[StBernard] Louisiana nursing home case puts Katrina response on trial

[Westley Annis]

Louisiana nursing home case puts Katrina response on trial 

By Laura Parker, USA TODAY
When Sal and Mabel Mangano were arrested after 35 people drowned in their
nursing home in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they became vivid symbols of
the inept preparation and response to the disaster. St. Rita's Nursing Home
was a signature scene of the horror that followed Katrina, and the Manganos'
decision not to evacuate the home as floodwaters rose in the New Orleans
area outraged residents there.
Now, with the Manganos' criminal trial scheduled to begin Monday, the case
has grown from a narrowly drawn inquiry about negligent homicide into a
melodrama writ large about virtually everyone who had a hand in botching the
official response to Katrina nearly two years ago.

The list of potential culprits in that scenario brims with prominent names.
The Manganos' defense attorneys - seeking to deflect blame for the deaths at
St. Rita's - will be allowed to call many of them as witnesses, starting
with Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.


PHOTOS: 'We'll see who the jurors think behaved more rationally'
The trial will begin about two weeks before the Aug. 29 second anniversary
of Katrina. Southeast Louisiana remains littered by debris, and the recovery
effort is going slowly. Against that backdrop, the Manganos' attorneys plan
to counter prosecutors' contention that the couple's negligence caused the
deaths at St. Rita's.

The defense attorneys argue that the nursing home residents - strapped in
their beds, wailing for help - died because of the catastrophic levee
failure that turned a Category 3 hurricane, which St. Rita's had ridden out
unscathed, into the nation's worst natural disaster.

A judge's gag order bars prosecutors, defense lawyers and potential
witnesses from speaking publicly about the case, but the Manganos' legal
strategy is laid out in court papers.

Their attorneys want to call retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers lieutenant
general Carl Strock to repeat his admission at a news conference in June
2006 that defective levee design was the corps' fault and caused most of the
flooding.

Blanco and an array of other public officials, the defense team argues,
compounded the calamity. These officials failed, defense court papers say,
to organize an effective emergency evacuation and help transport "at risk"
people to high ground, as required by state law.

No evaluation of responsibility "can be made without evidence that the state
and local authorities failed their duties," the defense attorneys argue in
court papers. Only by knowing "all the circumstances" of the disaster, the
attorneys argue, can jurors "properly evaluate the Manganos' place in that
tragedy."

Whether the jury will buy that argument is anyone's guess, but the scope of
the defense claims are likely to make the Mangano case a trial within a
trial, as local, state and federal officials are grilled about their actions
before and after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

"Nobody has ever been put on trial for how they responded to Katrina," says
Clancy DuBos, a New Orleans native, attorney and publisher of the Gambit
Weekly, an alternative newspaper.

"Here you have the state putting on a husband and wife, operators of a
nursing home. Their attorneys, in turn, will be putting the state on trial.
We'll see who the jurors think behaved more rationally, more honorably."

Ample warnings of danger 

It is a common defense tactic to "make the case bigger than the facts," says
Dane Ciolino, a professor of criminal law at Loyola University Law School in
New Orleans.

The Manganos, after all, are not accused of causing the flood. They are
charged with 35 counts of negligent homicide and 24 counts of cruelty to the
infirm, the latter charges based on the hardships suffered by the St. Rita's
residents who survived the ordeal. Maximum prison sentences are five years
for each count of negligent homicide and 10 years for each count of cruelty.

Even if state officials were slow to act - and prosecution witnesses will
dispute that claim - the Manganos still had ample other warnings that it was
risky not to evacuate the nursing home. Several local television weather
forecasters might be called as prosecution witnesses, court papers say, to
describe media coverage that warned for days that a monster storm was
nearing New Orleans.

The trial was moved from St. Bernard Parish at the defense's request and
will be heard by six jurors in St. Francisville, 30 miles north of Baton
Rouge. The defense hopes it's a dispassionate distance from the raw anger
that still simmers against the Manganos in St. Bernard Parish, where they
operated St. Rita's for 20 years.

The trial, expected to last four to six weeks, also will be touched by
Louisiana's free-wheeling election politics. The verdict could be handed
down less than a month before Louisiana's statewide primary election on Oct.
20, when Attorney General Charles Foti, who is prosecuting the case, seeks a
second four-year term against two formidable challengers.

Foti, 70, has come under withering public criticism for his aggressive
criminal investigation into New Orleans' Memorial Hospital, where he accused
Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses of homicide for allegedly euthanizing four
patients after the city flooded.

Criticism of Foti in the New Orleans medical community was so vehement on
media blogs that the American Medical Association and a Louisiana medical
society issued statements supporting Pou.

Last month, the probe sputtered to an end when a grand jury declined to
indict the women. Pou, who now is suing Foti, accused him in court papers of
arresting her and branding her a murderer to try to boost his re-election
campaign.

"He needs to win St. Rita's badly because the Pou case created so much
hatred for him in New Orleans," says Pam Metzger, a Tulane University law
professor. "For someone who was relatively popular with the white middle
class, all of a sudden, nice little old ladies with blue hair are spitting
on his photo for what he did to Dr. Pou."

As the St. Rita's trial approaches, two senior prosecutors have been joined
by Burton Guidry, Foti's top lieutenant.

Guidry calls himself Crawdaddy, plays in a Cajun washboard band and is a
shrewd courtroom operator. He often is called into high-stakes cases that
need showman talents not always found in Louisiana law books.

Prosecutors are fighting to limit the scope of the trial to the events in
the hours leading up to Katrina, and immediately afterward.

St. Bernard Parish President Junior Rodriguez said soon after Katrina that a
parishwide evacuation was ordered before the storm, just as New Orleans
Mayor Ray Nagin ordered residents there to flee.

The prosecution witness list is dominated by 23 relatives of those who died
or suffered injuries.

It includes Anna Cousins, whose mother-in-law, Adele Cousins, 81, died at
St. Rita's. Anna Cousins told USA TODAY in 2005 that the Manganos led her
family to believe the home would be evacuated, but then reversed themselves
- too late for the family to pick up Adele.

Prosecutors also want to show jurors pictures of the gruesome scene,
including bloated bodies.

There is a key difference between Foti's two big investigations: Pou and two
nurses enjoyed wide public support in New Orleans, while Foti was blasted in
the local media for overreaching. Five miles away in St. Bernard, it's the
Manganos who have been the targets of public disdain.

Community anger at the Manganos was most vividly expressed by Larry
Ingargiola, St. Bernard Parish's director of emergency preparedness.

Asked by a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune what he thought of
the couple, whom he had known since childhood, Ingargiola flashed his middle
finger and asked: "Can you quote this in your paper?"

Still, some legal analysts say, prosecutors could have a hard time
persuading jurors the Manganos' actions were criminal.

"Most cases of negligent homicide don't become criminal. They're civil
cases," Loyola's Ciolino says. "It comes down to whether the Manganos were
reasonable in not evacuating and relying on the flood protection and
response of the government to protect their residents."

Desperate efforts 

St. Rita's, named for the patroness of impossible cases, occupies a low
brick building.

It withstood Katrina's lashing with no major damage. Sal Mangano had just
inspected the roof when he saw the flood surging toward him. It filled the
building to the ceiling within 20 minutes.

Despite frantic efforts by the Manganos - who are in their mid-60s - St.
Rita's aides and good Samaritans in boats, the water rose so fast that only
24 of the nursing home's 59 residents were saved. Some floated out of
windows on mattresses; others were pulled through holes chopped in the roof.

Foti arrested the Manganos on Sept. 13, 2005, after a public outcry swept
through the parish. "Their inaction resulted in the death of those people,"
Foti said then.

That kicked off a public relations war between the Manganos and Foti.

Last year, Jim Cobb, one of the Manganos' defense attorneys, told Esquire
magazine that Foti has "the legal acumen of an unlit charcoal briquette -
and that's being too hard on charcoal briquettes."

Attacking the prosecutor 

Cobb, 53, has tried to get Foti removed from the case for ethical reasons.
Among other things, Cobb has noted that Foti's campaign-finance chairman
mistakenly sent letters soliciting contributions to the Manganos and Cobb.
Cobb pounced on the implications of a prosecutor soliciting funds from the
subject of an investigation.

Defense attorneys later angered Foti by raising a legal point that could
strengthen their case.

Last fall, Foti filed a $200 billion civil claim in federal court on behalf
of the state of Louisiana alleging that no one would have drowned after
Katrina if the Army Corps of Engineers had not been negligent.

The Manganos' attorneys told the judge that Foti cannot have it both ways:
He cannot blame the Katrina deaths on the corps in a civil lawsuit in
federal court, then blame the deaths at St. Rita's on the Manganos in state
court.

In a responding brief punctuated by exclamation points and capital letters,
Foti dismissed the effort to remove him from the case as "ill-conceived and
desperate, vituperous" and part of a string of "obsessive attacks designed
to besmirch." He stayed on the case.

Last week, Judge Jerome Winsberg, a retired New Orleans criminal court judge
assigned to the case after all St. Bernard Parish judges recused themselves,
granted defense attorneys wide leeway. He ruled that they can mention Foti's
civil court lawsuit against the corps during the Manganos' trial.

To counter prosecution testimony that three other St. Bernard nursing homes
were evacuated and only one of their patients died, the judge will allow the
defense to introduce evidence that most of the 60 nursing homes in Katrina's
path chose to "shelter in place" as the Manganos did.

In one - Lafon Nursing Home in New Orleans - 22 people died. No criminal
charges have been filed in those deaths.

For all of the misery Katrina unleashed and all of the missteps and bad
decisions surrounding it, the Manganos are the only two people to face trial
for them. Were they arrogantly responsible for the deaths of helpless people
by thinking they could safely hunker down when so many others fled? Is that
criminal? Or are they scapegoats for a population so fed up with bungled
decisions it wants someone to blame?

DuBos, who also writes a column for the Gambit, puts it this way:

"The defense will say: 'Don't put these people in jail when there was
massive chaos all around. If you're going to put them in jail, let's put the
governor and the president in jail, too, because they dropped the ball,
too.' The list of bad decisions was committed all the way to the White
House. Why this mom and pop? Why do George Bush and Kathleen Blanco and Ray
Nagin and Junior Rodriguez get to walk away and start over?"
 

  
 
  
 

  
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