Louisiana Voice

By Paul Spillman

The Senate began its August recess without taking a floor vote on the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA). The bill had seemingly risen from the mat after the SEC and Big Ten conferences reversed course and agreed to support it. But a barrage of proposed amendments knocked it out for good. It is unclear whether the Senate will take up the bill in September, though sponsors believe it will.

Passage of the PCSA was believed to be heavily dependent on the two biggest conferences for support and the SEC and the Big Ten allowed two “final deadlines” to pass knocking out any chances of the bill getting a floor vote. Then late Friday of last week both conferences suddenly threw their support behind the legislation. Senate Majority leader John Thune filed for cloture and sponsors hoped the bill would be voted on before the August recess. But in the last few days with mounting pressure to address other priorities and too many amendments to consider proponents ran out of time.

Why did the SEC and the Big Ten reverse course? It wasn’t acknowledged by either conference but it may have had a lot to do with the latest injunction against the NCAA issued earlier that same Friday by federal district court judge Charlotte Sweeny in Denver. Continuing to oppose legislation in light of the most recent ruling would have been a bad look for both conferences.

What is this latest injunction? This past June, in response to numerous lawsuits to regain eligibility, the NCAA voted on new eligibility rules, allowing for five years of eligibility to be used over a five year period beginning at high school graduation or age 19 and made it effective beginning in 2027.

Previously college athletes had four years of eligibility to be used over a five year period. But as is the wont of the NCAA there were numerous exemptions either granted or denied for seemingly random and inconsistent reasons. And in this case the NCAA once again acted inconsistently – unnecessarily – without anticipating the obvious result. Because of Covid the NCAA granted students in school at that time or who graduated high school in spring 2021 a fifth year of eligibility to replace the “lost” Covid year. In effect, that exemption granted athletes going back to the 2018 class who were still in college in 2021 a fifth year of eligibility. With the new eligibility rules taking effect next year, athletes in their fourth year of eligibility this year – who graduated high school in 2023 – will get a fifth year of eligibility in 2027. So every class since 2018 has had five years of eligibility. Except one.

Who does that leave out? Students who graduated high school in 2022 and began college in the fall of that year. Those students didn’t get the extra year for Covid and had their four years of eligibility expire this past spring. Why did that class alone not get an extra year of eligibility? The NCAA decided that since the academic year was over when it approved new eligibility rules in June it would just be too much trouble to find a way to work that out, so arbitrarily ruled that class doesn’t get an extra year.

Did anyone associated with the NCAA anticipate this debacle? No, or they didn’t care enough to act, and that’s not new. Time and time again over the years the NCAA has made inconsistent and apparently random rulings. It’s the reason courts now have no respect whatsoever for the NCAA and it needs Congress for a get-out-of-jail-free card. This decision – to create new eligibility rules that ignored the practical reality of singling out one class – was immediately challenged by several different (former) athletes in several different jurisdictions. Sweeny is the first to issue a ruling and she made it class action. Every college athlete from the 2022 class who completed their eligibility in the spring of this year is now eligible for the 2026-27 athletic calendar.

Texas football has already cashed in, returning a highly regarded offensive lineman who nevertheless went undrafted and signed a free agent NFL contract. It is unlikely LSU football will sign anyone. The roster for this year is set and the money allocated. And the general consensus is Kiffin has assembled a boatload of talent. Will Wade and LSU basketball, on the other hand, will certainly seek to take advantage of this injunction as Wade is rebuilding an LSU team from scratch and still needs a point guard.

The collective groan from all of college sports over another injunction and the as yet unknown fallout – the injunction was immediately appealed but may not be heard until the fall and the NCAA doesn’t have a great track record anyway – probably pushed the two major conferences off the fence.

The final language of the bill included all the points detailed previously: an antitrust exemption, a “hard cap” on spending, eligibility limits, allows for pooling of media rights though makes participation voluntary, prevents private equity from outright purchasing brands, limits the size of conferences and places a heavy burden on schools that wish to change conferences, and provides for grants to historically black colleges and universities to upgrade their media facilities and programs to better market themselves.

The legislation also includes the “Lane Kiffin rule” preventing coaches leaving one school and taking a job at another school in the same season. That works for the NFL for a variety of reasons, including that the draft and free agency come after the Superbowl. But the NCAA lacks that much common sense or concern. The transfer portal for football, as an example, opens during the season. Any school would naturally want its new head coach in place to recruit athletes out of the portal.

As Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said at Big Ten media days, “When you ask for help you don’t always get the help you ask for.” Most universities wanted a “skinny” bill, basically granting the NCAA an antitrust exemption and nothing more. Instead they’re getting the Protect College Sports Act.

Debate over legislation that restricts capitalism and promotes socialistic practices – for the common good, of course – can be saved for another time.

Meanwhile, LSU President Dr. Wade Rousse gathered high-dollar donors to a meeting at the Governor’s Mansion earlier in the week to unveil an innovative funding model for LSU, but the NDA mindset is standard operating procedure in Louisiana politics and even public universities. Few details were made available to the common man. But the end result is equity. Maybe not traditional private equity, which the SEC opposes. It may be through some kind of spin-off LLC. But LSU is selling its brand to investors and seeking a rumored $100M as a startup. It is just one among many schools. Some 40 universities have reportedly either begun or are considering a similar model.

A rapidly changing landscape is doing what the NCAA has refused to do – it is separating the revenue producers from the non-revenue producers, both among sports and among universities. The universities that produce the revenue or can raise the money will support its non-revenue sports, for men and women athletes. Other colleges and universities can’t do that without a subsidy, which it usually gets from its general fund but isn’t enough to keep up in today’s world. And some colleges don’t have any revenue producing sports at all. All of this will not continue to exist under one banner of NCAA. The PCSA, if eventually made law, may extend its life but the NCAA is on borrowed time even as the bell rings for another round of college sports

If you do not think justice can be cold-bloodied, then maybe you haven’t heard the story of Elvis Brooks who spent more than four decades in prison for a crime he never committed.

The Louisiana Illuminator and The Lens, writing for the ProPublica Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News, this week ran a story about Brooks and how justice continues to be denied Brooks.

Exonerated after 42 years in prison, he’s eligible for $480K compensation. Louisiana’s AG says no. • Louisiana Illuminator

Attorney General Liz Murrill, like her predecessor, Gov. Jeff Landry, has consistently fought the compensation of those wrongly convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They both are typical of selfish, heartless Republicans who care only for their own, i.e. those with the financial means to perpetuate them in clinging to office. They oppose anything that remotely resembles benefits for lower income citizens while benefiting from holding public office by relying heavily on campaign contributions from supporters, itself a form of public welfare. When necessary, as in Brooks’s case, they fall back on technicalities to deny compensation for gross errors or outright malfeasnce on their part.

In Murrill’s case, she is hiding behind a law that protects wrongdoing by prosecutors through the art of dirty dealing and underhanded tactics. And Brooks isn’t her only victim in that maneuver that looks for the world as though it was invented by Karl Rove; she has opposed 22 compensation claims in which the wrongly-convicted were ultimately exonerated and in the case of Calvin Duncan, even threatened him with preventing him from obtaining a license to practice law after he enrolled in law school.

That, folks, is vincictiveness at its very worst. An individual who tries to recover from an illegal conviction and prison sentence by obtaining an education only to be threatened because he sought compensation for his wrongful conviction.

Then there is John Thompson who was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent 14 years on death road, much of it in solitary confinement. He, too, was exonerated when it was discovered the prosecutor had concealed exculpatory evidence. He sued District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. and was awarded $14 million. The DA’s office appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and it was (you guessed it) Clarence Thomas who wrote the majority opinion denying one dime in compensation to Thompson.

Landry, like his protege Murrill, has consistently opposed awarding damages to the wrongfully convicted. In June, he vetoed a bill that a Republican Legislature (if you can believe it) that would have increased compensation to the wrongfully-convicted, using a broad brush to paint exonerees as “convicted criminals” who were only interested in money.

That is patently racist–again, typical of Republicans who at the same time seem to condone pedophilia by refusing to hold certain high officials accountable. By their silence on the issue, they are complicit.

No, Landry, they are not “convicted criminals”; they were convicted, but the only criminals were the prosecutors who gamed the system to gain their conviction. A more accurate description would be to call them innocent victims of a system of justice that is light years from perfect–and you, Governor, and you, Ms. Attorney General, are a big part of that system.

I devoted an entire chapter to Brooks’s story in my book, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana. The book is available on Amazon. Following is my story of Brooks:

Far too often, when prosecutors realize they’ve really screwed up and left themselves vulnerable to legal liability, they’ll do the only “merciful” thing: offer a reduced charge, allow the wrongfully- convicted individual an opportunity for his immediate freedom in exchange for waiving the right to file suit later. Except there’s nothing about such a deal that can realistically be termed “merciful.” A more accurate description would be “cowardly.”

Prosecutors neglected to provide exculpatory evidence in murder trial of Elvis Brooks, accused of the shooting death of fifty-eight-year- old Cecil Lloyd during a robbery of a New Orleans bar at 11:00 p.m. on July 1, 1977, and it wasn’t until April 28, 2022, that he was finally able to clear his name. A memo which addressed fingerprints on a beer can that excluded Brooks, along with descriptions of the shooter which conflicted with Brooks’s appearance, was written by prosecutor Phil Boudousque, but did not surface until October 2019, forty-five years after the crime.

Testifying in his own defense at trial, Brooks said he left his job at a New Orleans furniture store around 5:45 p.m. on July 1 and went straight home where he remained until he returned to work the following day. His claims were backed up by time sheets from his place of employment. “I have never been inside the place,” he said of the bar, the Welcome Inn Bar. “In fact, I don’t go in white barrooms because I know trouble might kick off.”

He was, nevertheless, convicted of first-degree murder and three counts of armed robbery after a one-day trial on Sept. 22, 1977. He was sentenced to life without parole for the murder conviction and concurrent sentences of fifty years for each of the armed robbery convictions. He was summarily shipped off to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 1980 and for the next thirty-nine years, he filed more than twenty unsuccessful motions seeking to get his conviction overturned.

By January 2019, Brooks was being represented by the Innocence Project New Orleans which turned up several key pieces of evidence.

First, there was that note from the prosecutor’s file which said that Brooks was not the source of any fingerprints found on beer cans handled by the robbers. Second, the testimony of two witnesses was at odds with their earlier statements about what the shooter was wearing. Finally, there was no evidence in the police files from witnesses that made mention of markings on Brook’s forehead. Then, there had been another robbery the same night as the Welcome Inn robbery. That robbery was just an hour earlier and a block away and the victims of that robbery gave similar descriptions of the two perpetrators but they never identified Brooks as one of the robbers.

Upon discovery that the fingerprint evidence had never been produced, the district attorney, refusing to admit wrongdoing, in 2019 gave Brooks the option of either clearing his name or becoming a free man by agreeing for prosecutors to amend the murder charge to manslaughter so that he might be released on time served. Leon Cannizzaro, the Orleans Parish District Attorney at the time, called the deal fair. “If he (Brooks) and his attorneys truly believed in his innocence, they could have pursued post-conviction claims,” he told the Washington Post. Brooks might have countered by saying if Cannizzaro was so certain of his guilt, he never would’ve offered a deal.

The choice was clear-cut. If he took the deal, Cannizzaro’s office would not be held accountable for its misdeeds and he could not seek any compensation for his forty-two years behind bars, a Washington Post reporter wrote. If he spurned the offer and decided to try and clear his name, it was understood that Cannizzaro’s office would throw all its manpower and financial resources into fighting him.

On Dec. 9, 2021, Brooks’s attorney, Harry Daniels, filed a motion asking the court to allow Brooks to withdraw his 2019 guilty plea because it was made without full knowledge of the facts that had been withheld from him.

“When the prior district attorney’s administration (Cannizzaro) learned that the trial prosecutor had failed to turn over this fingerprint evidence, they offered Mr. Brooks the chance to leave prison alive, but never revealed the wrongdoing they had uncovered,” the motion said. “Instead, Mr. Brooks was forced to make an impossible choice between clearing his name or living his life outside the gates of Angola prison. Mr. Brooks’s guilty plea is constitutionally infirm due to the state’s withholding and the coercive nature of his plea agreement and must be withdrawn.

Orleans Parish Judge Nandi Campbell granted his motion to withdraw his 2019 guilty plea on April 28, 2022, and the state finally dismissed all charges against him.

“I cried at night in Angola,” Brooks told reporter Richard Webster of the Washington Post In 2020, two years before Judge Campbell granted his motion. “I ain’t never thought I was going to get out. So, I took the deal. It ain’t right, but that’s the way of the world.”

A coalition of civil rights, immigrant justice, faith leaders and community organizations will host a peaceful vigil on Saturday, August 8, at 6:00 p.m. at the pedestrian footbridge over Highway 165 at the intersection of MLK Jr. Drive and Renwick Street in Monroe. The event is part of the National Day of Action, joining communities across the country–including New Orleans and Alexandria, LA, San Marcos, TX, Newark, NJ, and New York City, NY.

The vigil is being organized to stand in solidarity with immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and families affected by immigration detention and enforcement policies. Organizers invite members of the public to attend, bringing candles, flowers, and signs in support of the cause.

Coalition Demands

Participating organizations are calling for the following demands:

●     Free all people currently held in immigration detention and close immigration detention centers.

●     Hold local, state, and federal leadership accountable for harm caused by immigration enforcement policies.

●     Enact comprehensive immigration reform and end deportation flights.

●     End attacks on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), refugees, and asylum seekers.

●     Free political prisoners.

●     Recognize that migration is a human right and affirm that no human being is illegal.

●     Support a nationwide general strike to pressure policymakers to shut down ICE and permanently close immigration detention centers.

●     End the 287(g) Memorandum of Understanding between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement including Ouachita Parish Sheriff’s Office and West Monroe Police Department.

●     Secure the release of Anderson, a teenager currently being held at the RichwoodDetention Center.

Peaceful Community Gathering

Organizers emphasize that the vigil is intended to be a peaceful, family-friendly gathering centered on remembrance, solidarity, and advocacy. Speakers are expected to address the harm of immigration detention on families, discuss proposed policy reforms, and encourage continued civic engagement on immigration issues.

Community members are encouraged to attend, bring candles and flowers in remembrance of the individuals who have been killed by ICE. Organizers are also requesting participants bring a bag of rice or beans to donate to local hunger relief initiatives.

Endorsing Organizations

This event is endorsed by:

●     Indivisible North Louisiana

●     CENLA Activism

●     Baton Rouge Indivisible

●     Freedom Mavericks Indivisible

●     Tangipahoa Indivisible

●     St. Tammany Indivisible

●     Louisiana Advocates for Immigrants in Detention

●     Southeast Dignity Not Detention Coalition

●     Ouachita Parish/Monroe NAACP