Four years after a federal bribery investigation exposed another corruption scandal in the district attorney’s office, sending multiple participants to federal prison, Don Landry is seeking a second term as the area’s top prosecutor.
Yet the scandal has not produced a crowded field of challengers. Landry, who turns 80 in a few months, faces just one opponent, raising the question: Why hasn’t a more competitive field emerged to challenge the incumbent?
Although Landry was not directly implicated in the bribery scheme, critics questioned his judgment in hiring Gary Haynes, whose late wife went to federal prison for a similar scandal under former DA Mike Harson. Landry testified for hours last fall under an immunity agreement, repeatedly saying he did not know or could not recall details about his office and acknowledging gaps in oversight that had allowed the corruption to go undetected.
Landry didn’t agree to be interviewed for this story, but pointed to decreased crime in the district as a reason voters should support him for another term.
Kristian Earles, a former district judge who retired from the bench last year to challenge Landry, puts at least part of the blame on the incumbent for failing to guard against future corruption.
“He was warned [about Haynes]; he knew this guy,” Earles says of Landry. “He and Dusty [Guidry] both were his mistakes because he hired them.”
“If you take a fox and put him in the henhouse and don’t watch him,” he adds, “you know what foxes do.”
It’s widely known that Haynes was not a welcome addition to the incoming DA’s administration in 2021. The assistant prosecutors in the office, well aware Haynes was investigated a decade earlier by the feds but never charged, were upset that Landry brought him back.
The previous DA, Keith Stutes, had decided not to keep either Landry or Haynes as assistants after assuming the seat in 2015. But after Haynes worked to elect Landry in 2020, Landry brought him back into the office.
Haynes was convicted last year on six charges connected to the bribery scheme he orchestrated while running Landry’s pretrial diversion program, which is intended for nonviolent first offenders as an alternative to the traditional court system. He is serving seven years in federal prison.
The star witness against him was Dusty Guidry, a consultant Landry also hired to work on the program. Guidry pleaded guilty, agreed to testify against Haynes and was sentenced to four years in prison.
Earles says he expected the controversy to draw more challengers into the race, including from within Landry’s own office.
“I really quite don’t understand it,” Earles says. “I had really planned for him to drop out and at least one, if not two, of his assistants to run.”
Asked for comment about the corruption scandal and lack of challengers, Landry opted to issue a statement about how his office has worked to lower the district’s crime rate.
Political observers cite several reasons for the sparse field: the difficulty of unseating an incumbent, campaign costs, political connections, the financial appeal of private practice, and the potential professional or personal fallout of challenging a powerful figure and losing.
Those same observers believe the Nov. 3 race favors Landry.
“Despite [Landry’s] problems and foibles, he’s very well liked. And his wife knows a lot of people,” says former U.S. Attorney Mike Skinner. Rebecca Landry, a dance instructor, is a fixture at her husband’s side and well connected in local social circles, particularly among Mardi Gras krewe members. The couple helped found the Krewe of Rio.
“Outside of getting charged or stepping down,” it’s difficult to get an incumbent out of office, just about any office, says UL Lafayette visiting political science instructor Jacob Authement. “Incumbency is by far the biggest hurdle.
“Incumbents tend to win handedly across the nation,” Authement says, noting stats showing that in the 2025 general election, an average of 89% of incumbents nationwide won their re-election bids.
In a low-profile race, where fewer voters are paying attention and fewer challengers may emerge, an incumbent can be especially difficult to unseat. That can make waiting for an open seat a more attractive option than mounting a campaign against a sitting district attorney. Waiting for a seat to open rather than challenging an incumbent in a state legislative race, for example, tends to give candidates a 50-60% better chance of winning, Authement notes.
With Haynes’ trial now a year in the rearview mirror, Earles’ task is finding ways to remind voters of the scandal. He’s mostly turning to social media — where he posted the entire transcript of Landry’s testimony from Haynes’ trial — but he says many voters remain unaware of the scandal and implications for the office.
In polling conducted for his campaign in recent months, half of respondents said they didn’t know about the bribery scandal, Earles says.
Even so, the poll showed Landry’s unfavorable numbers were “way up,” Earles maintains, and he views that as key to his own chances in the race. “He either wins on his record,” Earles says, “or loses on the unpopularity of his record.”
Authement believes the bribery trial may have faded from voters’ immediate concerns. The case is no longer “in the here and now,” he says, and voters are more likely focused on day-to-day issues, like the economy and gas prices.
“A really far-down ballot local government race is just not going to have the notoriety or like the eyes on it that most people expect,” the political science instructor says.
Despite the scandal unfolding under Landry’s watch, money people and influential supporters have stuck with him, something potential challengers say they became keenly aware of as they considered a run.
Landry holds a financial advantage because of it, having outraised Earles by nearly $50,000. He ended 2025 with $182,000 in his war chest and reported $294,000 on hand a month out from the election, more than twice Earles’ $122,000.
Both Landry and Earles are running as Republicans. The 15th Judicial District covers Lafayette, Vermilion and Acadia parishes. Landry is from Lafayette; Earles grew up in Acadia Parish.
For Skinner, the current race is a case of déjà vu.
More than a decade ago, after a similar bribery scandal rocked the DA’s office — the one involving Haynes’ late wife who was Harson’s longtime office administrator — Skinner, a Democrat, joined Donald Washington, a Republican and fellow former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, in endorsing then-DA Mike Harson’s challenger, Stutes. Stutes had recently left the office as Harson’s top assistant prosecutor.
Regarded as a tough, straight-shooting prosecutor, Stutes had launched his own investigation into the DA’s office in 2012, while still working for Harson. He turned his findings over to the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice and then-Attorney General Buddy Caldwell. The probe ultimately resulted in additional state arrests in 2016, following earlier federal guilty pleas in the pay-for-plea scheme.
Both Skinner and Washington had grown dismayed by what they saw as Harson’s lack of attention to and oversight of his office and said public integrity was not partisan.
“It’s not about party. It’s not about what church you go to. It’s not about whose family reunion you go to. It’s about the kind of justice you want for this community,” Washington said at the time.
Before Stutes entered the 2014 race, Harson had gone unchallenged in the 1996, 2002 and 2008 elections.
“It could be that only somebody like Keith could have beaten Harson,” Skinner says, underscoring the difficulty of unseating an incumbent district attorney.
The parallel with Stutes has limits. Stutes challenged Harson after investigating his own office and turning his findings over to outside authorities. This time, no one from Landry’s inner circle has emerged to challenge the incumbent, leaving Earles to take him on from the outside.
Stutes, who chose not to run for re-election in 2020 for personal reasons, is supporting Earles.
Landry’s entry into the 2020 election largely represented a return to the Harson era, which was in some ways an extension of the Nathan Stansbury administration. Don Landry defeated Danny Landry, who also worked in the DA’s office when he ran.
In a political forum Wednesday night, Landry cited both Stansbury and Harson as his mentors.
In all, Landry, primarily a misdemeanor prosecutor, spent 34 years of his professional career under the two district attorneys. Stutes’ six-year term (2015-2020) interrupted a power structure that had held since at least the 1970s.
And while Stutes had spent 28 years as an ADA, the hard-nosed prosecutor-turned-DA was no conventional political figure. He didn’t operate by the old rules of loyalty and favoritism. Stutes ran the office on his own terms.
Determined to wipe clean the stain of a bribery scandal he inherited when he took over the office, Stutes weighed eliminating the district’s diversion program, but opted instead to make it more restrictive — a hedge against abuse.
After Stutes’ single term as district attorney, his successor, Landry, expanded the program while contracting with an exclusive set of vendors, drawing the scrutiny of federal investigators and, ultimately, another bribery scandal erupted.
Skinner, who himself seriously contemplated running for district attorney in the 2008 election, wonders whether the political consequences of corruption have changed. Scandals that once might have doomed an elected official, he suspects, no longer carry the same weight, as local politics increasingly reflect a national climate of diminished accountability.
In the dozen years since, Skinner has come to wonder whether the public’s response to corruption is a “collective group shrug,” marked by indifference. He believes voters may be increasingly willing to tolerate conduct that once would have been disqualifying.
That shift is not universal, however. In the 2023 mayor-president’s race, Monique Boulet defeated Josh Guillory after making corruption a central issue in her campaign.
For assistant district attorneys, challenging their boss carries risks that extend beyond the campaign itself, including the possibility of losing their jobs before a single vote is cast.
Those who maintain private practices could lose their positions in the DA’s office, along with the benefits (like healthcare) that come with them, while risking the professional fallout of a public campaign against their boss.
There is also a difference between wanting to lead a prosecutor’s office and wanting to run for political office, Authement says. “There are dozens of people that probably would serve really well in the job that have no interest in being in front of the public in that regard,” he says. “It takes a different type of person and ambition to run for a political office.”
Keith Stutes says he never planned to run for district attorney. The corruption within the office pushed him to do it.
Outside of the office, the three-parish region has no shortage of potential candidates for district attorney, but observers say those in the prime of their careers — a time when they are bringing in significant money to their households — may be reluctant to take a chance on campaigning for a job that would pay them $228,000 a year (a figure that includes benefits and state supplemental pay.) “Easily $500,000” is what some of the most successful criminal defense attorneys in Lafayette can expect to make, says one source.
Landry, for his part, insists voters are satisfied with his leadership.
“We’ve been all over Lafayette, Vermilion and Acadia parishes, and people everywhere tell us we are doing a good job,” Landry tells The Current in a text message. He maintains that crime is the lowest it has been in decades, and says he intends “to make the 15th Judicial District even safer over the next six years.”
Former federal prosecutor Janice Hebert offers a different way for voters dissatisfied with both candidates to weigh their choices: consider how long each might remain in office.
“If you are dissatisfied with the track records of both candidates, you should vote for the one more likely to spend less time in the position,” Hebert says.
“Don Landry at age 80 will hold the office for six years or less if he retires. Mr. Earles, if elected, will likely be the DA for decades, running as a powerful incumbent. I will use my vote to maintain the status quo for the shortest time possible, and give the community an opportunity to develop better candidates for the next election.”
Earles, 59, says he would serve a maximum of two six-year terms if elected, putting him at 71 when he leaves office.
“Two terms, that would be it. Absolutely,” Earles tells The Current.
