By Steve Gorman
April 29 (Reuters) - New Orleans Sheriff Susan Hutson and her chief financial officer were charged on Wednesday with criminal malfeasance, obstruction of justice and other charges stemming from last year's escape of 10 inmates in one of the biggest jailbreaks in U.S. history.
A special grand jury convened to investigate the May 2025 breakout returned an indictment charging Hutson with 30 felony counts and her CFO, Bianka Brown, with 20 counts, according to a statement released by Louisiana
Attorney General Liz Murrill.
The judge presiding over the case set bond at $300,000 for Hutson and $200,000 for Brown. Both were ordered to surrender their passports and are barred from leaving the state.
"While Sheriff Hutson did not personally open the doors of the jail for the escapees, her refusal to comply with basic legal requirements and to take even minimal precautions in the discharge of her duties directly contributed to and enabled the escape," Murrill said in a statement.
There was no immediate response to the indictment from the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office, and legal representatives for Hutson and Bianka were not immediately known to Reuters. It was not clear whether the two would leave their posts.
Sheriff-elect Michelle Woodfork is scheduled to be sworn in early next month to succeed Hutson.
Ten inmates housed at the Orleans Parish Justice Center, which mostly holds people awaiting trial or sentencing, escaped on May 16 by tearing a sink and toilet off a cell wall and fleeing through the resulting hole in the structure.
The escapees, some of them murder suspects, were discovered missing during a routine headcount that morning. All 10 were ultimately recaptured.
Before Wednesday, more than a dozen people were charged as accessories to the escape, many of them employees of the detention center or relatives of the runaway inmates. They included a maintenance worker who turned off the water supply to the breached cell at the inmates' request.
Hutson was charged with 14 counts of malfeasance in office, plus multiple counts of conspiracy to commit malfeasance, filing or maintaining false public records, conspiracy to file false records, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Brown was indicted on the same offenses.
Hutson, a Philadelphia native, was elected sheriff of Orleans Parish in December 2021 and sworn in on May 2, 2022, becoming the first African-American woman to serve as a sheriff in Louisiana and the first woman ever to serve as sheriff in New Orleans.
She previously served as a defense attorney and prosecutor before becoming police monitor for the Los Angeles Police Department from 2007 to 2010, where she also oversaw local detention centers.
She was appointed as independent police monitor for New Orleans in 2010 and served in that post for a decade, helping institute such reforms as formation of an investigation team to probe officer-involved shootings and the use of officer-worn body cameras.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
