LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau

Published: March 24, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship News Service

The House Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice advanced a bill Thursday that would allow parents who are convicted of killing their minor children to receive the death penalty.

House Bill 68, authored by Rep. Barbara Carpenter, D-Baton Rouge, would add minor children of the offender to the list of victims of the crime of first-degree murder.

In her opening remarks, Carpenter brought up recent cases of Louisiana parents who had killed their children and told the committee that members of her community had asked her to address the issue.

“Parents of babies have literally killed these babies, and something needs to be said or done,” Carpenter said. “Right here in Baton Rouge, the death of a 2-year-old kid. The mom got upset because the child was playing with her eyeglasses, and she hit the baby, and the baby died. The boyfriend and the mama put the baby in a suitcase, drove it to Mississippi and buried it.”

Current law includes all minors under the age of 12 on the list of victims for whom killers can receive the death penalty.

Read more at Louisiana Illuminator

Published: March 22, 2022

By: Josh Archote, LSU Manship School News Service

Third in a three-part series

Leland and Sonny Boyd say some relatives and old friends wonder why they are speaking publicly about their father’s involvement in the Ku Klux Klan in 1960s Louisiana.

But to them, talking about growing up in an abusive and violently segregated atmosphere is necessary in today’s social landscape.

“If you don’t study your history, if you don’t learn your history, then you’re doomed to relive it,” Sonny, 74, said. “There are now two generations of people who didn’t have to live through that. And so they don’t really have an understanding of it, and how some people hold the old views the way they do and how some people came out of it seemingly unscathed. We didn’t come out unscathed. We bear the scars of what happened.” 

Leland, 70, said their father, Earcel Boyd, “was a pretty good man to start off with. But something changed over the years.”

“I don’t have to be what my daddy was.” Leland said. “We chose not to choose that path. And that’s an option. It’s a choice you make. Every person has to make that choice. We, as individuals, have to make that choice.”

The brothers recall how their father lived a life of paradoxes. He had Black friends around Ferriday, Louisiana, where the family lived in the 1960s, and once taught his children to treat everyone with respect, no matter their skin color. An ordained Baptist minister, Earcel preached in Black churches, too.

But he also joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1962 and later became a member of a secretive and violent Klan offshoot called the Silver Dollar Group.

Earcel was never charged with a crime, and many of the racially motivated bombings and murders in and around Ferriday remain unsolved. But FBI files indicate members of the Silver Dollar Group were the main suspects.

Read more at Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting

Published: March 17, 2022

By: Josh Archote, LSU Manship School News Service

This is the second in a three-part series.

When Leland Boyd woke up in the middle of the night as a child, he’d sometimes find his father Earcel in the bathroom, scrubbing his hands over and over.

“The next day you’d see him, his hands would be just red,” Leland said. “He would take a bar of soap and just scrub his arms for hours under hot water. He would be in the bathroom at least three times a month early in the morning for hours.”

Earcel’s sons believed this compulsion was a result of nightmarish experiences during World War II, when Earcel participated in landing assaults on the Japanese in Guam.

During one raid, another son Sonny said, Earcel spotted a Japanese guard whose position put U.S. troop movements at risk. That night, Earcel silently crawled up a ditch, grabbed the guard from the back and slit his throat with a knife. He then had to lie in the ditch overnight with the guard’s blood encrusting his hands and arms. 

“He never felt that he could get his hands washed clean,” Sonny said. 

That happened when Earcel was 21, and later in the war, he shot an American soldier who attempted to reboard a landing craft after debarking on an assault. Earcel was trained to allow no one to reboard unless wounded or dead and shot the soldier, who recovered, Sonny said. 

The Boyd brothers believe that their father’s rage and irrationality — which caused great emotional and physical distress for their family — was partly related to his experiences in World War II, especially the killing of the guard. 

His propensity for violence also was apparent in his decision to join the Ku Klux Klan in 1962 when he was living in Concordia Parish, just across the Mississippi River from Natchez. And in the mid-1960s, he was one of the 20 or so members of the Silver Dollar Group, a violent Klan offshoot thought to be involved in several murders.

Read more at Daily World

Published: March 16, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–The mother of Ronald Greene gave tearful testimony Tuesday to a House committee investigating the circumstances of his death, calling her son’s killing and the handling of the state police investigation a “black eye for the state of Louisiana.”

Mona Hardin broke down sobbing at the witness table as she called out the state police for the death of her son, who died after being tased and beaten while in custody.

“There was a reason why my son was killed: Because state troopers are judge, jury, and executioner,” Hardin said.

Hardin echoed lawmakers in criticizing Col. Kevin Reeves, the retired superintendent who oversaw the state police at the time of Greene’s death, for giving insufficient answers to the committee.

Read more at St. Mary Now

Published: March 14, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Just over two years after the first COVID death in Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards announced Monday that the public health emergency will expire on Wednesday, crediting the availability of vaccines, antivirals and quality masks.

“Just because the proclamation is expiring doesn’t mean COVID is over,’’ he said. “If the circumstances call for it, I will not hesitate to declare another emergency.”

“But, God willing, we will never have to see such difficult mitigation measures in our state again,” he added.

In his annual state-of-the-state address to the Legislature, Edwards said Louisiana also is in a better fiscal situation, and he laid out his proposals to spend several billions of dollars of federal aid money and surplus state tax revenues.

“At my first state of the state, I had just inherited a billion-dollar budget deficit to close out that fiscal year and a $2 billion deficit for the year that started July 1, 2016,” Edwards said. “Today, as I stand here before you, we have hundreds of millions in surplus, even more in current year excess, and billions in federal funding.”

Read more at The Daily Star

Published: March 10, 2022

By: Claire Sullivan, LSU Manship School News Service

The Louisiana governor’s Climate Initiatives Task Force met Wednesday for the first time since unanimously passing a climate action plan in January, the first of its kind in the Gulf South.

Fifty public meetings into its 16-month existence, the task force is shifting gears from planning to executing its 84-step action plan. A bipartisan infrastructure act signed into law by President Joe Biden provides a unique opportunity to fund these efforts.

Louisiana is set to qualify for billions of dollars for road repairs, extreme weather preparedness, public transportation, broadband expansion and more. Another $179 billion in competitive federal funds is up for grabs to fund infrastructure projects, with special consideration for climate-focused efforts.

While task force members were optimistic about the prospect of federal funding, they also reckoned with the political uncertainty.

“I really want to encourage folks to pay attention to what’s already being rolled out” in the Louisiana Legislature, Flozell Daniels, president of the Foundation for Louisiana, said, referring to proposals to shield the state’s oil and gas industry from the changes.

“Much of it is designed to undermine the considerable work that’s been put into this plan, and we should acknowledge that,” Daniels said.

Read more at Louisiana Illuminator

Published: March 10, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE–Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday vetoed maps that did little to change the boundaries of Louisiana’s congressional districts, citing the failure to add a second majority Black district. 

“I have vetoed the proposed congressional map drawn by Louisiana’s Legislature because it does not include a second majority African American district, despite Black voters making up almost a third of Louisianans per the latest U.S. Census data,” Edwards said. 

“This map is simply not fair to the people of Louisiana and does not meet the standards set forth in the federal Voting Rights Act,” he added.

Louisiana has six congressional districts, but they are drawn in such a way that a Black candidate could win in only one of them.

Read more at The Franklin Sun

Published: March 9, 2022

By: Josh Archote, LSU Manship School News Service

— This is the first in a three-part series.

Although 57 years have passed, Leland Boyd still can’t forget the smell of burnt human flesh. 

In December 1964, Leland, then 12, stood in the doorway of a hospital room, where Frank Morris, a 51-year-old Black man from Ferriday, Louisiana, lay in critical condition after two men had torched his shoe shop. 

Morris was a friend of the Boyd family. Leland and his father, Earcel Boyd Sr., spent many afternoons after school in Morris’ shop. He repaired Leland and his siblings’ shoes and even ate dinner at the white family’s home on occasion, and the friendship had continued after Earcel joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1962. 

“Frank, who did this?” Leland, now 70, recalls his father repeatedly asking Morris while he lay in the hospital bed.

“I thought they were my friends,” Morris kept responding.

Morris died from his burns four days later in what the FBI viewed as a racially motivated arson-murder.  Before his death, friends, family members and FBI agents would desperately probe Morris to identify his attackers, but he said he did not know them.

Leland is still haunted by that scene in the hospital room.

“Human flesh smells different when it’s burned than beef, or pork or chicken,” he said. “It’s got an odor that you won’t ever forget. That’s all I could smell. It’s one of those experiences I wish I could get out of my mind.”

Read more at houmatoday

Published: Feb. 18, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson and Alex Tirado, LSU Manship School News Service

On the final day of the redistricting session, the Louisiana House and Senate passed bills Friday that turned back efforts to expand minority representation and preserved the current balance of power in the state’s congressional delegation and the Legislature itself. 

After extensive negotiations, both chambers advanced amended congressional maps, sending two identical bills to Gov. John Bel Edwards’ desk. Black lawmakers immediately called on Edwards to veto at least the congressional map.

HB1, authored by House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales, and SB5, authored by Sen. Sharon Hewitt, R-Slidell, came out of closed-door negotiations with a compromise: south of Alexandria, the map is faithful to Schexnayder’s proposal, north of Alexandria, the map is faithful to Hewitt’s proposal. 

The Senate passed the amended version of HB1 along party lines with a 27-10 vote. 

Across the hall, the House passed the amended SB5 by a vote of 64-31, with three Republicans joining Democrats to vote against the bill and one Democrat voting in favor of passage. 

Notably, Rep. Travis Johnson, D-Vidalia, voted against the bill. Johnson, a conservative Black Democrat, had been in the hot seat with his party after voting in favor of Schexnayder’s similar congressional bill earlier in the week. 

Rep. Francis Thompson, D-Delhi, was the lone Democrat to vote in favor of the bill. 

Both chambers advanced maps for the Public Service Commission, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and Louisiana House and Senate with relatively little fuss. None of the bills that passed increased minority representation at any level. 

Read more at Bossier Press-Tribune

Published: Feb. 17, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, Lura Stabiler and Alex Tirado, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — The only Republican bill that would have increased minority representation through redistricting died on the House floor Wednesday, prompting its author to give his fellow lawmakers a tongue-lashing.

Rep. Barry Ivey, R-Central, authored HB22, a Supreme Court map that would have created a second majority Black district on the state’s seven-member court. The bill made it out of committee on a bipartisan vote but was involuntarily tabled on the House floor, much to the chagrin of its author.

“We’ll just continue to get by here in Louisiana, because we are too stupid to work together,” Ivey said in a no-holds-barred condemnation.

Rep. Mark Wright, R-Covington, moved to table the bill after asking whether it would be better to consider Supreme Court maps during the regular session in March.

Every House Democrat present voted in opposition to tabling the bill, but the motion passed 53-43, with a handful of Republicans, including Rep. Tanner Magee, R-Houma and the second ranking legislator in the House, and Rep. John Stefanski, R-Crowley, chair of the House committee that oversees redistricting voting, against the motion.

Over the last two weeks, Republicans, who hold roughly two-thirds of the seats in the Legislature, have advanced bills to redraw the maps of the state’s six congressional districts, its 105 House districts and its 39 Senate districts without adding any more majority-minority ones.

They have passed bills that maintain the status quo in the racial breakdowns for members of the Public Service Commission and the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and they advanced a Supreme Court bill that would leave the current district boundaries largely intact.

Read more at the News Star