican.)

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If some of our Repugnican legislators were not as dumb as a can of hair, they might actually be funny with all their pontificating and posturing.

But the fact is, they’re not funny; they’re just being Trumpian stupid. *

The Repugnicans in the legislature called a special session that convened a week ago to consider restrictions on Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’s actions to contain the spread of the coronavirus that has killed 210,000 Americans.

It’s not enough that their president insists on walking around maskless, taking mini-motorcade trips around Walter Reed Hospital to wave at worshipful admirers with nothing better to do than gather outside the hospital in some kind of love-in vigil in support of a man who ignored every precaution until he, too, was diagnosed with the virus. He has to rub salt in the wounds of those who have lost loved ones to the virus by calling on Americans not to fear the coronavirus.

In case the Repugnican legislators have not noticed, but a map of the U.S. last week showed a majority of states where COVID-19 cases are on the increase. Among those were Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi. Smack in the middle of those states was one where cases were not on the rise: Louisiana.

But that ain’t good enough for the Repugnicans, dagnabbit. They want their freedom – freedom to go maskless into restaurants, LSU and Saints football games, festivals and, of course, Mardi Gras.

Again, in case they’ve forgotten, Louisiana was at one time the singular hot spot in America for the virus. That time was immediately after Mardi Gras, when visitors from all the nation converged on New Orleans and took the virus back to their homes.

Then came the shutdown. Theaters, stores, stadiums, gymnasiums, restaurants and schools were shut down, some for good. People worked and learned from home.

Except for places like Firehouse Bar-B-Que in Livingston Parish and Life Tabernacle Church in nearby Central, both within a few miles of my home, defied orders of closure or attendance restrictions. Other church ministers railed against the refusal of guvmint to allow the faithful to worship Gawd. Idiots like U.S Rep. Clay Higgins, who probably hasn’t set foot in a house of worship for years, maybe decades, took up the cross in the name of religious principle – and evangelical votes.

They want their freedom. I’m waiting for an insurrection by people who don’t want to wear seat belts because, well, it’s their freedom to feel unrestricted. And it’s just a matter of time before public flashers insist that they should not be required to wear pants. I mean, freedom of restriction is what it’s all about, right?

Our Repugnican legislators, supported by Koch Industries, Karl Rove, ALEC, LABI and Grover Norquist, have taken over control of this state beginning in 2008 when Bobby Jindal, working under the guiding hand of Timmy Teepell, turned state government over to the corporate interests.

Sacrificed at the altar of oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, nursing homes, private prisons, banks and payday lenders were public colleges, health care, public education, teachers, and women in particular – and the middle class in general. Massive corporate tax cuts were passed at the expense of the state budget which spiraled into deficit after deficit under Jindal as benefits were cut or eliminated outright – all at the direction of Norquist, who doesn’t even live in Louisiana.

So, with the state continuing to wallow at or near the bottom of every ranking of things good and at the top of all the bad rankings, the Repugnicans, led by the likes of House Speaker Clay Schexnayder (R-Gonzales) and Senate President Page Cortez (R-Lafayette) want to chip away at the one area at which the state has been successful under the leadership and direction of John Bel Edwards – bringing down the infection rate of COVID-19.

Sounding eerily like the idle boasts of Trump when he speaks of “many people” telling him this and that, Rep. Stephen Dwight (R-Lake Charles) sniffs, “There have been a lot of complaints that we don’t know what is coming down, what the plan is.”

Want to know what their plan is? Here it is, as explained by House Speaker Pro Tem Tanner Magee (R-Houma): “We are on step one of the process. It is wide open right now.”

Wow. Thanks for clearing that up. I certainly feel better now. That’s very much like Trump’s oft-repeated promise that his replacement plan for Obamacare would be revealed “in a couple of weeks.” He first made that promise soon after becoming president in January 2016. We’re still waiting.

Rep. BLAKE MIGUEZ (R-Erath) may have inadvertently provided some keen insight on accountability and transparency as defined Repugnicans when he said the bills being pushed to restrict the governor’s authority drew scant debate because they had already been discussed in private. “We have had a lot of discussions, a lot of meetings of Republicans (he can’t even spell the party’s name correctly) behind the scenes,” he said. “We showed a unified voice out here today that we are going to stick together.”

Well, of course you are. Otherwise, you might get a bad grade from LABI and a bad grade from LABI means fewer corporate campaign contributions, right?

But, hey. That’s government transparency – the gold standard of governmental ethics since January 2008, which just happened to coincide with the beginning of the Jindal era, which, to tell the truth, has never really gone away.

*(Trumpian stupid: unable to think for oneself, willingness, even eagerness, to take cues on behavior, philosophy and leadership from a narcissistic buffoon.)

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For today’s lesson, class, we’re going to be studying how to turn a $4.3 million surplus into a deficit of almost $6.4 million in a mere six years.

Said another way, because in mathematics, you must be able to check your works by looking at the problem from a different angle, how do you lose more than $10 million of taxpayer money in a single term of office?

Perhaps we could borrow from the classic 1964 Peter Sellers-George C. Scott movie and simply call this class DA Duhé (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Deficit).

Or, Honey, I Shrunk the Surplus. Or maybe even The Incredible Shrinking General Fund.

When it comes to deficit accrual, 16^th JDC District Attorney Bofill Duhé is virtually unchallenged in Louisiana.

There are 42 judicial districts in Louisiana, some of which, like the 16^th JDC, encompass more than one parish. The 16^th JDC is comprised of Iberia, St. Martin and St. Mary parishes.

Only six other district attorneys showed budget deficits in their latest state audits. Five of those only did so in the most recent accountings, having finished in the black in previous audits. They are the 19^th JDC (East Baton Rouge Parish), the 1^st JDC (Caddo), the 26^th JDC (Bossier and Webster), the 37^th JDC (Caldwell), and the 7^th (Catahoula and Concordia).

Orleans was the only district besides the 16^th to show multi-year deficits but Orleans has historically experienced financial problems.

When Duhé took office in 2014, he inherited a budgetary surplus of $4.3 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2013. A year later that surplus had shrunk to $2.1 million. The next year that figure had decreased to less than $240,000 and in 2016, the office experienced its first deficit when it finished the year $906,529 in the red. It more than doubled to a bit north of $2 million in 2017 and by the end of 2018, the last year for which audit figures are available, the deficit had swollen to an eye-popping $6.4 million.

In football parlance, that’s a swing of more than $10 million in only four years, or an average loss of $2.5 million per year.

In May of this year, Duhé furloughed 38 percent of his staff, attributing the difficult times to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the pandemic did not raise its ugly head until March of this year, so what is the reason for the deficit spending for all the previous years of his tenure?

Well, perhaps we should start by taking a peek into his educational and professional background.

Nope, that’s not it. He graduated in general business from UL-Lafayette in 1984 and began his working career as a special assets officer for two Lafayette banks until he decided to enroll in law school in 1989. He still sits on the board of directors of a local bank so, if anyone should know a thing or two about handling money and how to operate a budget, you’d think that someone would certainly be one Bo Duhé.

Duhé once said, “We, like other businesses in our community, must operate within our means.”

Perhaps if Duhé had not spent so much of his time pursuing cases that he should not have he could have saved a dollar or two. Several of his prosecutions look a lot more like persecutions, a waste of taxpayer dollars.

Let’s begin with his puzzling feud with District Judge Lori Landry. Duhé filed MOTIONS OF RECUSAL on more than 300 criminal cases docketed for Judge Landry’s court. That story, chronicled by The Daily Appeal reporter SARAH LUSTBADER, has more twists and turns than a barrel of chains – not to mention obvious conflicts of interests involving First Assistant DA ROBERT VINES.

Judge Landry, it should be noted, is opposing Duhé’s reelection in next month’s election.

And then there’s the story of DONALD BOUSSARD who paid dearly after he had the temerity to initiate a recall of former Sheriff Louis Ackal after 20-year-old Victor White III supposedly managed to (a) obtain a gun and (b) shoot himself in the chest while (c) he was seated in the back seat of a sheriff’s department patrol car (d) with his hands cuffed behind him.

Finally, there is that questionable indictment of Iberia Parish Clerk of Court MICHAEL THIBODEAUX on (count ‘em) 14 criminal counts of perjury, racketeering, malfeasance, theft of advance court costs, and filing false/altered public records.

The fact that the indictment came a full 20 months after the release of the October 2016 audit should raise eyebrows. And considering a blindfolded man could turn around three times and spit and most probably hit a legislative audit report at least as serious as this one which produced not even a slap on the wrist, and you really start wondering about the local political affiliations.

Thibodeaux’s cardinal sin: Ryan Huval was an employee of the clerk’s office and Thibodeaux terminated him. The official reasons are not known and Thibodeaux is prohibited from discussing it because of privacy issues.

But the reasons, whether justified or not, don’t matter. Ryan Huval is the son of Ricky Huval.

Ricky Huval is the parish assessor and he was not happy with his son’s firing. And Ricky Huval and District Attorney M. Bofill Duhé are tight.

But the question must be asked: where was the DA’s office when prisoners were being abused and killed while in custody of Sheriff Louis Ackal? Yes, Ackal was indicted, but it was a federal indictment. Duhé was nowhere to be found.

And if Thibodeaux can be indicted by Duhé for the alleged misapplication of $300,000, what does that say about the man who indicted him losing $10 million in four years?

Without having ventured into Iberia Parish, it certainly appears that Duhé is not above using his office to carry out political vendettas – even at the waste of millions of taxpayer dollars.

(And I say “without having ventured into Iberia Parish” for a reason. Given the obvious underhanded political hijinks that take place there and given all that I’ve written about Ackal and Duhé, there’s no way I’ll be taking a leisurely drive through the 16^th JDC anytime soon. I’m slow but I ain’t stupid.)

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“This is a national crisis directly affecting the president and, unfortunately, we can’t trust what comes out of the White House.”

—Allan Lichtman, history professor at American University, on Trump’s credibility problems which he says are coming home to roost.

“You do not give a patient – much less the President of the United States – a drug that is not yet approved by the FDA (to say nothing of someone with ‘mild symptoms’). Unsurprisingly, the Trump White House is not being forthright to the American people about the health of their President,” 

—Zeke Emanuel, bioethicist and former health policy adviser for President Obama.

“The disclosure of the 72 hours from diagnosis leaves us with a significant time of lacking self-quarantine but instead travelling to Minnesota and New Jersey, along with many other gatherings, close contacts, that may well have further spread infections.”

—Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, questioning the news conference Saturday by physicians tending to Donald Trump which raised the possibility that Trump may have already known of his infection before holding campaign events in Minnesota and New Jersey – but held them anyway.

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic killed 5,500 people in Louisiana. As of today, LA’s death toll from COVID-19 is 5,355. At this rate, within the next four months, COVID-19 will have killed more people in LA than every hurricane combined since the Last Island Hurricane of 1856.

—Writer Lamar White, Jr.

NOT A TRUMP QUOTE, but it should be (with apologies to Cavin & Hobbes):

“That’s the difference between me and the rest of the world! Happiness isn’t good enough for me! I demand euphoria!“

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