LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau

Published: Feb. 4, 2022

By: Liz Ryan, Lara Nicholson, Rachel Mipro, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. (LSU Manship School News Service) — Aditya Shah was a junior at Hightstown High School in New Jersey in 2015 when he and his AP Government and Politics classmates began studying cold cases involving Ku Klux Klan murders in the South.

Out of curiosity, the students filed a public records request with the help of their teacher, Stuart Wexler, to learn more about some of these cases.

After about a year of waiting, Shah and his classmates had received only a few documents – and those were heavily redacted of vital information despite the cases being so old.

“We realized that this process is inefficient, and it takes too long and that something has to be done to change it,” Shah said in an interview.

From there, the students embarked on drafting a bill and a longshot effort to persuade lawmakers to turn it into law. Congress followed through in 2018, creating the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act, and now the law is finally about to be implemented.

A U.S. Senate committee approved four nominees last week to serve on a national board tasked with reviewing and eventually releasing to the public hundreds of thousands of pages of FBI documents on murder cases from the civil-rights era.

Once the full Senate approves them, the nominees, all university professors, will be able to get to work reviewing FBI files. Congress has appropriated $4 million for the effort, and it raises the possibility of fulfilling the hopes of historians, journalists, and victims’ family members still searching for answers to unsolved homicides.

In Louisiana alone, 15 victims from that era have been included among cases that the FBI has reviewed, and the board members could help prompt the release of more of those records.

Read more at KLFY

Published: Feb. 4, 2022

By: Lura Stabiler, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — A Republican Senate leader and a Democratic senator on Thursday debated the importance of adding a second majority-minority congressional district, giving different interpretations of the federal Voting Rights Act to justify their positions. 

The back-and-forth came on the third day of the special redistricting session in which senators present their redistricting maps for the state’s six congressional districts. 

Sen. Sharon Hewitt, R-Slidell and the chairwoman of the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, presented a map, as did Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, who was accompanied by NAACP Legal Defense Fund representatives Jared Evans and Michael Pernick. 

It was clear even before the start of the session that Black legislators wanted to make it likely for Black residents to elect two congressmen, while Republicans wanted to preserve the five seats that they hold.

Political considerations will play a major role in the process, but the two sides focused Thursday on how they were each grouping voters to achieve their goals. The committee may vote on the plans Friday.

On three different occasions during the hearing, Hewitt emphasized her interpretation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in disputing the idea that there should be two districts with Black voters in the majority since Blacks make up about a third of the state’s population in the 2020 Census.

Read more at Town Talk

Published: Feb. 3, 2022

By: Liz Ryan, LSU Manship School News Service

The U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday approved four nominees to serve on a national board tasked with reviewing and eventually releasing to the public hundreds of thousands of pages of FBI documents on murder cases from the civil rights-era.

Most cases involve Ku Klux Klan murders of African Americans that occurred in Louisiana or other Southern states.

A fifth nominee for the Civil Rights Records Review Board has yet to be named.

The four nominees approved Wednesday are university professors. One, Hank Klibanoff, is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist now teaching at Emory University. The other three are Margaret A. Burnham of Northeastern University, Gabrielle M. Dudley of Emory University, and Brenda E. Stevenson of UCLA.

The possibility of gaining access to unredacted documents about these cases has long been a hope of journalists, historians and family members still searching for answers to unsolved homicides.

According to the FBI and the Department of Justice, 15 Louisiana residents were murdered in these types of cases between 1954 and 1973.

Read more at the Daily Advertiser

Published: Feb. 3, 2022

By: Allison Kadlubar, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Black residents and civil rights groups on Wednesday objected strongly to a Republican proposal to redraw the districts for the state Senate, pushing for at least two more districts that would likely elect Black senators.

The concerns arose as Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, pitched his proposal to the Senate and Governmental Affairs Committee, explaining that it was based on technical strategies to ensure that all districts match representation based on population. 

But more than 80 people filled out cards signaling their opposition to Cortez’s proposed outline, and 20 of them voiced their concerns to the committee. 

Some supported an alternative proposal by Sen. Ed Price, D-Gonzales, who would redraw the maps to include two more districts than Cortez’s plan — one in Shreveport and one near Baton Rouge — that would include a majority of Black voters. 

The 2020 Census showed an increase in minority population in Louisiana and a small decrease in white population. 

But Cortez’s proposal, Senate Bill 1, would leave the number of likely minority seats at 11 of the 39 in the Senate. Price’s proposal would increase that number to 13 to align it with Census data showing that almost one-third of the state’s population is Black.

Read more at the News Star

Published: Feb. 2, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Battle lines were being drawn between Democrats and Republicans in the Louisiana Legislature Tuesday as the two sides proposed new congressional maps as a special redistricting session got underway.

Democrats are pushing for a second of the six congressional districts that would be likely to elect a Black representative.

Map proposals filed by State Sen. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge, would redraw congressional District 5 to be majority Black. The district is currently represented by Republican Rep. Julia Letlow.

The new district would run down from the northeast corner of the state, hugging the Mississippi border and going as far south as East Baton Rouge Parish.

On the other side of the trenches, Republicans are proposing to make minor changes to current congressional maps, preserving the current balance of power in the congressional delegation.

Read more at the Daily Advertiser

Published: Jan. 29, 2022

By: Lura Stabiler and Braxton Brown, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE, La. – As the Legislature gets ready to start a special session Tuesday on redistricting, one major focus is whether two of the state’s six congressional districts should be redrawn to give minority residents a better chance to elect two Black congressmen instead of one.

Black leaders and civil rights groups say that is only fair since African Americans make up nearly one-third of the state’s population and the 2020 Census shows that northern Louisiana, which has two white representatives in Congress, has lost population.

But Republicans want to hold onto the five congressional seats they have. And the politics will get even more complicated–and potentially tense–when it comes to redrawing the 105 Louisiana House districts and the 39 districts that send state senators to Baton Rouge.

The Census data shows that the suburban areas around New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette are among the fast-growing areas in the state, and their voters are mostly white and Republican. And most of the state legislative seats now held by Black politicians are in districts that lost some population and will have to be redrawn.

Lawmakers say the population shifts lay a foundation for debate, but political considerations play a huge role as state lawmakers battle each other to maintain their electoral advantages and the parties fight over a congressional seat that could help tilt the balance of power in Washington.

Adding even more intrigue is that Louisiana is the only Deep South state with a Democratic governor who could potentially veto the maps that the Republican-dominated Legislature draws.

As for how all of these considerations will affect how the district lines are redrawn, there is no way to know for sure what will emerge from the three-week special session.

“You have a lot of possibilities,” said demographer Greg Rigamer, a political consultant in New Orleans. “You can configure them in all sorts of ways to meet the minimum requirements,” he said.

Read more at KTBS

Published: Jan. 25, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE—With the state flush with cash, Gov. John Bel Edwards unveiled a proposed budget Monday that includes more than $1.1 billion in infrastructure spending and investments in education at all levels.

“I think we have once in a generation, and maybe once in a lifetime opportunity in some respects, to move our state forward,” Edwards said.

He outlined his budget priorities at a news conference at the Capitol. The budget is for the fiscal year that begins July 1, and the state has lots of money to spend following federal pandemic relief and higher-than-expected state tax revenues. 

Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne will present the plan on Tuesday to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget. The Legislature will decide by June what the final bill looks like. 

Read more at Biz Magazine

Published: Jan. 12, 2022

By: Piper Hutchinson, LSU Manship School News Service

BATON ROUGE — Louisiana will have an additional $1.6 billion to spend over the next year and a half after a state panel approved new revenue projections Tuesday. 

The state expects to collect $1.2 billion more in general fund revenue than projected in the current budget cycle, which ends June 30, and $770 million more in the next cycle, which starts July 1. 

This revenue is mostly due to personal income taxes and sales taxes, which have been higher than anticipated. 

Not all of the extra money will be available to be spent at the Legislature’s discretion. About $275 million will be set aside for dedicated funds, and $400 million will be used to pay down the federal loan the state received to rebuild the levee system after Hurricane Katrina. 

Read more at Biz Magazine

Published: Jan. 3, 2022

By: Lara Nicholson, Zane Piontek, Brea Rougeau and Jada Hemsley (LSU Manship School News Service)

Chlanda Gibson was in her bed last April when she heard loud pops outside her window.

She had fallen asleep while waiting for her son, 17-year-old Roddrick Cook, to come home after going out with friends. When she went to check on the noise, his friends knocked on the back door for help — one with a gunshot wound in his leg.

Cook was nowhere to be found, and as police investigated, Gibson sat in the back of a police cruiser, where she spent five dark hours wondering what had happened to him. Then she was given the devastating news: Her son, the 6-foot 4-inch, 250-pound high school football player who dreamed of going to the NFL, had been killed that night.

Gibson’s son still sits on the long list of Baton Rouge murders that remain unsolved. That list includes more than half of the city’s 121homicides in 2021 as murder rates continue to soar nationwide.

The national surge in homicide rates stems from a variety of political and socioeconomic factors, trends to which Louisiana has proven far from immune. The Baton Rouge area, Shreveport, Alexandria and Lafayette all had record numbers of homicides in 2021, and New Orleans had 218 murders, the most since before its population fell with Hurricane Katrina.

As the killings stack up, clearance rates — the percentage of cases closed — has shriveled in some cities, and even cities that are solving most of their murders are struggling through staffing shortages to keep up.

The number of murders increased by 30% nationally in 2020, and the national average for homicide clearance rates dropped nearly 10 percentage points, to 51.3%. The Murder Accountability Project, which analyzes FBI homicide data collected from local agencies nationwide, said that was the worst single-year drop and the lowest murder clearance rate on record.

In Louisiana, the average clearance rate saw a drop of 9.7 percentage points in 2020, to 50.6%, according to data compiled by the accountability project, and some police departments experienced lower numbers.

Read more at WWNO

Published: Dec. 27, 2021

By: Alaina A. Alfred, Alejandro Burgos and Taylar R. Green, LSU Manship School News Service

Living in an LSU dorm, Jack Tomeny is used to leaving his car unattended in a campus lot for a few days at a time. One day Tomeny noticed that someone had stolen his backpack from the backseat along with the loose change he had in the car.

Tomeny fell victim to a recurring theme that is making students uneasy not only on campus but at popular student apartment complexes near the LSU campus.

The number of car break-ins reported on campus jumped to 22 during this fall semester alone after falling to just two while students were studying remotely in 2020 and averaging 10 a year in the three years before that.

Baton Rouge Police Department records show that the off-campus apartment areas that many students move to after their freshman years have been averaging 30 to 35 vehicle burglaries a month. And relatively high rates for vehicle and apartment break-ins — and armed robberies — in Baton Rouge as a whole add to the apprehension. 

Some students, like Tomeny, acknowledge being a bit naïve in not taking enough precautions. He left a passenger door unlocked even though the lot was not well lit.

Still, he said, “I was honestly a little surprised that there’s people brave enough to go and check random people’s cars.”

Tomeny did not bother to report the break-in to LSU police, saying that he did not see what they could do at that point and that he decided to “kind of just cut my losses.”

LSU sophomore Laisha Mendez found that someone had broken her car’s passenger seat window in September while she was inside a bar in Tigerland, a popular hangout spot for students. The glove compartment was open, and old checks were found scattered over the seat.

Mendez spoke to the Baton Rouge Police Department about the incident and learned that the police had apprehended two men suspected of committing that crime and 17 other car-related incidents.

Read more at the News Star