Tag: louisiana

Supreme Court Issues Landmark Ruling on Voting Rights Act: 4 Things to Know

The U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark decision on April 29 reinterpreted a provision of the Voting Rights Act and struck down a majority-black congressional district in Louisiana, opening the door for more redistricting across the United States.

In a 6–3 ruling, the high court found that the Louisiana district represented by Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.) relied on race when the congressional map was drawn up.

Ruling Impacts Key Voting Rights Act Section

The ruling was authored by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Alito wrote that “allowing race to play any part in government decisionmaking represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context.”

He said Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is effectively limited to instances of intentional discrimination, a very high standard.

“Only when understood this way does (Section 2) of the Voting Rights Act properly fit within Congress’s 15th Amendment enforcement power,” Alito wrote.

The 15th Amendment, a Reconstruction-era amendment of the Constitution that was ratified in 1870 following the end of the Civil War, allows Congress to pass laws ensuring that the right to vote cannot be denied “on ​account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Interpreting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law in 1965, to “outlaw a map solely because it fails to provide a sufficient number of majority-minority districts would create a right that the amendment does not protect,” Alito argued, referring to the 15th Amendment.

Louisiana Map ‘Unconstitutional’

With the decision, the high court blocked an electoral map in Louisiana that would have given the state a second majority-black congressional district.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was issued amid a battle unfolding between Republican-led and Democratic-led states ​around the country involving the redrawing of electoral maps to change the composition of House of Representatives districts ahead of the November elections.

“That map is an unconstitutional gerrymander,” Alito wrote for the majority, adding that the Voting Rights Act doesn’t “require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district” and ruling that there is “no compelling interest” that justified Louisiana using race to create Fields’ district.

The U.S. Constitution, he added, “almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny.”

The decision was issued as other states have moved to implement new congressional districts ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections.

Florida legislators were debating a proposed redrawing of the state’s congressional lines, which was submitted this month by Gov. Ron DeSantis and was intended to give Republicans a chance to pick up as many as four seats in the House of Representatives.

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Louisiana Lawmakers Pass Bill To Send People To Jail For Smoking Marijuana Near College Campuses

Louisiana lawmakers have approved a bill that threatens to send people to jail for up to one year if they smoke marijuana within 2,000 feet of a school property—including a college campus.

The legislation from Rep. Gabe Firment (R) was passed by the House of Representatives in a 59-34 vote last week.

HB 568, which now heads to the Senate for consideration, applies to people who violate drug laws “while smoking, vaping, or otherwise abusing such controlled dangerous substance while on any property used for school purposes by any school, within two thousand feet of any such property, or while on a school bus.”

The pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) said the “incredibly draconian penalties” in the legislation threaten to reverse cannabis reform progress made in the state in recent years.

In 2021, then-Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) signed a bill decriminalizing marijuana by removing the threat of jail time for possessing up to 14 grams.

“HB 568 would make cannabis use a felony in huge swaths of urban and suburban areas. Two thousand feet is a little over ⅓ of a mile,” Kevin Caldwell, MPP”s Southeast legislative manager, said in an action alert to supporters. “In addition to mandatory incarceration of up to a year, the bill includes a fine of up to $1,000.”

“This is an attempt to bring back the draconian penalties that Louisiana was infamous for in decades past. This bill seeks to undo years of hard work by advocates for ending jail time for minor cannabis offenses,” he said. “Under this legislation, a student could be incarcerated for a year for consuming in a college dorm room.”

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Louisiana Democrat Mayor Indicted on Medicaid Fraud Charges

A Louisiana Democrat Mayor was indicted on Medicaid fraud charges.

Winnsboro Mayor Alice Wallace was indicted for Medicaid fraud in a $75,00 benefits scheme.

Wallace said she will be “vindicated” in a lengthy social media post.

“The devil is trying to embarrass and discredit leadership to possess power again through those who know nothing,,that way they can run it!!” Wallace wrote in a Facebook post.

The Shreveport Times reported:

Winnsboro Mayor Alice Wallace said that she will be “vindicated” of Medicaid fraud charges in a Facebook post following her arrest April 21 by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill with the town’s mayor’s election three weeks away.

Wallace is charged with six counts of government benefits fraud in what Murrill described as a Medicaid fraud scheme in which the mayor is accused of illegally securing $75,000 in benefits from 2021 through 2026.

Wallace declined to comment when reached by USA Today Network by phone April 22, but an April 21 post on her Facebook page said, “They just energized Team Wallace…”

“It’s election time; what else you got! I’m still standing!!” the post said.

Per the Louisiana Attorney General’s office:

LBI found that Wallace fraudulently received Medicaid benefits for herself and a dependent between 2021 and 2026. Wallace did not report to LDH a change in household income, failed to disclose her marital status, and intentionally misrepresented the availability of health insurance provided through her employers.

Agents found that Wallace failed to notify LDH that she was employed from 2021 through 2022, where she received a salary and was offered health coverage insurance. From 2022 through 2026, Wallace was employed by the Town of Winnsboro, Louisiana, as the elected Mayor, and did not report to LDH that employment, income, or availability of medical health coverage as required.

LBI’s investigation revealed that Wallace and her dependent continuously utilized Medicaid program benefits from 2021 through 2026, while she received a salary that would have made her ineligible to receive benefits from the State of Louisiana and the LDH programs. The LDH Medicaid Fraud Division found that Wallace fraudulently received benefits for a combined loss of claims of approximately $75,000.00.

LBI obtained an arrest warrant for Alice Wallace through the 19th Judicial District Court of Louisiana, in that she intentionally committed:

6 Counts – LA.R.S. 14:70.9 – Government Benefits Fraud

Wallace was arrested for knowingly concealing and failing to disclose material facts affecting her and her dependents’ continued eligibility to receive benefits from the Louisiana Department of Health Medicaid program. Those six counts pertain to the years of 2021 through 2026, in which Wallace was known to be employed, received an income, failed to disclose that income as required, and continued to receive benefits.

“Our Louisiana Bureau of Investigation has arrested Winnsboro Mayor Alice Wallace for 6 counts of Medicaid fraud in a $75,000 benefits scheme,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said.

“It doesn’t matter who you are—if you defraud the hardworking taxpayers of Louisiana, you’re going to jail,” she said.

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4 men arrested after podcast helps solve decades-old murder of teen girl

Louisiana detectives are crediting a local podcast with helping to solve the decades-old rape and murder of a teenage girl. 

Over the past few days, police charged four men with aggravated rape and second-degree murder for killing Roxanne Sharp, 44 years after her body was found in the woods. 

Who killed Roxanne Sharp? 

The backstory:

Sharp was 16 years old in 1982 when she was raped and murdered in the woods in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, about 30 miles north of New Orleans. 

Eventually, the case went cold, remaining unsolved for decades until investigators asked a local media company to produce a podcast about Sharp’s murder. “Who Killed Roxanne Sharp?” went live last year with six episodes. 

What followed were crucial tips from the public and new witnesses contacting investigators. 

What they’re saying:

“It helped our investigators piece together where Roxanne was days before to the time she died, to where we’re at now,” Louisiana State Police spokesperson Marc Gremillion told The Associated Press. “It was a very large help with getting that message out to the public, and then, therefore, those witnesses getting back to us.”

Perry Wayne Taylor, 64; Darrell Dean Spell, 64; Carlos Cooper, 64; and Billy Williams, Jr., 62, have all been charged in connection with Sharp’s death. 

Cooper and Taylor were already in prison on unrelated charges, and Williams and Spell were arrested earlier this week. Police said Sharp knew the four suspects and frequented the neighborhood where they lived. 

Northshore Media Vice President Charles Dowdy, who helped produce the podcast, said his team didn’t think there’d be much interest in the case, but “we were quickly corrected.”

“Cold cases don’t close themselves,” Covington Police Department Chief Michael Ferrell said in a statement. “They close because people show up, year after year, and refuse to quit. That is exactly what our agencies did, and today, Roxanne and her family finally have the justice they have waited so long for.”

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Louisiana advances bill to funnel homeless people into forced treatment and unpaid labor

Yesterday, the Louisiana House of Representatives took the dangerous step of voting in favor of a truly disgusting anti-homeless bill. This bill is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation peddled by the Palantir-funded, billionaire-backed Cicero Institute. In addition to making it a crime to sleep outside, this bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment. 

But it gets worse.  

This bill requires homeless people to pay for the very treatment they are forced into. And if the person cannot pay the cost of treatment, this bill requires them to perform unpaid labor for the government or a community organization to pay off their debt. Louisiana has a long history – and present – of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow.   

We can all agree that the creation of a two-tiered justice system, where people are punished differently for the same crime depending simply on whether or not they are homeless, is just too extreme.  

Louisiana Governor Landry cites Donald Trump’s anti-homeless policies to justify his support of this heinous bill.  But this is not just about Louisiana – it reveals just how far many states might be willing to go to align themselves with Trump’s extreme, anti-homeless agenda. Politicians from Donald Trump on down would rather blame homeless people than use their power to address the sky-high rents that are the leading cause of homelessness.  

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He Compared a Black Child to a Dog and Withheld Evidence in Death Row Cases. Now He’s Running for Judge.

Hugo Holland’s aggressive legal tactics made him one of Louisiana’s most renowned prosecutors and helped turn Caddo Parish, a majority Black community in the northwest corner of the state, into one of the nation’s leaders in death penalty convictions.

His nearly 40-year career, though, has been marked by controversies.

In at least two death penalty cases, Louisiana judges found that Holland withheld evidence. In a third, he secured the conviction of a Black 16-year-old, comparing the boy to a dog and telling the jury to “get rid of it”; prosecutors later admitted that Holland and his team had failed to turn over evidence.

Defense attorneys have also accused him of racism, pointing, for example, to a capital murder case several years ago in which Holland emailed one of them to say he was going to spend Veterans Day in his pickup truck looking for “a Black guy or a Mex-can.” Holland called it a joke.

Holland, 62, is now running for judge in the First Judicial District Court in Caddo Parish, and his nascent campaign appears to have substantial backing. He has raised more than $61,000 in less than two months, according to the first campaign finance report released in February — twice the amount many candidates running for the 1st Judicial Court spend in an entire campaign, said Jeffrey Sadow, an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University in Shreveport.

Holland’s donors include an assistant district attorney with the Caddo Parish DA’s office, the district attorney of neighboring Bossier and Webster parishes, a former state judge, and members of major law firms throughout the area.

Holland’s funding haul might prove to be so daunting that it scares off potential challengers, Sadow said, though candidates have until the end of July to enter the race. “It shows he’s got an awful lot of support and that he’s considered a quality candidate,” he said.

In addition to his robust campaign fundraising, Holland has been able to bring on the head of the local Republican Party, Matthew Kay, as his campaign chair. (Kay also served as an elector for Donald Trump in 2024.)

Holland declined multiple requests for comment about his candidacy and record as a prosecutor. Neither Kay nor nine of the 10 donors Verite News and ProPublica reached out to would respond or agree to speak about their support for Holland.

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‘Refuses to enforce its own precedents’: Sotomayor torches SCOTUS for inaction on ‘significant’ buried evidence in slaying of teen pizza delivery driver

Justice Sonia Sotomayor registered a sharp dissent Monday as the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the case of a man sentenced to life in the 1998 slaying of a teenage pizza delivery driver in Louisiana, accusing her colleagues of refusing to “enforce its own precedents.”

Joined only by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor argued that it made little sense for the Supreme Court to effectively free James Skinner’s co-defendant from death row with a decision a decade earlier but to leave Skinner in prison for the rest of his days without parole, when both men were incarcerated for the murder of 16-year-old Eric Walber based on “similar sets of evidence, which centered on the same two eyewitness accounts.”

“Equal justice under law, the phrase engraved on the front of this Court’s building, requires that two codefendants, convicted of the same crime, who raised essentially the same constitutional claims, receive the same answer from the courts,” Sotomayor said. “Here, because the Louisiana courts refused to apply this Court’s Brady precedents, including a decision by this Court involving the very same evidence, Skinner risks spending the rest of his life in prison while [Michael] Wearry walks free,” Sotomayor said. “Because the Court refuses to enforce its own precedents, I respectfully dissent from the denial of certiorari.”

Under Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors must hand over “Brady material,” evidence that is exculpatory or tends to be favorable to the defense. The “withholding of evidence that is material to the determination of either guilt or punishment of a criminal defendant violates the defendant’s constitutional right to due process,” the Supreme Court held in 1963.

The evidence of Brady violations in the case of Michael Wearry was egregious to the point that the Supreme Court ruled his conviction and death sentence had to be set aside in 2016, and a new trial was “required.” Of particular concern was what the state hid from the defense about its star witness, a “jailhouse snitch” named Sam Scott who two years after the slaying claimed a lesser level of responsibility in Walber’s death while pointing to Wearry, Skinner, and three others.

That story not only changed, but was also wrong about basic facts. For instance, the witness claimed Walber was shot to death — but the evidence showed that on that April 1998 day, the Albany High School football player was filling in for someone who didn’t show up for work at Pizza Express and was beaten and run over by his own car, local CBS affiliate WAFB reported. Skinner was allegedly behind the wheel.

Further explaining why the Supreme Court found Scott’s account “dubious,” one of his versions of the crime said Randy Hutchinson — who had “undergone knee surgery to repair a ruptured patellar tendon” nine days earlier — ran after the pizza delivery driver.

Worse yet, Scott had made statements behind bars that he wanted to “‘make sure [Wearry] gets the needle cause he jacked over me,'” an inmate reported. Neither the defense nor the jury were aware of this evidence.

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Sophisticated drones attacked Louisiana’s Barksdale bomber base

Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, in Bossier Parish not far from Shreveport, was attacked by drone swarms during the week of March 9. The attack disrupted B-52H aircraft launches in support of Operation Epic Fury against Iran. It is the first time a US airbase was temporarily put out of operation in wartime, something that never happened even in World War II.

Each wave forced the Air Force to halt operations and send its personnel to shelters. Barksdale is the command hub of the US Air Force Global Strike Command. Not only are B-52s based there, but the base is part of America’s nuclear triad. It shelters long range nuclear cruise missiles (such as the AGM-86B) and will soon house a new Long Range Standoff cruise missile. Shelters and storage sites for the new missiles are under construction.

The only other significant US airbase for B-52s is in Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Both bases are supporting Epic Fury. The aircraft can either fly to the UK and then on to Iran, or (as they did during the period when the UK blocked them) fly directly from Barksdale to Iran, a very long mission requiring eight in-air refuelings.

The drone waves lasted around four hours each day, an extraordinarily long loiter time for a drone. It is not known if the drones were fixed wing or quadcopter types, or how they were powered (liquid fuel or electrical). Each wave consisted of 12 to 15 drones, and the drones flew with their lights on, intentionally making them visible.

Barksdale AFB does not have air defenses, nor does it have fighter jets that can take down drones.

The airbase does have some electronic countermeasures that were designed to disable GPS and the datalinks between the drones and their remote operators. The electronic countermeasures failed to work.

The drones themselves may have been autonomous or semi-autonomous, and operated in ways suggesting the drones were equipped with multiple sensors that directed the behavior of each drone over the base and in response to attempts at jamming.

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‘Multiple waves’ of unauthorized drones recently spotted over strategic US Air Force base

A drone sighting that temporarily raised alarms at one of the United States Air Force’s largest and most strategic airfields earlier this month was more extensive, and potentially more dangerous, than first reported, according to a confidential internal briefing document reviewed by ABC News.

Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana said it was under a shelter-in-place order March 9 after “a report of an unmanned aerial system operating over the installation.”

The sighting raised concerns because Barksdale houses long-range B-52 bombers and plays a critical role in command and control of the Air Force nuclear defense capabilities.

The shelter-in-place order was lifted later that day but the unauthorized drone flights continued for nearly a week.

“Barksdale Air Force Base detected multiple unauthorized drones operating in our airspace during the week of March 9th,” Capt. Hunter Rininger of the 2nd Bomb Wing said in a statement provided to ABC News. The additional drone incursions had not been previously reported.

According to the confidential briefing document dated March 15, the drones came in waves and entered and exited the base in a way that may suggest attempts to “avoid the operator(s) being located.” Lights on the drones suggested the operators “may be testing security responses” at the base.

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New Orleans ‘Anti-Police’ Defense Attorney Indicted for Wire Fraud

An ‘anti-police’ New Orleans defense attorney was indicted for wire fraud on Friday.

Tanzanika Ruffin allegedly stole $250,000 from a client and used the money to fund a lavish lifestyle.

This is not the first time that Ruffin has been accused of criminal conduct.

She was fired from as an assistant district attorney in 2004 for extortion allegations.

“Ruffin was fired from the DA’s office more than 20 years ago for extortion allegations. The DA’s office later dismissed the allegations, and the Bar suspended her license for a short period,” WDSU reported.

Per the Justice Department:

On Friday, March 13, 2026, a Federal Grand Jury indicted TANZANIKA RUFFIN (“RUFFIN”), age 48, for wire fraud, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1343, announced U.S. Attorney David I. Courcelle.

According to the indictment, RUFFIN defrauded approximately $250,000 from her clients’ family. RUFFIN made numerous misrepresentations to the family regarding the $250,000.

RUFFIN falsely told her client and his family that they had to compensate a New Orleans Police Department (“NOPD”) officer for various fictitious injuries and harms that the officer had allegedly suffered.

RUFFIN also falsely represented that she had confected a “Mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement” (“NDA”) with the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office and the NOPD officer.

According to RUFFIN, this fabricated NDA required her client’s family to keep confidential any discussions about a financial settlement.

In truth and in fact, no such NDA existed. Instead, RUFFIN spent all the money on personal and unauthorized expenditures and did not give any funds to the NOPD officer.

If convicted, RUFFIN faces a maximum penalty of twenty (20) years of imprisonment, up to three (3) years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000, and payment of a mandatory $100 special assessment fee.

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