It took a jury just five hours Monday to send a former Louisiana sheriff to prison on eight separate sex crime charges including incest.
Jack Strain, 58, was indicted by a grand jury in 2019 on four counts of aggravated rape, two counts of aggravated incest, one count of sexual battery, and one count of indecent behavior with a juvenile. An aggravated rape conviction carries a mandatory life sentence in Louisiana.
Strain was found guilty on all counts.
A longtime lawman, Strain served two decades as St. Tammany Parish Sheriff. Some of the allegations were for crimes that occurred during his tenure in power but some stretched back much farther, even to his teen years.
“You need to see the complete picture of who (Strain) is,” assistant district attorney Elizabeth Authement said during the trial. “Jack Strain was the ultimate manipulator … an expert predator who thought he could get away with it forever.”
Five different male accusers gave emotional testimony over the course of the two-week trial, illustrating Strain’s pattern of abuse and manipulation through vivid testimony that described multiple rapes and molestations.
The accusers were not identified in court because of the nature of the crimes, but three were said to be related to Strain.
“He had an insatiable taste for something that is the most forbidden: Children. Boys. His own relatives,” assistant district attorney Collin Sims said during closing arguments, emphasizing his words more and more as he spoke. “There is no doubt – zero – that he is guilty of every single act up there.”
“I’m never going to forget the phrase ‘let’s have a taste,’” Sims said with a shudder, recalling one particularly lurid piece of testimony.
Strain’s defense strategy was to attack the credibility of the accusers, two of which were convicted felons that defense attorney Billy Gibbens labeled “walking, talking reasonable doubt.” He dismissed the other two accusers as having been forced into testifying against Strain by the FBI.
“This has been a government manufactured case against Jack Strain using coercion and manipulation,” Gibbens said, but the defense closed their argument without calling a single witness including Strain himself.
After the trial though, St. Tammany District Attorney Warren Montgomery said there were even more victims who lobbied accusations at Strain, but that Montgomery felt they already had what they needed to send Strain to prison for life, saying testimony in these types of cases can be very painful for the victims, according to WWL-TV.
Strain will officially receive his mandatory life sentence on January 18, 2022.
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This story was updated on Tuesday, November 9, 2021.