Louisiana Voice

low-hanging fruit

noun

low-hang·​ing fruit ˈlō-ˈhaŋ-iŋ- 

1. the obvious or easy things that can be most readily done or dealt with in achieving success or making progress toward an objective
2. That which is especially easy to obtain or achieve. Often implies something that is perhaps not as satisfying as that which takes more effort or skill to obtain or do.

Okay, that was too easy. But even as international publications like THE GUARDIAN are splashing stories across its pages about the indictments of four state troopers and a deputy sheriff for the death of motorist Ronald Greene 3½ years ago in Union Parish, some of us continue to wonder why the net didn’t snare a few of the Louisiana State Police (LSP) higher-ups.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Greene was beaten and tased to death in May 2019 following a police chase by state troopers in Ouachita and Union Parishes. After he became unresponsive, he was pronounced dead and state police, in what has become a disturbing version of transparency on their part, told the family he had died in a crash.

That was a lie, pure and simple, as body cam footage that remained concealed by LSP for more than two years later, much too long later, revealed. True, Greene was involved in a collision with a tree that terminated the chase, but the damage to his vehicle was minimal and the body cam footage revealed in graphic, tragic detail that Greene was very much alive as he begged for his life while shackled as troopers and a Union Parish deputy sheriff taunted him in between tasings, kicks and punches.

But the indictments by a Union Parish grand jury were limited to the four troopers and the Union Parish deputy. Untouched thus far were members of the State Police command who were clearly complicit in the attempt to keep the incriminating video under wraps. To a lesser degree perhaps, Gov. John Bel Edwards must also share the burden, for contrary to his claims otherwise, it appears that he was made aware of the circumstances of Greene’s death only hours after the fact, yet helped keep the lid on the powder keg by maintaining his silence during what was at the time a tight reelection campaign.

If former LSP hierarchy are to be held to account, that task will fall to East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore.

That’s with emphasis on former hierarchy because one-by-one, they have exited, choosing retirement over accountability. The dominoes began falling when Lt. Col. MIKE NOEL, named by Edwards as his choice to succeed Ronnie Jones as the new chairman of the State Gaming Control Board, suddenly withdrew from consideration and announced his retirement rather than answer questions about Greene’s death that he knew would be forthcoming in a Senate confirmation hearing. Others followed, including then-State Police Commander Col. Kevin Reeves, and his second in command, Doug Cain.

There were other retirements within the higher ranks of State Police and some of those included the incorruptible — like Sgt. ALBERT PAXTON, a detective who chose retirement over submitting to demands from above to back off on his investigation of Greene’s death.

Former prominent New Orleans attorney ASHTON O’DWHER knows a thing or two about cover-ups and slip-shod investigations, having been subjected to unprovoked torture by State Police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina only to see nothing done to the perpetrators. In his understandable anger that continues to fester 17 years later, O’Dwyer insists that LSP remains a “racketeering enterprise.”

And finally, it’s rare that I agree with right-wing columnist and political science associate professor Jeff Sadow, but he made a recent observation that, unfortunately, has a disturbing ring of truth to it.

Sadow said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that the most obvious purpose of the special legislative committee formed to investigate Greene’s death was to advance the political careers of the committee members.

I’m afraid the committee’s less-than-inspiring performance proves Sadow’s assessment to be sadly accurate.

“[E]fforts to close the minds of the next generation will not make its members stronger, more resilient, more intelligent or, for that matter, more moral.”

—Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr., on the perils of book censorship.

Of all those sanctimonious members of the morality police who want to crack down on the content of public and school libraries under the disingenuous pretense of a protective desire to shield impressionable children from objectionable material, I can’t help but wonder how many have impressionable children/grandchildren walking around with equally or more negatively influential – and unsupervised – cellphone access.

Perhaps it would be appropriate for the members of the Lafayette Parish Library Board of Control (Control being the operative word here) to do a little reading of their own – except they’re probably too busy to actually read anything, being so ironically focused as they are on banning books. Anyway, should they find the time to do so, I would suggest that they go back and re-read Luke 4:23 (that’s on the assumption that they’ve so inclined to crack the Good Book in the first place).

It says, “Physician, heal thyself.”

Just sayin’.

Because, while you have your drawers in a wad over children’s access to books containing sexual references, your own kiddies and grandchildren are walking around checking out God knows what on their phones.

And they can watch just about anything their little hearts desire on Netflix, Hulu, their own computers, and iPads, and you most probably have no clue.

In fact, you don’t seem to have a clue about much of anything other than flexing your power over a woman who spent years pursuing a degree to do precisely what she’s doing: run a parish library system and to make administrative decisions consistent with her job description. As for the individual members of the board of control, I ask what are your qualifications to run a library – other than knowing some local political hack who was willing to nominate you to the board?

That is what really seems to be the problem these days – the whole country is being run by political hacks.

At the present time, the board of control is comprised of eight such individuals who will convene at 10 a.m. Thursday to consider disciplinary action against head librarian Cara Chance on charges of “gross insubordination,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Now when I say the board is comprised of eight members, I deliberately omitted the name of the ruthless manipulator of the board’s puppet strings. That’s because he is not officially a member but you’d better believe he is swinging an awfully big stick on the board in his one-man quest for all that’s decent and acceptable – by his standards, that is.

His name is Michael Lunsford. He’s not even from Lafayette Parish. He’s from next door St. Martin Parish and he’s in bed with one Jeff Landry, who just happens to be attorney general for the gret stet of Loozeanner. And he wants so badly to be governor that his ambition practically squirts from his very pores.

Lunsford, with Landry’s full backing, is going over the entire state, picking off parish library systems one-by-one in an effort to undercut professional librarians and to enforce his own warped view of how the world should be. On his stop by Livingston Parish, he appeared to be curiously preoccupied with a book about anal sex – enough so to kinda make you wonder how he managed to home in on that particular selection.

And just to show you that the end game for Lunsford and his outfit, Citizens for a New Louisiana, isn’t just banning books containing sexual content, it should be interesting to note that Citizens for a New Louisiana earlier blocked a Black History presentation at the library. That more or less tipped their hand that Lunsford, his organization, the Republican Party that backs him, and Landry have as their overall objective the complete and total control of all library content as well as educational curricula. That would include, if they are able to prevail, the stripping of all curricula about the Civil War, the Civil Rights struggle, women’s suffrage, Roe v. Wade, and anything that shines an unfavorable light on American history.

Anyway, after the flap over the Black History presentation, the board of control handed down a directive that banned any theme display at the library. That was a pretty heavy-handed move and if applied across the board, would dictate that no displays about Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Mardi Gras, July 4, Labor Day, Memorial Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or anybody else’s day be allowed. Now, I think we can all agree that was not a well thought-out dictum. Kinda lame-brained, as a matter of fact. I mean, you’re gonna snub Ground Hog Day because some politically-appointed board of control had its collective head up its collective derriere? Okay, I can readily see how this bigoted board would give MLK Day short shrift. I mean, that’s what the board was appointed to do, right? That would be really white of them.

Well, Chance, who after all, is the head librarian, decided to be the head librarian and she erected a display that included the mantion of (gasp! cover your ears!) gay marriage and the board lost its fecal matter and began popping nitroglycerin tablets and tomorrow’s disciplinary hearing is the upshot of her uppity behavior.

Parish Library Director Danny Gillane had earlier tendered his resignation notice, effective January 31, and had applied for the same position in Baton Rouge but on Monday he unresigned. It’s not known if his decision to reconsider leaving had anything to do with this Thursday’s disciplinary hearing or not.

Chance has the option at Thursday’s hearing to demand that the meeting be held in open session. It would transfer the pressure to the board if it were forced to hold its discussion out in the open so everyone could hear just how absurd – and virulent – bigotry can be.

Be forewarned, all those of you who would be so brazen as to dare check a publication from your local library that so much as hints at sexuality, sexual orientation or gender identity.

They’re coming for your books.

But more than your books, they’re really coming for your freedom.

Those self-appointed guardians of morality and decency now have the public libraries of Rapides Parish in their crosshairs.

They’ve already encroached on public libraries in Caddo, Bossier, Livingston, Lafayette, St. Tammany, and other parishes in their crusade to purge books they deem objectionable – by their standards, of course. By their standards alone.

A newly-appointed member of the Rapides Parish Library Board has added an item to tomorrow’s (Tuesday, December 13) board meeting agenda to call for the altering of the library’s collection development policy “to exclude children’s and teen books that include references to sexuality, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

The meeting will be held at the Westside Regional Branch of the parish library at 3:30 p.m.

But it’s not about children’s books. It never was.

Let me pause a minute right here and say to you that if you are not pissed off at the efforts of the ultra-right-wing Citizens for a New Louisiana for their firing the first salvo in what is being set up as an all-out attack on the First Amendment, then you damn well should be. This is an issue well worth gearing up for an all-or-nothing battle.

And all you hunters (yes, gun-lovers, I’ll play your game here), take heed. If the First Amendment falls, can the Second Amendment be that far behind?

And that’s not a rhetorical question.

Citizens for a New Louisiana, headed up by a guy named Michael Lunsford of St. Martin Parish, is tied to the National Republican Party and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry (coincidentally, also from St. Martin) who, incidentally, is an announced candidate for governor in 2023. The group is heavily financed by the National Republican Party which has as its agenda an ambitious plan for the dismantling of many rights that we now take for granted.

First, they stacked the Supreme Court (you do remember how they pulled that off, don’t you, by blocking the first vacancy because of a pending presidential election and then rushing the second through after the election was over but before a Democratic president could take office). The new court then lost no time ripping a woman’s right over her own body from her. Done.

The next step was to launch a systematic assault on two fronts: one being an attack on education curriculum and something called critical race theory (CRT), and the so-called objectional content of public and school libraries.

Basically, our Republican political leadership does not want African-American children to learn how they (the current Republican political leadership – and a certain NFL team owner) fought so hard to prevent those children’s grandparents from having the same access to a quality education as those Republican political leaders – and a certain NFL team owner. That’s the CRT they’re so paranoid about.

Citizens for a New Louisiana isn’t going to stop at ridding library shelves of LGBTQ books. That is not their ultimate goal at all. Never was.

And they won’t stop at banning books about race, the civil rights struggle, and the Civil War.

Nor will they stop at banning books about history that puts this country in a less than favorable light – things like Vietnam, Watergate, corporate and Wall Street greed and the recessions and depressions that greed brought about.

And they certainly won’t stop at eradicating books that tell of the environmental destruction we’ve brought upon ourselves – again, fostered by greed that gave not a thought of the future.

They won’t stop at banning books about women’s suffrage, equal pay for women, and the history of Roe v. Wade.

They won’t stop at eliminating any books that tell of the growing pay inequities that have grown exponentially over the past several decades, or the inequality of pay for women who perform the same jobs as men.

And you can bet they won’t stop at trashing science books that conflict with evangelicals’ Old Testament beliefs.

They won’t stop at any of these pursuits until there won’t be any books – or libraries, for that matter – for them to worry about or to protest.

You may think I’m being an alarmist or a conspiracy theorist, but I’m afraid history is on my side in this argument. All you have to do is look at 1930s’ Germany or any other suppressive society like Iran, Russia, China, or North Korea for your evidence.

When we allow a few self-righteous moralists to set the standards for behavior – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has already hinted at the possibility of the court banning contraceptives – and to usurp the US Constitution, there will be no going back. To repeat a time worn cliché, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

The time to stop this insane movement is right now, before it can gain any more momentum. There needs to be a large turnout at tomorrow’s meeting to tell Citizens for a New Louisiana to go pound sand up their collective asses.

These people constitute a clear and present danger.

If you control information, you control the agenda. If you control the agenda, you control the people. If you control the people, there is no freedom.

It’s that simple.

Lots of finger-pointing and yet, no one – and everyone – is to blame for the release of a man convicted in Ascension Parish of murder.

Everyone from the local district attorney to state officials in Baton Rouge to a sheriff in northeast Louisiana has been accused of being asleep at the wheel when Michael “Ma-Man” (seriously, can you think of a less original nickname?) LeBlanc was turned out of jail because his sentencing was “overlooked” for five years?

Wow. Talk about the unqualified leading the inept into the abyss…

At the same time, a sheriff’s deputy who was clocking along at 85 mph when he rear-ended a stalled vehicle, killing a mother of four, has entered a plea of no contest after being charged with careless operation when John Q. Public would in all probability have been arrested for negligent homicide.

The presiding 21^st Judicial District judge slapped Winburn with a 10-day parish prison sentence, suspended, of course, on condition that the deputy fork over $300 in fines. DA Scott Perrilloux’s office noted that $300 is the standard fine in careless operation cases. He neglected to inform us as to the penalty for killing another driver.

When DEPUTY CORY WINBURN crashed into the car being driven by Christinia Estave, 33, on July 15, it was the second time he had rear-ended another driver. The first one resulted in a lawsuit that was subsequently dismissed (we take care of our own in Livingston Parish – provided you have the right connections). In 2018, Sheriff Jason Ard fired Winburn but rehired him in 2020 after he spent about a year in exile, working for the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office.

What makes the Winburn case even more curious is that for nearly a month after Estave’s death, Ard steadfastly refused to release any information about the accident – not even Winburn’s identity. Ard has never explained his secrecy surrounding the accident.

We don’t even know for certain if Winburn has his emergency lights on at the time. He was said to be responding to a call about a shooting around 1 a.m. when the collision occurred. Is there dash cam footage? We just don’t know.

We do know that neither driver was wearing a seat belt, a violation considered even more severe on Winburn’s part since law enforcement officials, who routinely conduct seat belt checks on civilian drivers in Livingston Parish, are, or should be, held to a higher standard. After all, they do set the bar, in theory, anyway.

But returning to the issue of where’s Waldo LeBlanc? Ascension Parish Sheriff Bobby Webre would like to know but he has split for parts unknown after failing to show for a required 48-hour check-in with his parole officer. So, Webre got a piece of paper called a warrant. That’ll show him.

Department of Corrections officials in Baton Rouge said that without the formal procedure of sentencing by the court, the state had no legal authority to hold him. Natalie LaBorde, executive counsel for DOC, said LeBlanc was looking at mandatory life in prison for his 2014 second-degree murder conviction. But when a sentence is not imposed, she said constitutional- and statutorily-imposed structure, calls for the state agency to take control of a prisoner, but not until sentencing has been imposed. Because that had not taken place, she said state corrections officials had no legal authority to hold him once he completed a sentence for a previous gun possession conviction, also in Ascension Parish.

Confusing? You bet. But it gets better.

Once he completed the gun possession sentence in May, he was turned over to the custody of Madison Parish jailers and once he received credit for time owed in that parish (he seems to have been rather busy in his spree), he was released.

Ricky Babin, district attorney for the 23^rd Judicial District, which includes the parishes of Ascension, Assumption, and St. James, laid the blame at the feet of state corrections officials for failing to process paperwork from Ascension, a responsibility LaBorde had already swatted aside.

Nope, said Babin, even sans sentencing, Ascension paper, aka a detainer, should have kept LeBlanc in the custody of state officials if state officials had only followed their own procedures. “If he has a detainer…they should send him back to the parish prison in which he’s detained.

But Madison Parish officials, who hold many state inmates, had the Ascension detainer and when the errant LeBlanc was transferred to Riverbend Detention Center to face the Madison charges after the state gun charge sentence ended, it was up to local authorities who run that jail to follow the detainer, state official said, deftly slipping Ascension’s counter jab.

Now it really gets dicey because East Carroll, which sits atop Madison in extreme northeast Louisiana, actually houses Madison Parish’s pre-trial defendants but for some reason that remains unclear (naturally), did not do so and released LeBlanc.

The trail grows cold there, however, because East Carroll Parish Sheriff Wydette Williams was not available for comment. (With a name like Wydette, I’d probably be unavailable, too.)

So, there you have it: a couple of examples of our fine system of justice hard at work to serve and protect.

I hope this has cleared everything up for you.