Tag Archives: Louisiana

Juvenile Life-Without-Parole Conviction So Egregious It Has Not Been Overturned

25 Oct

Back in 2012, Miller v. Alabama outlawed mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. Then, in 2016, Montgomery v. Louisiana found that this rule had to be retroactively applied to past cases. This invited relitigating of past life-without-parole cases. Over 1,200 applicants of the near 3,000 appeals have successfully reversed life sentences and have been released from prison. The new minimum sentences are capped at between 25-40 years. Only around 4.1% of appears have resulted in a judge reissuing the life-sentence under the “irreparably corrupt” offender standard. This latter category includes Jason Michael Pilcher, who has been denied a reversal and has failed a new appeal on September 23, 2026 in State v. Pilcher at the Court of Appeal of Louisiana, Third Circuit.

In 1993, Pilcher was 15 when he and a companion runaway stole a car, and burglarized guns before driving this stolen car into a ditch, and breaking into the rural home of Mrs. Phyllis Albritton, who let them in to use her phone, and gave them ice water. While partaking of this hospitality, Pilcher pulled out his stolen .38 caliber revolver and her killed her instantly by shooting her in the head. Pilcher also shot to death her 11-year-old son Jusin and tried to shoot her 13-year-old daughter. In 1994, Pilcher was convicted in an 11-to-1 non-unanimous jury vote to mandatory lime imprisonment without parole for two counts of second-degree murder.

Pilcher failed to convince the court at a 2025 resentencing hearing to lower his sentence because his 30-year prison record proved he remained “irreparably corrupt” and thus a continuing danger to society. Expert testimony from Dr. Simoneaux had explained that the prison record indicated Pilcher had no taken classes (that might have helped by providing proof of his attempts at rehabilitation) in prison since 2016. Back in 2017, Dr. Simoneaux had concluded Pilcher still had a “clinically elevated profile”, meaning he was unusually “resentful, angry, and distrustful” for an adult. Anger and paranoia are a combination for violence.

Pilcher’s appeal had focused on accusing his family of providing a difficult childhood. For example, Pilcher’s mother, Janet Harmon, testified that she drank during the pregnancy, though she could not recall if it had been “whiskey” or “Crown Royal”. Pilcher was diagnosed with ADHD in elementary school and was prescribed Ritalin. Before this, his father had begun disciplining Pilcher by spanking him with his “hand on the butt”. There were several other problems, and during his first trail, neurologist Dr. Pinkus concluded he had a “congenital malformations of the brain and right temporal lobe with learning disorder, poor coordination, and lack of impulse control.”

While this is a sympathetic list of problems Pilcher has had to overcome, the fact that he remains a danger to society is proven by the over a hundred disciplinary conduct infractions Dr. Simoneaux reported Pilcher had been cited for while he has been in prison: he is still displaying signs of a dangerous antisocial personality disorder. If Pilcher had been released despite these continuing violent incidents, he would probably have been back in prison by now on new violent charges. This case seems to prove judges have been able to discern which of the life-without-parole appeals have been filed by those who had not developed psychological resilience or rationality since their juvenile actions. Yes, it is at times unfair to continue to penalize an adult for the actions of their undeveloped youth, but not when they keep committing similar actions now that they are an adult.

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There was a similar recent appeal in Louisiana in State v. Craig that initially ruled that Dale Dwayne Craig was eligible for parole before the latest September 10, 2026 ruling reversed this decision, reinstating his original parole ineligibility. In 1992, Craig and three accomplices kidnapped out of a Louisiana State University parking lot a freshman Kipp Gullett, torturing and then murdering him. Craig was initially sentenced to death in 1994, then this was commuted to life in 2005, and a sentencing review in 2023 temporarily made him eligible for parole before the latest appeal pointed out that Craig had attempted two previous violent escapes: threatening to kill a guard with a shank during his 1993 trial, and then cutting his window bars and climbing over security fences from death row in 1999. A three-judge panel heard the 2026 appeal, with two of them for the reversal (led by Judge Stromberg) and one dissenting (Judge Fields), found he had a permanent disregard for the law, categorizing him among the state’s “worst offenders” that mandated a permanent containment. Louisiana is one of two states where life without parole is an automatic sentence for adult second-degree murder. Thus, letting either Pilcher or Craig go free after even a prolonged sentence—just because of their age during the crime—would be unfair to adults that do not have a chance to argue about their difficult youth or other mitigating circumstances.

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Music Professor Fired Over Alleging University Leadership Was Misappropriating Funds

25 Oct

On September 11, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana immediately rejected an appeal filed over the dismissed case Rushing v. Yeargain (2025). Steven J. Rushing was a tenured professor at Southeastern Louisiana University (SLU) when he alleged the university’s leadership, in 2018, abruptly informed their faculty and staff that external operational compensation (for “additional work activities outside of their responsibilities at the university”) that had been promised had been cancelled due to a “budgetary crisis”. Rushing countered SLU’s claims by conducting his own forensic account that reached the conflicting conclusion the university had manipulated its balance sheets to hide institutional theft as part of its systemic corporate fraud and fiscal malfeasance led by SLU’s President John Crain and his internal auditor.

Rushing alleged that after he submitted his report, he was gagged from raising these concerns to the Faculty Senate Executive Council. And as he continued attempting to appeal to make a public statement about misappropriations the university terminated his employment, despite his tenured status. They cloaked this retaliatory dismissal as being aimed at decorum enforcement, and restructuring to meet the budgetary crisis. He first received a notice of intended termination on January 3, 2019, after first voicing concerns that September 2018.

SLU’s reasons for the termination included his refusal to “complete a workplace fitness evaluation”: this is irrelevant and petty. It also accuses him of asking students to support his claims at the Faculty Senate Meeting: this is in violation of students’ and his own speech rights (as Rushing’s initial claim alleged). SLU also nitpicks by finding faults in innocuous details, such as labeling Rushing’s email as “threatening behavior” when it merely stated: “I am afraid for you to meet with me”. And it penalizes him for “being behind schedule for Music 438”, when this tardiness might have resulted in needing to explain concepts more closely, or due to being distracted by being under fire by the administration. As Rushing’s filing explained these were not suitable reasons for the university to have proven “a breach of contract”. Such nitpicking and fabricated accusations are common in academia. Administrators have been systematically draining funds into their own coffers while shrinking faculty pay and finding any excuses to terminate tenured faculty to instead hire adjuncts at ever-decreasing salaries. The shrinking of the percentage of faculty in America who are tenured has not been an accidental shift, but rather a deliberate campaign to shift power and money in academia from the researchers who students attend to learn from to the administrators raising their tuitions.

Instead of winning on the facts, SLU won on minor abnormalities in the filings, such as that the university had “sovereign immunity”, the plaintiff’s inability to prove the Board violated specific “rules”, and Rushing had failed to name the Board (the entity that decided on his firing) in his lawsuit. The American legal system is thus running on gotchya: defending lawyers of corporations and judges claim that jurisdictional or filing mistakes made at the first filing are sufficient to dismiss a case, and that a litigant cannot refile the same case with these issues fixed because a dismissal has already been issued. Instead of logically fixing glitches and then judging a case on its merits, highly paid lawyers win by finding reasons the judge can ignore allegations by dismissing instead merely for misfiling. This single case might seem inconsequential, as it is unclear why the public should care about a professor’s external funding. But when thousands of similar cases never go to court, or are similarly quashed, the public suffers by the best professors being pressured out, as tuition goes up and money is misappropriated without even self-auditing. After this professor was fired, surely no other professors attempted to similarly complain of misappropriation at the next Senate meeting. This appeal failed without the judge asking for “oral argument”, or even a “reply” to be filed by the defendants. The mistake the appeal hoped to correct was that the initial judgement nitpicked on procedure, which the filer had now corrected. But because the filer had not found new evidence, nor could prove the initial judgement was nitpicking illegally, they lost yet again. This nitpicking needs to be stopped, and rationality should prevail for America’s legal system to once again represent the interests of the people over whoever can pay for a lawyer who can find a typo sufficient to refrain from even hearing arguments that allege corruption and fraud.

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