Louisiana
Flounder make surprise summer show
Don’t know why this happens, but every summer coastal anglers are blessed with what only can be called “a bonus fish.”
One year it was dolphin, the fish not the mammal, and one year it was black drum. Sheepshead, bull croaker and giant white trout had their turns.
This year it’s flounder.
An abundance of the flat fish was first noticed at the Catholic High Alumni Rodeo in early June. There were years when a single angler with a single fish showed up on that leaderboard. This year the count stopped at 20 weighed flounder.
And, they kept coming.
Grand Isle Rodeo weighmaster Marty Bourgeois said there were more showing up in the granddaddy of all saltwater events this year, but nothing of great size.
Yet, in the Blue Boot Rodeo in Grand Isle last month, a four-pounder took the top prize — that’s a big flounder.
So, why?
Creel limits are relatively new, a 10-fish-per-day limit, along with an Oct. 15-Nov. 30 closed season, and it’s too early to tell if those new regulations have had enough time to affect this year’s catch.
So, when reading up on flounder, it appears a flounder “run” is cyclical, that water temperatures influences the sex of a flounder — the warmer the water the more male flounder in our waters — and since we came through a relatively cold winter maybe we have more female flounder, and more females mean more eggs, which means more little flounder.
No matter the reason, flounder are “in” this summer, and now you just have to be able to afford crabmeat for that stuffed flounder recipe to make tablefare fit for a king — and a queen.
Freezer Day
Hunters for the Hungry director Julie Grunewald is urging hunters to beat last year’s record-setting 21,881-pound collection in the statewide Clean Out Your Freezer campaign. This year’s collection begins next weekend.
While this organization began in the 1990s to urge hunters to clear their freezers to get ready for the upcoming hunting seasons, you don’t have to be a hunter to contribute.
The program’s target is for “…anyone and everyone to drop off properly packaged and labeled frozen goods,” which means packaged meats should be labeled and dated.
That’s because food banks won’t accept the donations that can’t be identified. Vacuum-sealed and those items from professional processor work out best, but they must be frozen.
Volunteers will staff collection sites around the state and will have ice chests to accept donations.
The list of dates, times and locations are listed elsewhere on this page. If you have questions, you can email Grunewald: julie@h4hla.org.
Big reward
State Wildlife and Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have posted a $12,500 reward for information leading to the person or persons responsible for killing an endangered whooping crane found in January this year in Evangeline Parish.
According to these agencies, the juvenile crane was found dead in a pond in Mamou on the south side of Besi Lane. A necropsy found a shot fractured the bird’s spine and led to internal hemorrhaging.
The reward’s total comes from funding by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Foundation, the International Crane Foundation and the Dallas Zoo.
If you have information, call the Fish and Wildlife Service (985) 882-3756 or Wildlife and Fisheries’ Lake Charles Office (337) 491-2588. Callers can remain anonymous.
No dogs?
Last week the Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation filed suit in a Michigan federal court against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with hopes of rescinding a new regulation restricting the importation of dogs into our country.
The two federal agencies cite a need to prevent the spread of rabies to our country as the reason for imposing the new rule.
The foundation says the new rule even applies to countries such as Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy among others are countries “… which the Center for Disease Control classifies as ‘low risk’ or ‘free’ of dog rabies.”
Guess we can be thankful a long-ago waterfowl hunter decided to bring Labrador retrievers into Louisiana.
The supreme court handed a win on Friday to oil and gas companies fighting lawsuits over coastal land loss and environmental degradation in Louisiana.
The 8-0 procedural decision gives the companies a new day in federal court after a state jury ordered Chevron to pay upward of $740m to clean up damage to the state’s coastline, one of multiple similar lawsuits.
Backed by the Trump administration, the companies argued the case belongs in federal court because they began oil production and refining during the second world war as US contractors. They deny responsibility for land loss in Louisiana and say it is wrong to sue them for what they did before state environmental regulations were in place.
Louisiana’s coastal parishes have lost more than 2,000 sq miles (5,180 sq km) of land over the past century, according to the US Geological Survey, which has also identified oil and gas infrastructure as a significant cause. The state could lose an additional 3,000 sq miles (7,770 sq km) in the coming decades, its coastal protection agency has warned.
The Republican governor, Jeff Landry, backed the lawsuits when he was attorney general, despite being a longtime oil and gas industry supporter. Attorneys for local Louisiana leaders say the supreme court appeal was a stalling tactic.
The companies appealed to the high court after jurors in Plaquemines parish – a sliver of land straddling the Mississippi River into the Gulf – found that energy giant Texaco, acquired by Chevron in 2001, had for decades violated Louisiana regulations governing coastal resources by failing to restore wetlands affected by dredging canals, drilling wells and billions of gallons of wastewater dumped into the marsh.
The case is one of dozens of lawsuits filed in 2013 alleging oil giants including Chevron and Exxon violated state environmental laws for decades.
The companies asked the justices to overturn a 2024 decision from the US court of appeals for the fifth circuit that allowed the suit to stay in state court.
Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from the case, saying he had financial ties to ConocoPhillips. He had recused himself from other cases due to his stock holdings.
Incarcerated people with nonunanimous jury convictions would be able to send an application for parole to the committee within its first year.
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BATON ROUGE — A bill that would allow a committee to recommend parole to incarcerated Louisiana residents who received convictions through nonunanimous jury verdicts advanced 4-3 along party lines in a Senate judiciary committee.
Senate Bill 215 would allow the Department of Public Safety and Corrections to create a committee to review the appeal records of cases with nonunanimous convictions.
Incarcerated people with nonunanimous jury convictions would be able to send an application for parole to the committee within its first year. The committee would end after three years.
Democrats and advocacy groups opposed the bill, saying it did not go far enough to correct the problems.
The bill is meant to address possibly unjust convictions that are no longer legal in Louisiana after a constitutional amendment requiring unanimous verdicts passed in 2018.
The original law, allowing for convictions on as little as a 9-3 vote, was part of the 1898 constitutional convention, and it was designed to dilute Black jurors’ votes.
Louisiana changed the requirement to a 10-2 vote during the 1973 constitutional convention. Oregon, the only other state that allowed nonunanimous juries, had the same requirement.
Under the new bill, clerks of court would provide applicants with their records free of charge, and district attorneys and victims could respond at hearings.
Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Mandeville, who wrote the bill, said the legislation was a compromise between district attorneys who believed in the validity of convictions and criminal justice advocates.
“There’s likely not a way that either of those groups can come to a full consensus, but I think it was important to have the discussions and to continue to have the discussions,” McMath said.
Bradley R. Burget, president of the Louisiana District Attorney’s Association, supported the bill.
“We’re not exactly happy with it,” Burget said. “There’s a lot of the members of the DA’s association that may not be 100% for this, but I think this is something that they can live with.”
Zachary Daniels, the association’s executive director, liked the bill’s provision giving the committee authority to determine which nonunanimous convictions are just since “many of these contain strong evidence and are valid convictions where the prosecutor played by the rules at the time.”
Before the legislative session, the association found at least 1,215 cases a committee could analyze.
Daniels said it would be impossible to retry all of these cases because witnesses, officers and victims may no longer be available, and evidence may no longer exist.
The extensive list of issues the committee could consider includes the length of jury deliberations, the strength of the state’s case, the effectiveness of the defense attorney and evidence of racism.
Former Rep. Randal Gaines, who is now chair of the Democratic Party of Louisiana, filed a similar bill in 2022 that included the same list of issues that could be reviewed.
Herman Evans, who spent 37 years in prison after a nonunanimous jury convicted him in 1989 for a second-degree murder he did not commit, opposed the bill. Even after the perpetrator confessed in 2012, Evans did not get a hearing until 2024.
“That bill ain’t going to do nothing,” Evan said. “They’ve got the parole board. They’ve got the clemency board. It’s about the same board. And it costs about the same if you bring them back and let them get denied.”
Daniels said the expected cost to implement the bill is $1.8 million, based on a study resolution written for the 2025 legislative session by Sen. Charles Owen, R-Rosepine.
Owen also filed House Bill 219 that would allow courts to have resentencing hearings for nonunanimous convictions. The House Committee on Administration has not heard the bill yet.
One issue that arose in the meeting was the governor’s impact on the committee.
The governor would appoint to the committee three retired appellate court judges or Louisiana Supreme Court justices, one retired district attorney or assistant district attorney and one retired public defender.
The district attorney and public defender appointees would come from a list of three nominations from the Louisiana District Attorneys Association and the state public defender.
Although all five members would need to agree that a conviction was unfair, the current bill would allow the governor to make final decisions on releasing applicants.
The current bill does not provide details on the governor’s power. Daniels said the bill would eventually include that language after input from attorneys from the governor’s office.
Daniels also noted that there may be some conflict between the committee’s final decision and Gov. Jeff Landry’s tough-on-crime approach.
Sarah Gozalo of the Promise of Justice Initiative expressed concerns about the governor’s ultimate power.
“If we find that miscarriage of justice, the solution is, we will ask the governor — the one person who, in 2018, opposed getting rid of nonunanimous jurors,” Gozalo said.
Other opponents of the bill suggested keeping the bill in committee until it was amended to address their concerns.
Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voice of the Experienced, and Erica Navalance, a criminal defense attorney, recommended adding post-conviction evidence to the records the committee sees to prove claims of ineffective defense counsel or prosecutorial misconduct.
McMath declined to defer the bill.
“I think that holding it up in this committee doesn’t necessarily give the chance to continue to move on through the process, where we all know that things sometimes can change and get new input,” McMath said.
Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, who had a similar bill in 2025 that did not pass, objected to the bill’s advancement.
“Just know that this is not an easy objection for me,” Duplessis said. “And if this bill does advance, I want to continue, or at least I want to work with you, to try to find a solution, because it’s been stated repeatedly, we’re not quite there.”
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