SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – Despite a lien on all of his property, former Caddo Parish Commissioner Lynn Cawthorne donated his Shreveport home to his daughters on Friday, just before reporting to prison.
Cawthorne on Monday reported to the Federal Bureau of Prisons to begin serving a 46-month or 3-year, 10-month sentence after entering a guilty plea in November 2021 to wire fraud, which will be served concurrently with an additional three-year sentence for tax fraud.
The guilty pleas by 55-year-old Cawthorne and his sister, 50-year-old Belina Turner, were in connection with their involvement in a scheme to defraud the Food and Nutrition Service, an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the Child Nutrition Programs.
The two were convicted of bilking the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars intended to go for feeding programs for needy children.
During their March 16 sentencing, in addition to sentencing the siblings to jail time, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Foote ordered them to pay $837.590 in restitution to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and ordered Cawthorne to pay an additional $58,000 in restitution to the IRS for the tax fraud guilty plea.
On April 5, Tass Waterson, assistant U.S. Attorney in the Western District of Louisiana, signed a lien against all property owned by Cawthorne to help pay the restitution, which was filed in the office of the Caddo Clerk of Court.
However, that lien didn’t stop Cawthorne, who now is Inmate No. 20593-035 at El Reno Federal Prison in El Reno, Okla., from donating his home in the 1500 block of Oakdale in Shreveport to his daughters on Friday and filing the Act of Donation in the Caddo Parish Clerk of Court’s Office, just three days before he was slated to report to prison.
For an Act of Donation to be legal in Louisiana, it must be in “Authentic Form,” meaning in addition to the signatures being witnessed by a Louisiana Notary Public, they also must be witnessed by two people, who must sign the document and print their names under their signatures.
In the Act of Donation in which Cawthorne gave his home to his daughters, it was signed and stamped by a Louisiana Notary Public, but signed by only one witness, whose signature was illegible, and not printed beneath the signature.
Even if the document is legal according to Louisiana law, it is unclear whether it will stand in light of the lien filed by the U.S. Attorney’s office.
