THE SINCLAIR CASE

Chapter Eight: The Crime Victims' Advocate

Carroll DiBenedetto was also a close friend of the Boddens and the Dukes.

After graduating from Istrouma and finishing college, DiBenedetto became a social worker for a short time before entering the Baton Rouge criminal justice system as a probation officer. He would elevate to become the head the city’s Division of Probation and Parole within the Louisiana corrections department. He retired as the director of the Baton Rouge Family Court Center.

Those years of service inside the corrections system provided DiBenedetto with numerous opportunities to actively oppose, both in public and privately behind the scenes, any relief or benefit in “the Sinclair case.”

DiBenedetto was probably the staunchest, most hostile voice in the Istrouma network. He became the public face the network’s opposition. He jumped at every opportunity to express their opposition in media interviews or at public hearings. He enjoyed the importance media attention attached to his name—something he parlayed into becoming one of Louisiana’s leading crime victims’ rights advocates.

DiBenedetto used his inside knowledge about the inner workings of the criminal justice system to secure a total of eleven pardon and parole board denials in “the Sinclair case.” The combination of his criminal justice expertise and Sylvia Duke’s behind the scenes political power formed the dominant force in the Istrouma network, easily overshadowing the perfunctory opposition of Rep. Kennard and the Bodden family itself.

Beginning in 1976, the year of my first clemency effort, DiBenedetto coordinated the Istrouma network’s opposition. He personally garnered letters of opposition to my release from dozens of the Istrouma alumni. It was the beginning of a bitter crusade of revenge that included death threats against me and my supporters as well as official retaliation against some people inside the criminal justice system who expressed support for my rehabilitation.

Civil rights icon and former President of the Louisiana NAACP Rupert F. Richardson, who supported my release efforts, told me in the mid-1980s that she had received intimidating and hostile phone calls once her efforts became known in Baton Rouge political circles.

“Screw those Istrouma people,” she told me, with flair only Rupert could put forth.

In 1975, I enrolled in a GED class at Angola. The prison’s education director, Mason Green, would not allow me take the class. I was forced to file an administrative grievance to secure an order from the Department of Corrections allowing me to take the GED test. In reprisal, the director refused to let me take the six-week preparatory course for the test. But I had my revenge by scoring highest in the class of that year. The director was one of DiBenedetto’s many friends inside the corrections system.

Was there a direct connection between DiBenedetto and Green?

An inmate clerk working for the director told me that the director had tried to block me from taking the test because he was “friends with some guy named Benedetto [sic] who hates you.”

At the time I did not even know who Carroll DiBenedetto was, much less his influence in the prison’s education system. What I did know was that a reliable inmate told me “some guy named Benedetto” was behind the director’s actions.

That GED incident marked the first of many “instances where a benefit or opportunity was denied to me because of the corrupt influences of the Istrouma network. More often than not, DiBenedetto’s fingerprints were associated with the benefit denial or refusal.

As she had with Billy Cannon, Jodie sought, and secured, a meeting with DiBenedetto in the early 1990s. She went to him, hat in hand, begging him to back away from his opposition in my case.

“My worst nightmare, Mr. DiBenedetto, is that my husband will spend the rest of his life in prison, that he will die there,” Jodie told him in near tears.

DiBenedetto met with Jodie for one reason, to make this point.

“Mrs. Sinclair,” he said, not flinching, “I’m going to do everything in my power to make your worst nightmare a reality.”

That was the real Carroll DiBenedetto—a cowardly man who enjoyed wielding his influence to hurt people. He personified the heart and soul of the Istrouma network.

The determination to make Jodie’s worse nightmare a reality is what led DiBenedetto to get involved in the Louisiana crime victims’ movement in the 1990s. He became the head of a group called Victims and Citizens Against Crime originally based in New Orleans. It proved to be an ideal political vehicle that allowed him to keep the Istrouma network “fired up” in “the Sinclair case.” Each successful effort he led thwarting my release from prison added to his self-importance.

“Not only that, he’s been involved in a lot of other crimes, he committed armed robberies and escape,” he railed during pardon and parole hearings. “And he’s not a first offender.”

That was the favorite line of attack used against me by the Istrouma network—that I was a “crime spree” criminal and an incorrigible inmate incapable of rehabilitation. But after my rehabilitation became undeniable, even by DiBenedetto standards, the voice of the Istrouma network shifted their attack.

“Everybody says [Sinclair] is rehabilitated,” DiBenedetto told Allen Johnson, the author of a Gambit Weekly piece about me in the 1990s. “So what? He was sent [to prison] to do hard labor, not to be rehabilitated. He’ll get out in 10 more years. J.C. Bodden will be nothing but a rotting corpse.”

Yes, I killed his friend. He assumed as a license to kill me. The overweight, overbearing blowhard lied about me at every juncture for four decades. I will go to my grave feeling the same contempt for him as he felt for me through all those years.

Florence “Flo’” Babin, Bodden’s sister, expressed that same collective desire for revenge to the parole board in 1999 by saying:

“Keep him to 2011. He should be dead.”

By 2006—some 40 years, four months and eleven days after my arrest—the Louisiana Parole Board had enough of the Istrouma network’s demand for revenge. A three-member parole panel—consisting of highly respected crime victims’ advocate and a former conservative law enforcement official—voted unanimously to release me on parole.

Flo’ Babin, Gene Duke, Don Hooks, and all the Istrouma network regulars stormed out of the parole hearing room after the board announced its decision to grant parole, shouting “there ain’t no justice here.”