Louisiana is setting out to regulate and track privately run ankle monitoring firms, which for years have raked in profits while operating with little to no oversight.
Past The Times-Picayune | The Advocate investigations have shown that people wearing GPS monitors have often gone on to commit crimes, even as private companies hawk the devices as a way to keep communities safe while giving defendants their freedom before a trial. Often, the companies responsible face no repercussions, or breakdowns in communication between the firms and law enforcement mean the services they advertise serve little purpose, critics have said.
Now a bill that sets up a regulatory system for those companies, House Bill 874, will soon head to Gov. Jeff Landry’s desk.
Passed by the state Senate on Tuesday, the bill carried by Rep. Timothy Kerner, R-Lafitte, requires ankle monitor “vendors” to register with law enforcement and submit monthly lists of defendants supervised by the firms. The companies will have to file annual reports detailing their credentials, the localities they serve, services they offer, the number of defendants terminated from their rolls and reasons for those terminations.
"This allows the courts to get rid of bad actors," Kerner said in a Senate committee hearing on his bill.
Under an earlier version of the bill, companies that fail to report data faced fines up to $1,000 and could be barred from the market. But an amendment carried by Sen. Pat Connick, R-Marrero, toughened the legislation to carry criminal penalties for employees of the violating companies, who could face prison sentences up to six months. The Senate approved the amended bill 37-0.
Lobbying for the bill were Jill and Matt Dennis, a husband-and-wife team that runs the New Orleans-based electronic monitoring firm ASAP Release. They have loudly advocated for tougher regulations for vendors, arguing that a lack of oversight lets lax companies profit without taking accountability for failures.
In a statement in April, Matt Dennis said new laws from Landry's February special session, which toughened penalties for carjacking, armed robbery and other crimes, created a new urgency for pretrial monitoring standards.
"The influx of new arrests as a result of the special session combined with a jail that is already overflowing makes this bill one of the more important ones," Dennis said.
Scrutiny over Louisiana’s patchwork GPS monitoring system mounted in the wake of a murder-suicide in St. Francisville in the fall of 2021 committed by a man wearing a monitor strapped to his ankle.
The man, Marshall Rayburn, was arrested and charged with drugging and raping his wife, then set free affixed with a GPS ankle monitor and prohibited from coming within 100 yards of her St. Francisville home. The ankle monitor did nothing to stop Rayburn from barging into his wife’s house late one night and shooting her to death, then killing himself. Records showed that he violated the terms of his monitored release dozens of times and stalked his wife’s home before killing her.
In a rare move, the local district attorney filed criminal charges against the company that was supposed to have been watching him.
In other recent cases — including a man accused of two Baton Rouge murders who walked free on an ankle monitor then went on the run for 10 days; the slaying of an accused fentanyl distributor outside a Waffle House, when court minutes say he was meant to be on home arrest with an ankle monitor; and a young father released on a tracking app for a domestic violence charge who turned off his phone, shot a woman in front of her young son and went on the lam for a month — the companies faced no repercussions.
Amid those incidents, The Advocate | The Times-Picayune in 2022 requested lists of defendants ordered to wear ankle monitors from more than 80 district, juvenile and city courts in south Louisiana. Many courts said they don't order monitoring, while some said there was no way to search for the records. Just six could provide full lists.
The system varied widely across localities, the newspaper found. Some law jurisdictions had deals with specific ankle monitoring companies. Elsewhere, judges simply recommended companies they were familiar with to defendants; or defendants shop for the service on their own, choosing from an array of mom-and-pop providers who set prices at their whims.
While law enforcement and government officials argue that the devices create oversight concerns, criminal justice reform advocates say they also saddle defendants with cost burdens. Defendants, most of whom haven't yet received a trial, generally pay around $10 per day for the duration of their release, though some pay much more.
Kerner’s bill expands on tailored regulations for the firms approved by the Legislature last year — a step that some advocates of regulation for the industry called too lenient.
The legislation moves back to the state House for final approval before going to Gov. Jeff Landry's desk. Kerner, the sponsor, said he would endorse the amendments in the House.