NEW ORLEANS — The woman who served as the campaign manager for Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson in her upset victory over incumbent Sheriff Marlin Gusman resigned Friday as Hutson’s senior advisor, a sheriff’s office spokesman said.
Deborah Chapman’s resignation actually marks the second time she has left the sheriff’s office.
After her first resignation, Chapman agreed to return with a change in responsibilities that focused more on community issues outside of running the Orleans Justice Center.
But amid ongoing turmoil inside the sheriff’s office, Chapman now joins her son, Timothy David Ray, as a high-ranking executive who has left within five months of Hutson taking office.
Ray was a contractor working as Hutson’s communications director when he was forced to leave on Aug. 31 after the sheriff received a draft of an opinion from the Louisiana Ethics Board stating that Ray’s contract would be prohibited while his mother was Hutson’s senior advisor.
At the same time as Ray’s forced resignation, the sheriff’s human resources director left the office.
About a week later, Hutson fired four senior commanders at the jail and stated that a fifth long-time deputy resigned.
The mass firings, not entirely unexpected with the veteran deputies being holdovers from the previous administration, nevertheless resulted in more than 100 years of experience leaving the jail under a sheriff still trying to find her footing.
By all accounts, Hutson has gotten off to a rocky start since her trail-blazing inauguration on May 2 as Louisiana’s first African-American female sheriff.
In her first four months, Hutson has been rocked by an inmate death during a fight, a suicide, at least five stabbings, and the inmate take-over of a tier for nearly three days before state prison officials came in to restore order.
Following the inmate death and suicide over the same weekend in early June, Hutson pulled all of her deputies from courthouse security posts, bringing the justice system to a screeching halt and drawing sharp criticism from the criminal court judges.
Hutson restored the courthouse deputies to their post the next day.
Hutson, who has rarely offered explanations or answered questions about the jail to the media or general public despite her campaign promises of transparency, has pointed to a severe shortage of deputies as the root cause of many of the jail’s ongoing issues.
