The Terrebonne District Attorney's Office is requesting that a former death row inmate be returned to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola following his recent transfers to two other state prisons.
Chad Louviere, 43, was convicted of killing a young mother while holding his estranged wife and four other women hostage in a 1996 bank standoff in Houma. The state Department of Public Safety and Corrections transferred Louviere to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel from the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer in north Louisiana.
Elayn Hunt is the second largest prison in the state after Angola.
"It was our understanding and the victims' understanding that he would be at Angola," Assistant District Attorney Ellen Doskey said, adding the state didn't notify the District Attorney's Office of the transfer. "We are working our due diligence to get him transferred back to Angola."
There is no legal requirement to inform local agencies and other concerned parties of inmate transfers, said Pam Laborde, communications director for the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections.
State penitentiary officials have indicated space issues as the primary reason for moving Louviere out of Angola.
Louviere is serving two consecutive life sentences in prison after pleading guilty earlier this year. The plea spared him the death penalty but ended his appeals. He was sentenced to death in 2000 for murdering 27-year-old Pam Duplantis, raping two other women bank employees and kidnapping multiple people during a hostage standoff in the former Argent Bank at Grand Caillou and Moffet roads in Houma on Oct. 17, 1996.
Louviere has stayed in what officials refer to a "closed-cell restriction" unit in each of the three prisons that have housed him, Doskey said. He is required to remain for 23 hours inside of his cell, gets two to three hours outside in a fenced yard each week and is allowed four personal visits each year.
Such cells are reserved for high-security or high-risk inmates who may be unable to survive in the general prison population due to the severity of their crimes or their status as an inmate, officials say. The closed-cell restriction unit at Angola has about 100 cells.
These units are "designed to protect inmates as well as correctional officers," according to a 2013 news release from state Attorney General Buddy Caldwell.
Inmates can communicate with other inmates and prison staff, watch TVs through their cell doors, listen to the radio, use reading and writing materials, and shop at the prison store, among other activities. They have limited use of a phone and email and receive visits from religious, medical and psychological professionals, Caldwell noted.
"Contrary to numerous reports, this is not solitary confinement," he said in the release.
In a 2007 federal civil suit, Angola closed-cell restriction inmates Albert Woodfox, Herman Wallace and Robert King claimed they were "almost totally deprive[d] . . . of human contact, mental stimulus, physical activity, personal property and human dignity" after spending almost four decades in the unit.
The three were accused of killing a prison guard in 1972, but their convictions have since been overturned. Wallace and King have been released from Angola, but Woodfox remains in closed-cell restriction after a federal appeals court recently ruled he can be tried a third time.
Staff Writer Maki Somosot can be reached at 857-2208 or maki.somosot@houmatoday.com. Follow Maki on Twitter at @mdlbsomosot.
