Anna Pou—Charles Foti

Anna Pou—Charles Foti was a public and legal conflict over the investigation of patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina. As Louisiana attorney general, Foti criticized Pou and pursued a case in which investigators alleged that patients had been killed; Pou and her supporters challenged his conduct and motives. The relationship was never simply a private disagreement: it became a struggle over how the deaths should be understood, whether prosecutors had acted properly, and how much protection medical workers should receive when disaster overwhelms ordinary care.

The investigation and its public stakes

Pou was one of three medical workers arrested in connection with the Memorial deaths, alongside nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo. The case raised difficult questions about what had happened to patients during the hospital’s crisis and evacuation, and about whether the evidence could establish criminal intent. For Foti, the allegations warranted prosecution; for Pou’s supporters, the arrests threatened the reputations and professional futures of medical workers who had served during an extraordinary emergency.

The conflict reached beyond the criminal investigation. The families of deceased patients had brought civil cases, including one concerning Emmett Everett. Pou, a physician with Louisiana State University, sought state payment of Rick Simmons’s legal fees for defending her in several of those suits. The request made the state’s role part of the dispute: Simmons argued that Louisiana had failed to support Pou during the disaster and was again withholding support while she faced civil claims.

Simmons’s challenge to Foti

The day before the first anniversary of Pou’s arrest, Simmons filed a lawsuit on her behalf and circulated it to the media. Its argument ranged beyond the question of who should pay Pou’s legal fees. It challenged the conduct of Foti in arresting Pou and the two nurses, characterizing that conduct as improper and unethical.

The petition compared Foti’s public handling of the case with that of Michael B. Nifong, a North Carolina prosecutor who had been disbarred after trying a high-profile case in the media and misleading the public about evidence later shown to be false. Simmons invoked the Nifong episode to argue that prosecutors’ extrajudicial statements could endanger a fair process. The comparison was an accusation, not a judicial finding about Foti: Pou’s suit alleged that Foti had publicly condemned the women he arrested, while qualifications he had made at a press conference were omitted from news coverage.

Simmons also alleged that Foti was using the high-profile case to strengthen his prospects in an upcoming reelection campaign. As support, the petition attached an invitation to a $500-per-person fundraiser at New Orleans’s Windsor Court Hotel, held three days after the arrests. The filing thus joined two arguments that would recur in the dispute: that the prosecution was unfair to Pou and that Foti’s political interests had shaped its timing and presentation. Foti’s information director, Kris Wartelle, meanwhile, faced a different constraint. She complained that Pou’s representatives could speak freely about the events while prosecutors could not publicly discuss the evidence they possessed.

A public contest over the grand jury

Public opinion became an active part of the confrontation. On July 17, 2007, WWL host Garland Robinette urged listeners to attend a City Park rally in support of Pou and call for the case to be dropped. Four days earlier, Foti had appeared on Robinette’s radio program, where the host accused him of driving doctors and nurses out of Louisiana. Robinette’s support carried particular force because he had become prominent through his marathon Katrina broadcast and subsequent calls for accountability. He saw the investigation as an attack on Pou, Landry, and Budo for trying to save lives, while Foti’s position was that the alleged patient killings required legal scrutiny.

The grand jury was asked whether the evidence showed that Pou had the specific intent to kill, an element of second-degree murder under Louisiana law. It declined to indict her on every charge. The decision did not erase the disagreement about what had happened at Memorial. Assistant Attorney General Julie Cullen told reporters that the state’s position remained that the deaths were homicides. District Attorney Eddie Jordan said he respected and agreed with the grand jury’s decision, and the case was over in New Orleans.

Foti publicly rejected the implication that the grand jury’s outcome settled the underlying question. At a press conference in Baton Rouge, he distributed forensic experts’ reports that classified the Memorial deaths as homicides and criticized the grand jury for not hearing from those experts or from family members of the dead. His stance sharpened the divide: the grand jury had refused to indict, while Foti continued to present the forensic conclusions as grounds for treating the deaths as homicides.

After the ruling

At a press conference on the day the grand jury returned its decision, Pou said she was placing Foti in God’s hands and praying. She had broken nearly a year of silence before reporters, with family members present and Simmons beside her. Her response offered no direct rebuttal to Foti’s evidentiary claims; it instead marked the personal and public dimensions of a conflict that had followed her through the investigation.

The political consequences continued after the case closed. In September, a jury acquitted the owners of St. Rita’s Nursing Home on the charges Foti had brought against them. Six weeks later, after a campaign by Pou’s supporters to remove him, Foti lost his reelection bid, finishing last in a three-person primary. Before leaving office, his Medicaid Fraud Control Unit closed investigations into other health-care facilities, including Lindy Boggs Medical Center and Touro Infirmary; federal officials also ended their part of the joint investigations, citing the unsuccessful outcomes of the Memorial and St. Rita’s cases.

Pou’s relationship to Foti’s prosecution also shaped the policy response to disaster medicine. After the grand jury declined to indict her, she used the support she had gained statewide to advocate legislation intended to protect medical workers serving during disasters. In 2008, she supported three bills at a Baton Rouge Capitol hearing, arguing that clinicians who worked under alternate standards of care needed reassurance that crisis decisions would not automatically lead to prosecution. The legislature did not ask whether such protections should also cover intentionally hastening patients’ deaths. That unanswered question preserved the central tension of the Pou–Foti conflict: whether the case represented an unjust prosecution of disaster caregivers, a necessary inquiry into alleged homicides, or both a legal dispute and a larger argument about the limits of medical judgment in catastrophe.