Small town La. mayor denied bail in case of 'small town justice'

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A black mayor’s conviction by a mostly white jury in a predominantly black Mississippi Delta town is being challenged by the same national organization that supported the black Louisiana teens known as the Jena Six. His lawyer argues that his trial was riddled with such constitutional errors as a failure to record witness testimony.

Color of Change, an advocacy group, is protesting now former mayor Bobby Higginbotham’s May 2010 conviction on what the court assessed as $60,000 in fraud and official theft — an amount that typically would draw probation but no jail time, his lawyer said. They are also questioning the trial judge’s refusal to grant the ex-mayor’s request for post-conviction bail while his case is being prepared for appeal in a higher court.

Jailed locally since his conviction, Higginbotham was remanded to state prison after being sentenced in February 2011 to seven years, though Judge John Crigler, who oversaw the trial, immediately reduced his prison term to four years.

“The case is about a very small town with very small town kind of justice. It’s very clear, without even getting into the substance of what the charges were, that Bobby’s legal rights were trampled on from the moment there was a grand jury indictment,” said Rachel Conner, the New Orleans lawyer who was retained after his conviction.

She is sorting through the same 12 boxes of files relating to the case that Higginbotham received on the day before his trial began. Elected mayor in September 2006, Higginbotham, who is not an attorney, defended himself after the Tensas Parish prosecutor successfully petitioned the court to have the Town of Waterproof’s attorney removed as Higginbotham’s lawyer; the public defender preliminarily assigned to Higginbotham was deemed as having a conflict of interest because he had been involved in a civil suit naming Higginbotham as a defendant, and also removed from the case.

“This case seemed to be in the same vein as the Jena case,” said William Winters, campaign manager for Oakland, Ca.-based Color of Change, citing the six teens initially charged with attempted second-degree murder for the beating of a white classmate who was treated and released from a hospital emergency room.” In a small town like Waterproof, in a small parish like Tensas, you can get away with a lot.”

A woman answering the telephone Tuesday at the office of Tensas Parish District Attorney James Paxton, whose initial 44 charges against Higginbotham were reduced to three — charging personal expenses on the town credit card, giving himself a raise and steering town contracts to his own company, according to Conner — said tornadoes had hit the area and prevented Paxton from coming in. He did not return phone calls.

Higginbotham admitted to misuse of the credit card but said his raise had been approved by the town board, whose members also got a raise. He, and the black man he hired to be Waterproof’s police chief, also accused Tensas sheriff deputies of harassing and assaulting them physicality. Higginbotham also said the charges of corruption against him were mainly fake.

Louisiana Legislature auditors, in what they termed a narrow analysis of Waterproof’s fiscal operations, did issue an August 2008 report citing Waterproof’s non-compliance with a series of state laws on municipal governance, everything from “significant deficiencies in financial management and controls over town operations” to not collecting long-overdue utility payments by some among Waterproof’s total of roughly 850 residents.

Still, supporters of Higginbotham contend that Paxton and Tensas Parish Sheriff, both of whom are white, were upset that Higginbotham, as one bid to improve municipal services, ramped up the size and authority of Waterproof’s police department, making it less reliant on the parish-wide sheriff’s department. They contend that Paxton, who added 30 non-blacks to the parish’s standard jury pool of 120, had publicly refused to acknowledge Higginbotham as mayor; his white opponent has since become mayor.

“The biggest travesty is that [Higginbotham’s] been held without any bond since May [2010], even though it’s clear — and there’s no controversy on this — that at least one of his fundamental rights — having a proceeding recorded and a transcript of that — has been violated,” said attorney Conner said, who also questions whether the malfeasance for which Higginbotham was convicted totaled $60,000. She alleges that there are at least 12 constitutional errors in the case.

Louisiana law grants the right to post-conviction bail to anyone sentenced to five years or less, and gives trial judges discretion to set bail when sentences exceed that timeframe.

“He hasn’t been given excessive bail, like $2 million, but no bail at all. He has no criminal record,” Conner said, of her client. “In terms of the relative punishment — versus other politicians who are similarly situated, versus other people who don’t have criminal records — it strikes me as wildly unfair.”

The black former mayor of Richwood, La., which, like Waterproof, is near the larger city of Monroe, received probation on a conviction associated with malfeasance of roughly the same amount as Higginbotham’s, Conner said.

She continued: ‘’The real problem with this case is that the wheels of the legal system move very slowly… What you have here is justice delayed and justice denied. You have a man sitting in jail who, it seems, by all accounts, is going to get relief on appeal. Right now, there’s no way to get him out, where he needs to be, so he can be working on his own defense.”