NEW ORLEANS — Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick relented Friday and turned over 37,000 pages of public records to a grieving father in Missouri who wants to know why nobody was charged with killing his son in Metairie seven years ago.
The DA told Bob Arthur in September that the records of its closed investigation into his son Shawn Arthur’s death were ready for him to review, but he would have to pay $18,535.50 in fees for paper copies, or $5,560.65 for scanning and redacting digital copies of the documents.
Arthur sued the DA’s office in January with help from the Tulane Law School First Amendment Clinic, arguing the Louisiana Public Records Act does not permit charging the public for labor.
“People deserve access to government records as a basic mechanism of accountability and transparency,” said Melia Cerrato, Sunshine Fellow with the First Amendment Clinic. “We deserve to know how our government is operating. We pay taxes to support our government, and we have a right to see records without paying exorbitant fees.”
Arthur suddenly received the records for free this week, just days before a hearing in court on the matter that had been set for Monday and is now delayed while Arthur reviews the records.
Connick's office issued a statement Friday saying Arthur could have come into the office in Gretna and reviewed the records for free anytime over the last six months, ignoring the fact that Arthur lives hundreds of miles away in Missouri, near Kansas City.
The statement said the DA "has now given Mr. Arthur what he asked for in the hope of settling an unproductive dispute and avoiding any further waste of time and resources."
The DA's office's statement claimed the fees it charges "are reasonable and are consistent with, or in many cases lower than, fees charged by other Louisiana government agencies." But the $5,560 it tried to bill Arthur in "scanning and redacting fees" for electronic files at 15 cents per page is not consistent with what the neighboring city of New Orleans charges for electronic files: a flat $25, regardless of how many pages the files contain or if they had to be scanned or redacted.
"It is important to pursue this case to help the general public with getting documents at fair prices," Arthur said. "Families deserve access to these types of records so that they can learn the truth. Why did it take a year and a costly lawsuit for them to provide these records to me?"
What’s more, a Louisiana Senate committee advanced a bill this week that would allow government agencies to require proof of Louisiana residency before responding to a public records request. Bob Arthur said if that passed, it would have required him to hire an attorney in Louisiana just to request the records related to the investigation of his son’s death.
That’s all the more significant because Arthur was forced to investigate his own son’s death to find out what really happened to Shawn. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office closed its investigation after quickly deciding Shawn’s death was an accident, without following a lead to a prostitute who had visited Shawn’s Metairie apartment the night he died. The investigators in the case said the prostitute, Dominique Berry, did not want to be found and gave up.
Bob had to hire private investigators to track down Berry in a Georgia jail, where she admitted giving drugs and alcohol to dozens of men, including Shawn Arthur, to help her pimp, Randy Schenck, rob them. That led directly to federal prosecutors charging Schenck and Berry with sex trafficking and identity theft, and Schenck was found in federal court to have caused Shawn’s death.
U.S. District Judge Barry Ashe ordered Schenck to pay the Arthurs restitution for causing Shawn’s death. Jefferson Parish Coroner Gerry Cvitanovich testified that outside experts disagreed with his pathologist’s ruling of an accident and his office changed the cause of death from accidental to undetermined. He also testified alcohol in combination with the drugs Schenck had Berry give Shawn Arthur caused his death, contrary to the original pathologist's ruling. At one point, Judge Ashe even asked federal prosecutors why Schenck hadn’t been charged with murder. Federal prosecutor Jordan Ginsberg responded that murder is a state crime, not a federal one.
For years, WWL Louisiana followed Arthur’s efforts to get Connick’s office to charge Schenck with the state crime of murder. Under Louisiana criminal law, if someone dies as a result of a burglary or other felony, it’s murder.
But on Feb. 23, 2023, the sixth anniversary of Shawn Arthur’s death, the DA’s office closed the matter without going to a grand jury, saying it “determined that there is insufficient evidence to pursue a homicide prosecution in connection with the death of Shawn Arthur.”
That same day, Bob Arthur filed his public records request.
Arthur said he was concerned to learn that Louisiana lawmakers are considering other bills to limit access to public records. One bill advanced by a Senate committee would prevent the public from seeing government officials' public emails and text messages, which supporters called an effort to protect the deliberative process. Arthur said that kind of restriction could make it hard for him to find out why the people responsible for his son's death haven't been charged or why the case wasn't even presented to a grand jury.
"The whole idea behind getting public records is to keep everybody honest and to know what the government's doing," he said.
CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of this story reported that Coroner Gerry Cvitanovich testified in federal court that outside experts overruled his pathologist's original findings on the cause of Shawn Arthur's death. He didn't testify that they overruled the pathologist, but rather that they disagreed with her conclusions.