Busted In Acadiana

On the heals of the Mickey Shunick story being featured on Dateline NBC’s and a series of motions filed by Lavergne allegeding he was abused in the Lafayette Parish Correctional Center and had to crap on a floor….the motherfawker is still making waves behind bars.

According to The Advertiser, in a new set of court filings, confessed killer Brandon Scott Lavergne is asking a judge to release to him the names of grand jury witnesses who testified against him and the transcript of a secretly recorded meeting with his ex-wife while he was jailed in 2004.

Lavergne also alleges that officials with Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he is serving a life sentence, denied him access to the law library and withheld documents mailed to him from the 15th Judicial District Court in Lafayette. And he wants a judge to issue a gag order in the case to squelch further media coverage.

The eight motions, two letters of inquiry and a copy of a request for an emergency administrative remedy were received by 15th Judicial District Court from Lavergne on Jan. 22.

They are the second set of filings made by Lavergne since he pleaded guilty on Aug. 17 to the murders of University of Louisiana at Lafayette co-ed Mickey Shunick, who disappeared from Lafayette on May 19, and Lafayette Parish resident Lisa Pate, who disappeared in June 1999. Lavergne reached a deal with prosecutors that eliminated the possibility of the death penalty.

In December, Lavergne asked Judge Herman Clause to throw out his Aug. 7 guilty pleas, claiming numerous errors on the part of his court-appointed attorneys, prosecutors and police. Clause rejected the request Jan. 2 on a technicality and returned the petitions to Lavergne with the proper forms, instructing him to submit his motions in the proper format.

Clause has not yet ruled on Lavergne’s latest court motions.

In his letter of inquiry, Lavergne asked why his previous filings were released to the public since they were ruled to be improperly filed. He wrote that one of the fundamental issues he has is the media attention tainting a potential jury pool if his motion to throw out his confessions is granted.

“The petitioner feels the state is playing politics with his life and attempting to use the tide of public opinion to influence the judgment of this honorable court and in doing so further damage his ability to ever receive a fair trial,” Lavergne wrote.

He asked Clause to implement “a gag order to the district attorney and the state as a whole to prevent the releasing of any more information concerning the petitioner’s case until after its final disposition has been ruled on.”

In the most recent filings, Lavergne said he received legal mail from the 15th Judicial District Court on Jan. 15, but that it had been opened. Clause’s motion stated that he was returning all of Lavergne’s post-conviction filings.

“NONE of these documents were included with the order,” Lavergne wrote.

Upon inquiring, Lavergne said he was told that the mail was already open when the prison’s legal programs division received it. He is asking for an internal affairs investigation and for the culprit to be charged with mail tampering, malfeasance and theft of documents.

Lavergne also alleges prison officials denied him access to the law library by placing him in a lockdown unit. He said he had to use another prisoner “as a go between,” which he said is a violation of his right to privacy.

He further alleged that “inmate counselors” failed to provide him with requested case laws and other legal filings.

Finally, Lavergne submitted eight motions requesting documents from district attorneys, clerks of court and law enforcement agencies in Lafayette and Acadia parishes related to the Shunick and Pate cases.

He requested copies from Acadia Parish authorities of all correspondence with and statements by his ex-wife; a list of witnesses and the transcript from a 2008 Acadia Parish grand jury hearing in which Lavergne was not indicted in the murder of Pate; and the Acadia Parish warrant authorizing his ex-wife to wear a hidden audio recorder while visiting him in jail in 2005, along with a transcript of the four-hour recording.

Lavergne also requested the names of witnesses who testified July 18 before a Lafayette Parish grand jury that indicted him for the murders of Shunick and Pate; a copy of the search warrant Louisiana State Police troopers possessed when removing his iPhone from his truck on the day he was arrested; a copy of the judgment of conviction and sentence and plea agreement; his sentencing transcript and all pretrial motions filed by his state-appointed attorneys; and the return of the post-conviction filings he submitted in December.

Lavergne previously served more than eight years in jail, from 2000 to 2008, after pleading guilty to aggravated oral sexual battery. He wanted that guilty plea thrown out, too.