19. September 2005 · Comments Off on Homicide Charges For Blanco And Nagin? · Categories: General

Tom McKenna at Seeking Justice cites this article:

The city of New Orleans followed virtually no aspect of its own emergency management plan in the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans officials also failed to implement most federal guidelines, which stated that the Superdome was not a safe shelter for thousands of residents.

The official “City of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan” states that the mayor can call for a mandatory citywide evacuation, but the Louisiana governor alone is given the power to carry out the evacuation, which Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has yet to do. She “begged” people to leave before the storm and is still asking the few thousand holdouts to evacuate the flooded city.

Red Cross officials say the organization was well positioned to provide food, water and hygiene products to the thousands stranded in New Orleans. But the state refused to let them deliver the aid.

And this article:

The husband-and-wife owners of a nursing home were charged with homicide because they did not evacuate 34 elderly patients who died after Hurricane Katrina struck, the first major criminal case related to the storm’s still-rising death toll.

And, citing Louisiana Negligent Homicide LA R.S. 14:32:

A. Negligent homicide is the killing of a human being by criminal negligence.
B. The violation of a statute or ordinance shall be considered only as presumptive evidence of such negligence.
C. Whoever commits the crime of negligent homicide shall be imprisoned with or without hard labor for not more than five years, fined not more than five thousand dollars, or both. However, if the victim was killed as a result of receiving a battery and was under the age of ten years, the offender shall be imprisoned at hard labor, without benefit of probation or suspension of sentence, for not less than two nor more than five years.

He wonders, “why are the mayor of New Orleans and perhaps the governor of Louisiana not charged with violating this statute in those cases where deaths occurred due to a failure to evacuate or because of poor conditions at the Superdome?”

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