Attorney Richard Ducote opened a new front in his war against the secrecy surrounding Louisiana judicial misconduct investigations by filing a federal lawsuit against the state’s Judiciary Commission.
Ducote’s lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Eastern District of Louisiana, is based on letters that both he and a plaintiff named Austin Leiser received from the Judiciary Commission in the past month that bar them from revealing they filed complaints against judges. The lawsuit asks the federal courts to rule that the Louisiana Supreme Court’s rules governing the secrecy of complaints against judges are “invalid, unenforceable and unconstitutional.”
The suit also asks the federal courts to issue a preliminary injunction that would prevent the state’s Judiciary Commission from starting proceedings against Ducote or Leiser for revealing that they filed complaints against judges. When people file complaints with the Judiciary Commission, they receive a letter warning them that they are forbidden from disclosing their complaints and often emphasizing that “violations of the confidentiality rule will be taken very seriously.”’