Louisiana Voice

Folks, I have to apologize on behalf of Amazon. There was apparently a rush of some sort on my latest book Murder on the Teche: A True Story of Money and a Flawed Investigation and they got behind on shipments of the book. But now I understand they’re back on schedule and shipping copies out.

To tell you the honest truth, it’s a problem I’ve never experienced in the sale of previous books, but I have to admit it’s one that feels kind of nice. I’ve been tracking Amazon orders online and the numbers have remained encouraging.

Murder on the Teche is the story of the murder of successful orthodontist Robert Chastant in New Iberia in 2010 and the slipshod, amateurish investigation carried out by the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Office and the 16th Judicial District Attorney’s office. The killer, an illegal Mexican hired hand, confessed but said the doctor’s wife paid him $1,000 to kill her husband. What followed was one of the most inept investigations I’ve ever seen.

So, here’s the deal: If you want a copy signed to you personally by me, forget Amazon and order either directly from me or click on the red and blue Cavalier House Books to the right of this post. It looks like this:

But don’t click on the image here; it won’t work. Be sure to request a signed copy. The bookstore is a stone’s throw from my house and I will trot my aging body up there and sign the book for you before he ships it out.

The other option is to either click on the yellow DONATE button to the right and pay by credit card or send a check to: Tom Aswell, P.O. Box 922, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727. The cost is $17.95 whether you purchase from Cavalier or from me and just to sweeten the deal, I will absorb the shipping costs.

Order now before there’s another backlog of shipments.

Thus far in 2021, there have been 14 mass shootings in the U.S. that left 79 Americans dead. That includes the one yesterday in San Jose, California in which nine died.

Even a pandemic couldn’t stop the killing. In 2020, despite a lockdown and business closures, there were nearly 20,000 Americans killed by gun violence, more than any other year in at least two decades, according to the Washington Post. Another 24,000 died by suicide by self-inflicted gunshots.

There are meatheads who will read this and disparage the statistics for no other reason than because they were in the hated Washington Post but whether you accept the validity of the publication’s reporting or not, these are the cold, hard facts. As the late Sen. Daniel “Pat” Moynihan once famously said, you’re welcome to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

In case you’re still not convinced here are some STATISTICS that do not come from The Post:

Every day in the U.S., 316 people are shot. Of that number nearly half (106) will die.

Altogether, 115,551 people are shot in this country each year with 38,826 dying from gunshot wounds. Suicide accounts for 23,437 of those deaths.

But more tragic than those numbers, 22 children aged one to 17 in the U.S. are shot with five of those dying. Nearly 8,000 children and teens are shot in the U.S. each year and 1,663 of those die from gun violence. Of that 1,663 who did, 662 die from suicide by guns.

How do these numbers stack up against those of other countries? Well, the picture ain’t pretty. Click HERE for a comparison.

So, how does the State of Texas respond to these stark figures? The Lone Star State legislature passes a BILL and sends it to the governor who will doubtless sign it into law so that henceforth, anyone in Texas will be allowed carry handguns without a permit – concealed or not. State Sen. Charles Schwertner (R-Georgetown) said the bill was a “simple restoration of Texans’ constitutional right under the Second Amendment.”

This despite a University of Texas/Texas Tech poll that revealed that 59 percent of all Texans were opposed to the bill.

Beautiful.

Now, the esteemed Louisiana Legislature is on the cusp of passing a similar bill. Senate Bill 118 by Sen. Jay Morris (R-Monroe) specifies that any Louisiana resident who meets certain qualifications “shall not be required to possess a permit.” The bill passed the Senate by a comfortable 27-11 vote.

At the time of the vote (April 27) Democrat Troy Carter was still in the State Senate prior to taking office as the state’s 2^nd District House member. That gave the State Senate a total of 12 Democrats. The 11 nay votes on SB 118 included the vote of Carter and 10 fellow Democrats. The only Senate Democrat to vote in favor of the open carry bill was Gary Smith of Norco.

He was – and is – the only white Democrat in the State Senate. Perhaps the African-American senators know a little about gun violence that the white Republicans – and Gary Smith – just don’t get. Perhaps they are a little weary of their young people dying unnecessarily from gun violence.

Or perhaps they’re a bit wary of a bunch of megalomaniacal, deranged lunatics wearing MAGA caps strutting around with a sidearm strapped to their jeans, looking for any excuse to prove their manhood to the ghost of John Wayne.

But here’s the thing: In 2019 there were 36,096 people killed in auto accidents in the U.S. Seven hundred twenty-seven of those were in Louisiana.

Texas, 19 other states do not now require permits for either open or concealed carry of firearms. Others, including the gret stet of Looziana, are in the process of enacting similar laws.

States with NO RESTRICTIONS whatever include Idaho, Montano, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maine, New Hampshire, Alaska and Vermont.

Only five states – California, New York, Illinois, South Carolina and Florida – currently prohibit both concealed and open carry.

We license drivers in Louisiana and every other state and no one seems to have a problem with that outside of a handful of militia-types camped out in the Montana foothills of the Northern Rocky Mountains. We even have laws in place that allow for the revocation of drivers’ licenses for certain offenses. Most also require that drivers carry liability insurance on their vehicles. In short, drivers are held to some level of responsibility in every single state.

Gun totin’ however, is another story altogether.

CIGARETTE SMOKING kills more than 480,000 Americans each year, according to the CDC. That includes 41,000 who die from second-hand smoke. Deaths from SECOND-HAND SMOKE breaks down to 7,333 deaths each year from lung cancer and another 33,951 from heart disease. The 480,000 smoking deaths equate to about 1300 per day and compares with the 587,830 deaths from COVID-19 in the US in 2020.

On average, smokers die about 10 years earlier than non-smokers.

So, what was done about cigarette deaths? The attorneys general of 46 states sued on the basis of the expenses incurred in caring for smokers who depended on Medicaid for payment of their medical care. Joe the Camel and the Marlboro Man were banned, along with all cigarette advertising and the four largest US tobacco companies SETTLED for a minimum of $206 billion.

In other words, Big Tobacco was held accountable for the carnage it had inflicted.

Likewise, PURDUE PHARMA was forced into bankruptcy as a result of the company’s marketing tactics with OxyContin, which sparked the opioid epidemic. Purdue will pay about $4.2 billion and the company’s Sackler family owners will be required to pony up an additional $4.275 billion.

Like Big Tobacco, Purdue is being called to account for the damage it has inflicted on society.

But when it comes to taking affirmative action against the growing epidemic of gun violence in this country, all the Repugnantcans have to offer is TAPs (thoughts and prayers). TAPs don’t do much to stop the hemorrhaging when you have a 9 mm slug embedded deep in your chest or gut.

TAPs don’t do a damned thing to resurrect the bodies lying in an elementary school classroom. They won’t help that teacher who stepped into the line of fire to protect a student.

What has to be done is to ban assault weapons, AR15s. But Repugnantcans crap their pants every time they get a call from the NRA. If possible, they’re more afraid of the NRA than they are of Trump.

Any time there is a mass shooting and someone suggests legislation to rein in the terror, Repugnantcans say in unison, “Now is not the time.”

Well, please tell us, just when the hell IS the time?

Instead, we get that ass-clown John (no relation) Kennedy posting a video on behalf of the NRA that he promises will “blow away” the anti-gun libtards.

Now, as Brian Williams explains in his report, this is a man who was educated at Vanderbilt and Virginia School of Law and at Magdalen College at Oxford, a school founded half-a-millennium ago in 1458. Still, he can’t spell believe. To watch the Williams report, click HERE.

What’s more, he pulls out that homey cliché that he claims is indigenous to South Louisiana (it isn’t): “I belive (sic) in love, but you oughta have a gun, just in case,” he drawls as he acts as though he is cleaning a cheap prop Saturday night special that would be an accurate defense only if his target was a maximum of three feet away.

Such is the timing of this cheesy video, coming as it does with the news of the latest mass shooting in San Jose, California, which took those nine lives.

TAPs.

Five of Louisiana’s House members apparently have no problem with the rash of attacks on Asian-Americans just as the same five don’t see any reason to investigate the Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters that left feces on corridor walls, widespread vandalism, and five people dead.

Never mind that Congressional Repugnantcans spent more time investigating Benghazi than it did 9/11. (Don’t believe me? Click HERE.)

House Resolution 275 called for the condemning of the “horrific shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 16, 2021, and reaffirming the House of Representative’s commitment to combating hate, bigotry, and violence against the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community.”

Democrat Troy Carter voted for the resolution which passed the full House by a 245-180 vote. Only 30 Republicans voted in favor of the resolution.

Neither Steve Scalise, Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Julia Letlow nor Garret Graves, Repugnantcans one and all, were among those 30.

So, what would be the harm in those who make our laws coming together, regardless of party affiliation, to condemn the spate of violence against Asian-Americans?

Beats the hell out of me, but Louisiana’s five Repugnantcans just couldn’t bring themselves to display enough spine to stand up for human rights and against the incomprehensible mentality of inflicting harm on others because of the color of their skin.

Unless, of course, the Repugnantcan Party at some point decided that it was no longer the Party of Lincoln, but the Party of Bigotry, which, come to think of it, isn’t that much of a stretch.

It also may be the Party of Anarchy.

Those same five Repugnantcans joined 170 other Repugnantcans in voting against House Resolution 3233, the “National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex Act.

HR 3233 passed by a 252-175 vote, with 35 Repugnantcans voting with 217 Democrats in favor of the resolution.

And again, the Louisiana Five were not among those 35. The only yea vote from Louisiana again came from Democrat Troy Carter.

You think maybe the Repugnantcans were that hesitant to vote in favor of investigating Benghazi in an effort to bury Hillary Clinton? Not on your life.

Without going into the merits or lack of for Clinton, it’s worthwhile to note that Congress, led by Repugnantcans frothing at the mouth, spent two years and four months investigating the deaths of four people at the U.S. embassy in Libya. In case anyone’s forgotten, five died as a result of the Capitol insurrection.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” Rep. Kevin McCarthy said back in 2016. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today?” That’s the same Kevin McCarthy who now wants no part of a Jan. 6 investigation.

But 28 months investigating Benghazi? That’s longer than congressional investigations into 9/11, Watergate, the JFK assignation or Pearl Harbor.

But Scalise, Higgins, Johnson, Letlow and Graves just couldn’t see the need to investigate how a screaming horde with nooses, guns, a bomb or two, and God knows what else was goaded by the former guy into storming the Capitol screaming about hanging Mike Pence, killing Nancy Pelosi and other members while actually killing one police officer.

Some “tourist stroll” that was.

The Fantastic Five just couldn’t bring themselves to probe how an orange-toupeed, con man managed to coax thousands of rabid followers to Washington to wreak havoc and to even kill a Capitol police officer, why members of the active military were among the rioters, why the U.S. Capitol was breached so easily and how any of the members under siege at that time could possibly equate the maniacal lunatics to a group of tourists strolling through the Capitol.

There are only two possible explanations. The five are (a) cowards who are deathly afraid of Trump, Jim Johnson, Devin Nunes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Josh Hawley, Madison Cawthorn, Clay Higgins, Steve Scalise, John N. Kennedy, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Matt Gaetz, Mitch McConnell and the other mouth-breathers who somehow got themselves elected to the House or Senate, or (b) are themselves advocates of violence, discord, and lawlessness.

Whichever the case, be assured that these people do not represent the values and principles this country stands for as set out in the U.S. Constitution – a document they’ve likely never read.

Unfortunately, they likely do represent their respective constituents, the people who put them in office.

And therein lies the problem.

As someone said long before I first wrote it in a column, we get the government we deserve.

Politics is cyclical. The pendulum swings both ways and the national mood will shift.

Those who deride a free press are seeing what happens in countries like Belarus when a reporter dares speak out against the country’s leader. That’s the kind of state-sanctioned terrorist acts against a dissident reporter that Trump so admires but one day, his supporters of today will sit back and wonder whatever possessed them to vote for such a monster. Only the hardest of the hard-core supporters will continue in their unquestioning blind loyalty.

One day, Congress will be rid of parasites like the aforementioned architects of the modern Repugnantcan Party.

We can only hope it won’t be too late.

The City of Baton Rouge has quietly agreed to pay $35,000 to the Clarence Green family of Baton Rouge to settle a civil rights lawsuit against a team of Baton Rouge police officers, according to attorney Thomas Frampton, who represented the family in their legal action against the city.

Frampton is associate professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law.

In the span of 90 minutes on January 1, 2020, the police officers stripped Clarence Green and his 16-year-old brother on a public street, GROPED THEIR GENITALS as part of a “frisk,” illegally entered the Green family’s apartment (with one officer drawing his gun), and repeatedly threated to beat a handcuffed and defenseless Clarence Green (“I’m going to come in [to the backseat of the police car] and f**k you up! You think I’m playing with you? I will f**k you up! I will f**k you clean up!”). The threats were captured on the officers’ body- cam.

The lead officer involved, Sgt. Ken Camallo, was criticized U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson by a federal judge after he testified about the New Year’s Day events. Judge Jackson said the officers “demonstrated a serious and wanton disregard for [Clarence Green’s] constitutional rights, first by initiating a traffic stop on the thinnest of pretext, and then by haphazardly invading [his] home (weapons drawn) to conduct an unjustified, warrantless search.”

The video depicts an “abject violation of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment” and “may justifiably be considered” criminal, Judge Jackson said, noting that Camallo “gave multiple conflicting accounts when describing the circumstances leading up to defendant’s traffic stop, and failed to offer a satisfactory explanation for why the police reports in this investigation were revised nearly a dozen times in the months following Green’s arrest.

The officer’s testimony was troubling at best, and the court was prepared to make a credibility determination” had the criminal case against Green been dismissed.

In 2017, in an unrelated case, a different federal judge found that Camallo testified falsely concerning the circumstances another illegal and warrantless home search. BRPD did not discipline Camallo after that incident, Frampton said. The residences in the 2017 case and the 2020 case are around the corner from one another.

Despite the incident with Green occurring over 14 months ago, only one of the five officers involved – Camallo – has faced any internal discipline. Other officers involved but unpunished by BRPD included Officer Troy Lawrence, Jr., believed to be the son of BRPD Deputy Chief Troy Lawrence, Sr.

As usual, none of the officers paid any of the settlement personally; taxpayers are footing the bill.

“The video is horrifying,” Frampton said. “It shows a form of ritualized humiliation and contempt for civil rights that, based on the lack of response from BRPD and District Attorney Hillar Moore, apparently has official sanction. These aren’t bad apples; there are some of the best officers on the force. It’s a miracle someone didn’t get killed . . . this time.”

On Wednesday of this week, I was eating dinner at a Denham Springs restaurant when two elderly couples entered the dining room. The message stenciled across the front of one of the men’s T-shirt immediately made my blood boil and had my wife not been with me, I probably would have some choice words for the cretin wearing the shirt.

Now, I am all about freedom of expression and as a general principle, am opposed to censorship of any description. But despite my belief in freedom of speech, I was immediately irate over the shirt’s message: DEFUND the MEDIA.

Whether he is aware of it or not (and he likely is oblivious), the media have already been defunded. Don’t believe it? Check the size of your local newspaper against what it was say, 10-15 years ago. Check the content of publications like The Shreveport Times, Monroe News-Star, Alexandria Town Talk, etc. to see what has happened to the print media. The New Orleans Times-Picayune ceased to exist after it had cut back to publishing three days a week. The Bastrop Enterprise shuttered its doors a few years back. Weekly and small dailies have been shrunken to mere shadows of their old selves – all because of defunding necessitated by the medium by which you are reading this: the Internet. So, I guess I am part of the problem but at least I never wanted to see newspapers die. That was, after all, the way I made my living for most of my adult life.

The old redneck is entitled to his opinion, but I have to wonder if he has ever considered what a world without the media might be like. Whether you agree with the message or not, it is critical that citizens of a democracy be kept informed about what their government is doing or not doing. The Washington Post‘s slogan, splashed across its masthead, proclaims, “Democracy dies in darkness.” LouisianaVoice‘s own masthead says, “It is understandable when a child is afraid of the dark but unforgivable when a man fears the light.”

You may not like the news you read (I deliberately omit TV news coverage because of the brevity of its stories, reduced as they are to 15-second soundbites). But as one reporter for the old Baton Rouge State-Times asked an irate caller during the hectic days of the Watergate scandal, “What have you learned about Richard Nixon that you’d rather not have known?”

Take, for example, the series of stories initiated by LouisianaVoice about an outfit in my hometown of Ruston: LASALLE CORRECTIONS. It all started with a whistleblower complaint that a LaSalle-run facility in GEORGIA was performing unwanted hysterectomies on female detainees.

On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to terminate its contract with two facilities that housed immigration detainees: the BRISTOL COUNTY (Massachusetts) Sheriff’s Office and the IRWIN COUNTY DETENTION CENTER in Ocilla, Georgia.

The Irwin County facility is the one operated by LaSalle against which the WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT was lodged last September by Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network.

Of course, the Georgia detention center is not the only troubled facility operated under the auspices of LaSalle. It pulled out of the TEXARKANA jail after numerous violations and lawsuits.

None of this would have ever come to light without the media.

As if those examples aren’t enough, there is the matter of RONALD GREENE and the Louisiana State Police.

Were it not for the dogged pursuit of this story, a gang of over-zealous state troopers in Monroe might never have been investigated for the death of Greene or the COVERUP that ensued.

Commenting on the release of the graphic video of Green’s final moments, Gov. John Bel Edwards lamented, “The entities that are doing the investigation, US Department of Justice and the District Attorney, haven’t yet completed the investigation. They renewed their request that the video not be made public, and that’s why the state police haven’t done it.”

Really, Governor? This occurred two years ago. How long does it take to conduct an investigation? George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police a year ago and the officer who held him down with his knee until he was dead was indicted, tried and convicted last month – 11 months after Floyd’s death. And we’re still “investigating” the Greene death two years later, with no indictments?

It’s bad enough that the state police are attempting to make this go away quietly without the state’s chief executive allowing himself to become complicit in the attempt.

State police have consistently refused to release the VIDEO of the tragic event, citing the same excuse as Edwards: that it was still “under investigation.” The media were asking for video of the apprehension, tasing, beating and ultimate killing of yet another black man who admittedly fled police who attempted to pull him over.

The source of the video is still unknown, but it was not from state police.

When Greene struck a tree, ending the chase, he exited his vehicle, saying, “I’m sorry” and “I’m scared.”

The ultimate lie, for which no one has yet been charged, was the claim by state police that Greene was killed in the auto accident, which the video clearly shows was not the case. That alone should be grounds for an obstruction of justice indictment.

That was a lie for which someone must be held accountable. But it’s been two years and the only trooper disciplined, subsequently was killed in a one-car collision, a victim, some say, of an apparent suicide after he had been given a termination letter from state police – 14 months after Greene’s death and only then because of media inquiries.

Two years is too damned long, but rest assured, without an aggressive media determined to get to the root of this story, it would have remained buried.

To the uninformed, obstinate, narrow-minded man who strutted so proudly through the restaurant in that T-shirt, a message: You can defund the media but when you do, you castrate democracy.