Louisiana Voice

Should a judge not involved in a civil case communicate with the presiding judge to make suggestions on how a ruling should be worded?

Should such action take on added significance if both judges are named defendants in a separate lawsuit if the plaintiff in their case is also the plaintiff in the first case?

Would such contact be considered ILLEGAL CASE-FIXING, i.e., ex parte communication?

If you’re confused by now, then welcome to the 4^th Judicial District Court, which serves the parishes of Ouachita and Morehouse where a general state of confusion appears to be the norm rather than the exception.

It all stems from the original racketeering lawsuit filed by Monroe businessman Stanley Palowsky III, et al against W. Brandon Cork, et al, in which Palowsky claimed that his company, AESI, was blacklisted in retaliation for his exposing an excess-billing scheme involving environmental remediation projects.

But when Palowsky discovered that Allyson Campbell, sister of a prominent Monroe personal injury attorney, a gossip columnist for the Monroe News Star newspaper, and an all-around gal about town who just happened to clerk for the judges of the 4^th JDC, had used as many as 52 separate writ applications filed by Palowsky as an end table in her office, he SUED CAMPBELL for concealing or destroying court documents.

He also sued the five judges of the 4^th JDC for conspiring to protect Campbell by covering up her alleged misdeeds. The five judicial defendants included His Honors Carl Sharp, Ben Jones, Wilson Rambo, Stephens Winters, and Fred Amman. Sharp and Amman have since retired from the bench.

Still confused? It gets better.

Thanks to the dogged determination of Ouachita Parish’s real newspaper, the Ouachita Citizen over in West Monroe, we now have a clearer picture of what is going on across the beautiful Ouachita River at the Duck Dynasty official publication.

The case-fixing allegations against Jones and Sharp were exposed in late 2020 after The Citizen got its hands on hundreds of internal court documents that included a draft judgment by Sharp in the original Cork matter that contained (gasp!) handwritten notes and edits in the margins from Jones. (Those records were obtained by The Citizen not without substantial effort that included overcoming an unsuccessful lawsuit filed by the judges against the paper in an effort to prevent turning over what were clearly public records.)

Of course, the judges claimed judicial immunity for their protection of Campbell and Ad Hoc Judge Jerome Barbera III in December 2015 dismissed the five judges as defendants based on an 1871 ruling that said, “It is a general principal of the highest importance to the proper administration of justice that a judicial officer (judge), in exercising the authority vested in him, shall be free to act upon his own convictions, without apprehension of personal consequences to himself.”

In other words, QUALIFIED IMMUNITY, the blanket protection that shields prosecutors, judges and law enforcement officers from responsibility for their abuses of power.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal has been assigned the task of deciding whether the judges of the 4^th JDC may continue to cover for Jones’s suggested edits to Sharp.

It would appear from my admittedly layman’s perspective, that ex parte communication between two judges, one of whom is assigned to hear a case and another who most definitely is not, would not fall under the definition of the exercise of their authority. Ex parte, by definition, is prohibited communication:

ex parte

ĕks pär′tē

adjective

1. Of or relating to an action taken in a legal proceeding by one party without the presence or participation of the opposing party.
2. Of or relating to such an action taken in a manner that is not permitted due to the risk of undue influence or interference.

I trust this is sufficient to clear everything up.

It’s a rare day indeed when JEFF SADOW and I agree on anything, but apparently pigs do fly and hell has finally frozen over.

Our unexpected meeting of the minds is best explained with one simple question: when are term limits not term limits?

The answer of course is when the term is applied the Good Ol’ Boy Loozeeaner way. You know, three terms in the House and then switch over to the Senate for three terms. Repeat.

But apparently, even that shell game isn’t enough for the professional politicians.

Sadow, a presumed associate professor of political science at LSU-Shreveport (though I’m told on pretty good authority that there are no political science students at that particular university), has noted that Rep. Stuart Bishop (R-Lafayette) has filed HB 205 that would increase the allowed number of terms served from three to four.

Like that makes a real difference to the chamber-hopping legislators.

Sadow, with all the skepticism he can muster, said that Bishop “trots out the old and tired argument that a lot of ‘institutional knowledge’ is lost as his justification for the increase.

And while he doesn’t come right out and say that that same “institutional knowledge” may well be the very thing that encourages political corruption, he does brush up against it by saying that same sage wisdom hasn’t seemed to help and all that ingrained grasp of the art of insider politics “assumes the experienced better resist manipulation without acknowledging that equally as likely, if not more so, the experienced become locked into alliances with those very outsiders that lead them to promote more often special interests rather than the people’s agenda.”

For my part, I take the position that if you can’t accomplish anything in three four-year terms, then we aren’t likely to see any marked improvement in four terms – or multiples of three terms via flip-flopping from one side of the Capitol to the other.

The sad truth is this state has rocked along content to lag behind the rest of the nation, save our neighbor to the immediate east of us. It’s no wonder that our unofficial state motto is “Thank God We’re Not Mississippi.”

We are dragging at or perilously close to the bottom in poverty, education, health care, obesity, illiteracy, teacher pay, education, unemployment, environmental quality, infant mortality, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and infrastructure. But not to worry: we’re at the top in prison population and festivals.

Meanwhile, Bishop wants to give legislators four more years of accepting dark money from PACs. If ever there was a clear illustration of redundancy, it’s passing a law saying legislators may enjoy another term in Baton Rouge.

It’s really difficult to see why four more years need to be made official when there are legislators who seem to have been receiving lobbyist largesse since Moby Dick was a guppy.

There was a recent story in the Baton Rouge Advocate that caught my attention and at the same time elicited my skepticism and more than a little amusement at the thought of my local Denham Springs Police Department conducting an undercover investigation of human trafficking and prostitution.

The story related how a local citizen, thinking he would receive “legitimate treatment from a licensed masseuse,” was instead greeted by a “scantily-clad woman,” prompting his suspicion that he had stumbled onto prostitution operating in plain sight in once sleepy Denham Springs.

When I moved out here in 1981, Denham, as the locals refer to it, was indeed sleepy. You could practically fire a cannon down Range Avenue, the main north-south drag, and not hit anything.

Not today. The Baton Rouge bedroom community, along with the entirety of Livingston Parish, has exploded in population over the past three decades and along with that growth came the usual problems of traffic congestion and crime.

And apparently prostitution. Undercover investigators began surveillance of three local massage parlors. They were the Green Land Spa on South Range Avenue, Apple Spa on Florida Boulevard (U.S. 190, erstwhile the main east-west artery before Interstate 12 was built, and Massage Life on Hummel Street.

Given the methods once employed by cops in Hawaii, Arkansas, and Michigan (where they actually engaged in sex in order to make a bust), I was given to wonder just what the so-called “undercover” operation entailed in investigating these massage parlors. (When the Hawaii legislator was considering abolishing the practice, police officers testified that the actual engagement of sex was a valuable “tool” for law enforcement. Most of my redneck wag friends would snicker at the use of that particular word.)

“There’s no secret that there’s sex trafficking going on in this country,” said Denham Mayor Gerald Landry, belaboring the obvious. “And there’s no secret that massage parlors are ways for these young ladies to be abused. There are not enough local ordinances for us to properly manage those kinds of facilities.”

That’s certainly more incisive than what I heard from a Denham cop a few days before Christmas in my carport several years back.

We were keeping our twin grandchildren while their parents, my eldest daughter and her husband, were out of town. We let them sleep in our bed and I was assigned to the guest bedroom and my wife opted for the sofa in the living room.

The layout of the living room is unique in that it has windows in the back of the room that look out into our carport which at the time did not have an enclosure (that was remedied after the flood of 2016). The carport has a motion-activate light and at 4 a.m. my wife came into the guest bedroom to wake me with the news that someone was in our carport.

I got up and looked out the window and saw someone going through my wife’s vehicle, apparently looking for anything of value he could steal and sell – most probably to purchase drugs. When I opened the door leading into the carport, he bolted, and disappeared down our driveway.

The Denham police were summoned in the vain hope that they might apprehend the would-be thief. How foolish of me to make such an assumption.

The officer who responded stood at least six feet from my wife’s vehicle and proclaimed, apparently seriously, “I don’t see any fingerprints.”

I was incredulous, but said nothing until we started down the drive, tracing the thief’s steps, and I spotted an object that he attempted to take but dropped on his way out. I forget now what it was but the officer picked it up and somberly said, “I don’t see any fingerprints on this, either.”

At that point, I blurted, “Well, I bet my fingerprints are all over it and the car, too. You can’t just stand next to something and see fingerprints.”

Given all that, I have to wonder if undercover officers found any fingerprints at those massage parlors.

When House Speaker Clay Schexnayder (R-Gonzales) decided to put Gov. John Bel Edwards in his crosshairs over the Ronald Greene beating death, he made sure to pack his House committee with familiar faces of South Louisiana members.

To tell the truth, that little move was overlooked by me but not by a sharp-eyed LouisianaVoice reader who was quick to question the makeup of the so-called bipartisan committee formed to study Greene’s death at the hands of five state troopers on May 10, 2019.

I say “so-called bipartisan” because while Schexnayder was careful to make certain that four of the eight-member committee were Democrats, he snubbed legislators – Republicans and Democrats alike – from North Louisiana, particularly Northeast Louisiana, where Greene was from and where he died.

Schexnayder’s appointment of four Democrats notwithstanding, this alleged “investigation” is a thinly-disguised hatchet job intended to take down Edwards. Not that he needs and help – Edwards has contributed significantly to his own political demise by keeping quiet so long when he knew damned well Greene died during a struggle with cops but still stuck to the lie that he died from a car crash that was the culmination of a two-parish police chase.

But to ignore North Louisiana House members when appointing the committee was not only ill-advised, but politically not smart. A politician worth his salt would never commit such a blunder. A man died at the hands of Troop F state troopers run amok – where driving while black is apparently a criminal offense. It would seem that legislators from that area would have a stake in any investigation into events occurring in that region.

The chase originated in Ouachita Parish and ended in Union Parish. They are both decidedly North Louisiana parishes: Union abuts Arkansas and Ouachita is just one parish removed from the Arkansas border. You don’t get any more “North Louisiana” than that.

Yet, one must look all the way to East Baton Rouge and West Baton Rouge parishes to find the northernmost member of the committee. That’s roughly 220 miles south of where Greene died.

The membership is chaired by Speaker Pro Tem Tanner Magee (R-Houma). Other members include Reps. Richard Nelson (R-Mandeville), C. Denise Marcelle (D-Baton Rouge), Richard Nelson (R-Mandeville), Tony Barcala (R-Prairieville), Jason Hugues (D-New Orleans), Edmond Jordan (D-Brusly), Mandie Landry (D-New Orleans), and Debbie Villio (R-Kenner).

Overlooked were Ouachita Parish Reps. Mike Echols (R-Monroe), Adrian Fisher (D-Monroe), Foy Bryan Gadberry (R-West Monroe), and Pat Moore (D-Monroe), and Jack McFarland (R-Jonesboro), Christopher Turner (R-Ruston), and Francis Thompson (D-Delhi).

There are others from Minden, Alexandria, Pineville, Shreveport, and Vidalia, but those in the preceding paragraph should have been represented because Greene either lived or died in their districts. Yet, not a single one was designated to serve on the committee.

That’s an oversight that cannot be ignored or excused.

Whether it’s the heat generated by the Ronald Greene murder and the subsequent coverup or just the possibility of an ambitious career move, word is Gov. John Bel Edwards may be about to hit the bricks for D.C.

LouisianaVoice has picked up on a fairly strong report that Edwards will be meeting with his cabinet members next week to announce he’ll be taking a position in the Biden administration, most probably in the Energy Department, currently headed by Secretary Jennifer Granholm, like Edwards, a former governor. She was the frst woman elected governor of Michigan, serving two terms from 2003 to 2011.

Rumors have been circulating of late that Edwards was considering a position in Washington and those reports have intensified with the growing questions about his knowledge of details of Greene’s beating death at the hands of State Troopers on May 10, 2019 and the subsequent claims that Greene died as the result of an auto accident at the end of a lengthy police chase through two north Louisiana parishes.

As Louisiana State Police stuck to their story for some 16 months, Trooper John Clary continued to claim there was no body cam footage of the incident. That claim turned out to be a lie when the body cam footage surfaced around September 2020, only about three months after LSP cellphones were wiped clean.

Greene’s death has resulted in the resignations of at least four high-ranking LSP officials and sparked calls for others as more details continue to emerge.

Edwards was reelected after a hard-fought campaign in 2019 and has nearly two years left in his current term.