Louisiana Voice

Guest column by Paul Spillman

Author and poet Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” But the modern world shows us that not “everybody” faces the consequences of their choices. At least not in this life. No more obvious example exists than the President of the United States.

The litany of consequences Trump has escaped would take days to write from the bankruptcies and lawsuits he has faced as a private businessman to Jan. 6 to his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein to the slush fund he wants to establish with our tax dollars to pay off criminal cronies and lawbreaking sycophants. And Trump wants even more than escaping consequences. He wants to guarantee he never faces any. The slush fund his corrupt Department of Justice set up for him also includes a provision the IRS will never audit his taxes. The “Republican” party is trying to find ways to give it to him.

Nor are examples confined to Trump or politicians. The uber wealthy routinely buy their way out of consequences. The Sackler family comes to mind. The family owned Purdue Pharmaceuticals and addicted America to Oxycontin with false testing, kickbacks, and lies. But “consequences” for the Sackler family amounted to dissolving the company and paying a $4.5B fine. Did that leave the Sacklers impoverished? Well they have nine years to pay out the fine and are worth more than $11B so none are going hungry anytime soon. Or going to prison.

But consequences still apply for some. Ask Bill Cassidy or Thomas Massie. Ask Calvin Duncan who spent 25 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit because of a corrupt prosecutor. Duncan taught himself law, eventually won his release, ran for office and was elected in a landslide. But there are consequences for Duncan – consequences for being a living example of the corruption in the Louisiana judicial system. The Louisiana legislature – on a motion from a West Monroe politician – voted to eliminate Duncan’s New Orleans city office.

Still, for the powerful, for the wealthy, for the connected there are few consequences, if any.

 And recently we had a good example of that right here at home. LSU has hired former head coach Ed Orgeron as a special assistant to head coach Lane Kiffin.

Orgeron led LSU to arguably the greatest season in college football history complete with Heisman winner, undefeated record, and national championship. Every LSU fan will be forever grateful to Ed Orgeron for that season of football. But then it went south. Orgeron seemingly let his success go to his head. He embarrassed himself and LSU with his personal life antics and let the program deteriorate in the process. When he was fired midway through the 2021 season he made a snarky comment about giving him the money and telling him which door to walk out of. By the end of that season LSU football had only 39 scholarship players to field a team with for a bowl game. Post 2019 LSU won a combined eleven football games in two years under Orgeron.

But now Orgeron is back at LSU. Because there are no consequences for the favored, the connected, or your good buddy. Only for the poor saps without power, money, or important friends. Early reactions seem positive from fans. The glory of 2019 still shines bright. If any doubts are raised they are drowned out by pleas for a second chance and redemption. But second chances shouldn’t automatically mean third and fourth chances, too. And redemption can be found out of the spotlight as much as in it. Orgeron was a head coach at Ole Miss, unsuccessfully, and got a second chance at LSU – more of a second chance than he maybe first thought. Les Miles hired him as a defensive line coach but through a series of events most are already familiar with Orgeron was named interim head coach in 2016 and permanently named following that season. Second chances indeed. And redemption on a grand scale. The 2019 season was nothing short of magical, a season for the ages. No one will ever be able to take that from Orgeron. But then came the aftermath and the eventual firing.

In the grand scheme of things LSU hiring Orgeron is less than a drop in a bucket, but so indicative of what ails our modern society. What lessons are learned from examples such as this? Live for yourself. Make selfish choices. Hurt people. Cause financial harm. Leave with the money and some snark. But don’t worry. In a few years we’ll all act like it never happened. There’s no need to fret over a lack of morals or ethics. No need to reward honesty or punish dishonesty. It’s all about maxing out your own desires in the right-here-and-right-now. And those who are successful are celebrated, even elected president. They are certainly rewarded with endless opportunity to do it all again. In politics, in business, in sports. In all aspects of modern life.

And what of the rest of us. Those without power, money or connected friends? For the rest of us cynicism sets in. We begin to accept it all as normal, not something we can do anything about. Hope for the future becomes a victim of the times. A sense of helplessness, even despair, slowly becomes the norm. We feel defeated. There is something inherently wrong with escaping the consequences of your choices and each of us feels it in our bones. It offends us on a cellular level. If there are no consequences then selfishness is the only worthy pursuit. But consequences should be absolute. Redemption can be possible. But reward and celebration should follow redemption, not follow the absence of consequences.

Perhaps Orgeron seeks redemption at LSU. Or maybe he just wants a stepping stone back into coaching. Either way his good buddy Lane Kiffin is helping him out. Anyone at LSU who might have objected has been sent packing. And if it doesn’t work out Orgeron still has that $13 million buyout. He’s not going hungry anytime soon, either. Because that’s just the way the world turns in 2026.

Remember the story about sneaky state senators and information-hoarding House members and crafty city and parish officials and the glut of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) that have sprung up in every single parish in the gret stet of Loozeraner in an underhanded tactic to keep state voters in the dark about generous tax breaks and information on controversial multi-billion-dollar data centers popping up?

Remember how LOUISIANA ILLUMINATOR was the first news service in the state to devote the time and energy to tell us how we were being kept in the dark by these agreements that sealed off our access to otherwise public information?

Then, Lake Charles TV station KPLC scored a coup when it obtained a copy of a seven-page NDA signed between an unnamed corporate entity, State Sen. Jeremy Steine and Louisiana Economic Development (LED) Secretary Chris Stelly.

Well, it turns out there may be a crack in that wall of silence. A state district judge has ordered that Ascension Parish must release NDAs between officials and business leaders related to industrial development projects.

Naturally, the parish, which is all about transparency, is appealing. But if the order is allowed to stand—and it most likely won’t, knowing how the Louisiana Supreme Court leans politically—it could have a ripple effect throughout all 64 parishes.

One of the plaintiffs seeking to see what the NDAs contain, Ashley Graignard, president of Rural Roots Louisiana, was pretty succinct in asking the not-necessarily-rhetorical question: “If these projects are truly in the best interest of the people, why are so many documents hidden behind secrecy?

Judge Cody Martin agreed, ruling that neither of the public records exemptions claimed by parish officials are applicable

“The burden of proving protection from production of documents is on the custodian who is bound by law to produce said documents,” Martin wrote in his ruling. Ascension Parish, he said “has not met its burden in doing so.”

The NDAs are just one of several ATTACKS ON PUBLIC RECORDS by the Jeff Landry administration with no letup in sight.

It was Landry, after all who, as attorney general, FILED A LAWSUIT against a reporter who had the temerity to submit a public records request to the AG’s office.

It’s a legal tactic called Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP) being employed more frequently by public officials as a means of discouraging requests for public information.

If there’s anything to be learned by the Jackson and Calcasieu Parish sheriff’s departments, it’s you don’t piss off people by abducting or killing their pets.

In Calcasieu Parish, Justin and Christine Granger of Lake Charles have filed suit in federal court against the sheriff’s office, Sheriff Gary “Stitch” Guillory and Deputy Jordan Trahan after Trahan entered the Granger’s property on an unrelated call and ended up shooting and killing the family dog.

While no litigation has yet been filed in Jackson Parish, the possibility looms over the department after Tommy McDougald’s two pet cats were trapped and hauled away by the Village of Hodge and while the action was not taken specifically by the sheriff’s department, the Hodge mayor is a former deputy sheriff and McDougald is having a bit of trouble in getting the sheriff’s department to cooperate in investigating his complaint.

Trahan was responding to a “traffic complaint” last Aug. 1 but when he came upon the scene, there was no traffic violation observed, says the lawsuit. So, he pulled onto the Granger driveway and exited his patrol car to “leave a card.”

“For reasons unknown to [the Grangers], Trahan discharged his department-issued firearm and shot [the Granger’s] family dog affectionately named tank, killing him in his own yard.”

The lawsuit says Trahan entered the Granger property without cause “as there was no visible traffic violations subject to the complaint called in.” The lawsuit does not identify the person who initially reported the traffic violation.

“It was not until Christine Granger returned home that morning with numerous Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office units surrounding her home that she was told by a second deputy of the tragedy involving her family pet,” the petition says.

The Grangers made a public records request for both cam footage but the lawsuit says it is believed that deputies deliberately “turned off their respective body cameras and/or their audio and on that same day, Aug. 4, they were informed by the sheriff’s department that release of personal information on deputies, including home addresses, was prohibited—information for which the Grangers say they never asked.

The lawsuit says the five-year-old Rottweiler had never shown hostility toward other people and even if he had, Trahan “could have employed non-lethal methods to restrain Tank rather than shooting and killing, but neither attempted nor exhausted such methods.”

It’s not that unusual to find macho cops gunning down dogs as tiny as chihuahuas for no reason other than sport. A quick GOOGLE SEARCH found incidents in Little Rock, San Antonio and other locations. It’s obviously a case of gig game-hunter envy.

Meanwhile, back in Hodge, some 200 miles or so to the north central part of the state, Mayor Gerald Palmer, a retired Jackson Parish deputy who McDougald says has “a history of Civil Rights violations,” finds himself on the hot seat because of the village’s non-response to McDougald’s inquiries about his cats. The conflict between the sheriff’s office and the Hodge village attorney hasn’t helped assuage the feelings of McDougald.

He says when his wife left for work on April 8, she observed a town worker bating a life trap at the corner of their neighbor’s carport and when he and his wife returned home from work, their two pet cats were missing. It turns out, his neighbor told him, Mayor Palmer had requested permission to set the traps, baited with sardines only six feet from the McDougald property line, in order to catch “feral cats.”

When McDougald began trying to find his cats, he was told, “They were caught,” and Palmer told him, “We hauled them far off. You should have kept your pets in your yard.” (of course, when you bait a trap with sardines, you’re going to attract every cat in the neighborhood). McDougald also learned that the village was in violation of its own 1993 ordinance that requires the village to maintain a complete registry of every animal impounded.

Sheriff’s department Chief Deputy Stephen Watts, in response to McDougald’s inquiry about that registry, replied, “…[W]e are in the process of determining whether the referenced records exist and, if so, the appropriate steps for obtaining and reviewing them.”

But village attorney wrote McDougald on April 23 to say the village the “has no animal control or hold logs and Jackson Parish has no animal control or shelter” and “[T]here are no public emails dealing with animal control other than your email and people emailing the village because of your publication on Facebook of what you believe is the situation.”

In other words, take a hike.

The sheriff’s department, meanwhile, has been less than enthusiastic in following up on his complaint, waiting a full 21 days to load his sworn complaint into a departmental file. McDougald, meanwhile, has taken his complaint to the Louisiana Attorney General and the Louisiana Legislative Auditor.

He obviously doesn’t intend to let this matter of cat abduction go.

The Louisiana Legislature finally did something right but only after first doing it wrong two years ago.

Both the HOUSE (97-0, with eight abstentions) and the SENATE (33-0, six not voting) gave unanimous approval earlier this week to SB 208 by Sen. Stewart Cathey, Jr. (R-Monroe) that rectifies a 2024 bill, also authored by Cathey but ruled unconstitutional by a federal court. It’s scheduled for Conference Committee on Monday.

State Sen. Stewart Cathey, Jr.

The bill was submitted as an effort to protect disabled veterans from being charged fees unfairly by private services set up to assist them in obtaining benefits from the Veterans Administration.

While it does not completely prohibit the charging of fees for services, it does keep private unaccredited consultants from profiteering off initial disability claims filed by veterans, according to the LOUISIANA ILLUMINATOR.

Websites purporting to offer assistance to veterans began popping up in 2022 following President Joe Biden’s signing of the PACT Act into law which approved billions of dollars in additional benefits for veterans who were exposed to toxic emissions hazards during their military service.

Those private entities were found to be charging EXORBITANT FEES to veterans who were already suffering from the effects of toxic exposure—in some cases amounts in excess of $20,000 (Louisiana, however, had capped those fees at a still pricey $12,500)—for many services that are available at no fee from VA-accredited organizations like DISABLED AMERICAN VETERANS (DAV) and VETERANS OF FOREIGH WARS (VFW).

So, why would the Louisiana Legislature have even allowed fees as high as $12,500 for services that are available for free through non-profit organizations? Well, I’m just a jaded old newspaper reporter, but I would guess off the top of my gray old head that the answer is twofold: greedy lawyers and money. The plaintiffs’ bar has a lot of juice over in the House that Huey Built and they aren’t about to let an opportunity like that slip by.

A notable exception is Slidell attorney John B. Wells, who also happens to be a retired U.S. Navy commander, who filed suit against the fee practice and eventually won the ruling that Louisiana’s 2024 law was unconstitutional. Wells represents veterans in legal disputes over military benefits.

Attorney John B. Wells

The State of California went Louisiana one better by passing a law SIGNED BY GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM on Feb. 10 that prohibits unaccredited private companies for billing veterans for any help with VA claims and further ordered that those companies must shut down or revamp their business model in California by the end of the year.

It’s unfortunate but all too typical that unscrupulous people are standing by and ready to take advantage of the most vulnerable or less sophisticated among us. One only has to check his or her emails and text messages to find that a Nigerian prince wants to transfer millions to your checking account or you’re the unexpectantly unbelievably fortunate heir to some unknown relative who passed away abroad and left you a fortune—if you’ll only provide your account and routing numbers. Likewise, you probably should be sending the IRS or the DMV (depending upon the SCAM DU JOUR) a check lest you find yourself in handcuffs and heading off to the slammer.