Tedrick Knightshead has been placed on probation by the Louisiana Supreme Court because of his “inappropriate interactions” four years ago with a college student intern who worked in the former top assistant parish attorney’s office.
Specifically, the state Supreme Court suspended Knightshead from the practice of law for one year and one day but deferred the entire suspension subject to his “successful completion of a two-year period of unsupervised probation,” which will begin from the date Knightshead and the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which investigated the matter, execute a formal probation plan. Knightshead, who declined to comment for this story, resigned from the parish attorney’s office in December but currently runs a private law practice in Baton Rouge.
The disciplinary action was prompted by an ODC investigation into a former college student intern’s 2016 sexual harassment allegations against Knightshead, for which she had filed a formal complaint. The high court’s decision came Monday when it accepted a joint petition for consent discipline drafted by Knightshead and the ODC, where both parties outlined the reasons behind their agreed-upon sentence.
The decision may come as a surprise to some, given Knightshead’s documented disciplinary history—both as previously reported by Daily Report, and by Knightshead having his legal career delayed in the early 2000s while the state Supreme Court’s Committee on Bar Admissions investigated a 2002 altercation involving him and his former girlfriend. Why, then, didn’t the matter warrant a harsher penalty?
Part of the reason identified in the joint motion, ironically: Knightshead’s “absence of a prior disciplinary record.”
In the motion, Knightshead’s attorney and the ODC write that the sentence is “appropriate discipline for the conditionally-admitted violation of Rule 8.4(d) [of the Rules of Professional Conduct].” They found a precedent in Colorado’s 2019 Wiegand case, where the Supreme Court of Colorado accepted a consent discipline request and suspended the attorney under the exact same terms Knightshead was handed down.
While writing that Knightshead’s “selfish motive,” “substantial experience in the practice of law” and the “vulnerability of the victim” acted as aggravating factors in their decision, they cite Knightshead’s “absence of a prior disciplinary record,” “cooperative attitude toward the disciplinary process” and “remorse” as the factors mitigating his sentencing.
“Respondent’s misconduct was limited in scope, as well as duration (occurring on April 27, April 28 and May 2014, 2016),” the document reads, adding Knightshead successfully completed his prior internal discipline by the parish attorney’s office. “The ODC found no evidence of any subsequent misconduct of a similar nature by Respondent.”
Knightshead admitted to making a series of comments at the office to a student intern that she initially took as a joke, but the intern became disturbed after he asked her via text message to send him photos of her “non-work appropriate” attire and, later at the office, caressed and grabbed her arm. In response, then-parish attorney Lea Anne Batson wrote Knightshead up for “inappropriate communications” and required him to attend and complete an Equal Opportunity Policy Workshop and Supervisor Training.
Then, in February 2019, the ODC—an arm of the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board—received an anonymous complaint about the same allegations. At that time, Knightshead was still on the public payroll and acknowledged “in pertinent part” to the ODC the following month that he sent inappropriate text messages to a college intern in 2016, calling it “the DUMBEST mistake of my life.”
However, it wasn’t the only disciplinary action taken against Knightshead during his time at the parish attorney’s office, according to records previously obtained by Daily Report. In 2012, he was suspended without pay for nearly a month, though no reason is given for the suspension.
Yet despite these two disciplinary actions, Knightshead continued to serve as a key member of the parish attorney’s office. Not only did Batson keep him on as first assistant parish attorney; Batson’s replacement, current Parish Attorney Andy Dotson, asked Knightshead to remain on staff last year despite Knightshead’s plans to resign, and Dotson instead “demoted” him to a “senior special assistant parish attorney” before (Dotson did not return a call seeking comment before this afternoon’s deadline). Consequently, Knightshead didn’t resign from his new position until November, though it didn’t become effective until early December.
