John Milkovich

John Charles Milkovich (born May 1957) is an attorney in Shreveport, Louisiana, who is a Democrat member of the Louisiana State Senate. On January 11, 2016, he succeeded the term-limited District 38 Moderate Republican Sherri Smith Cheek Buffington, who completed three terms in the chamber, having first been elected in 2003.

Background

A native of rural Roundup in Musselshell County in central Montana, young Milkovich worked on cattle ranches and in roofing and painting. He attended the University of Chicago. In 1979, he graduated from the University of Montana and thereafter the Louisiana State University Law Center in Baton Rouge, at which he worked on The Louisiana Law Review. He claims to have been committed to "working families" for more than a quarter century.

He and his wife, Carola, also a lawyer and a former teacher whom he wed in 1985, have a daughter, Sarah; the couple resides in Keithville in south Caddo Parish. He is an active member of the First Assembly of God Church in Shreveport under the prominent pastor Denny Duron. He has worked in Sunday school and the prison ministry.

Career

Milkovich won the senatorial general election on November 21, 2015, when he defeated the Republican Richard Burford of DeSoto Parish, a departing member of the Louisiana House of Representatives. Milkovich led with 15,665 votes (52.4 percent) to Burford's 14,206 (47.6 percent). In his campaign, Milkovich advocated conservative social and economic views in sharp contrast to his party.

In 1994, Milkovich and his wife were the attorneys in the case of James Marvin Monds (born December 1963), a former surgical technician at Barksdale Air Force Base, who won release after serving nearly nine years for the murder in 1985 of Vicki Thomas, who was raped, assaulted, and killed at a parking lot at a Bossier City high school. Monds became the key suspect when his vehicle, a Ford Bronco, was identified as the one at the scene of the murder. Monds testified that he had never met Thomas and had no knowledge of her death but had cut his hand while working on a flat tire the night of the crime. The Louisiana Supreme Court, which heard the case after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals recused itself, ruled that insufficient evidence, most of a circumstantial nature, existed to continue to incarcerate Monds. He was therefore declared "acquitted" and released. Milkovich accused the presiding judge in the case, Graydon K. Kitchens, Jr., of Minden in Webster Parish and then District Attorney Henry Newton Brown, Jr., of Bossier City, later a circuit judge, of having engaged in serious legal errors in the case. Milkovich accused Judge Kitchens of trying to block testimony which would have cleared Monds, and he accused Brown and Monds' former wife, Shea, of plotting the killing of Thomas. The charge against Brown was quickly repudiated by James Bullers, who succeeded Brown as district attorney of Bossier and Webster parishes: "The theory was and is so ridiculous that it's almost unbelievable. I personally believe that Milkovich is totally obsessed with Henry Brown. I really don't know if he believes it himself."

Fourteen years after the Monds case, Milkovich was an unsuccessful candidate in 2008 for Louisiana's 4th congressional district seat. He lost the Democratic nomination to then Caddo Parish District Attorney Paul Carmouche, who in turn was narrowly defeated in the runoff contest by Republican John Fleming, a physician from Minden. The seat is now held by Republican James Michael "Mike" Johnson of Benton in Bossier Parish.