A 78-year-old woman from Mandeville has been sentenced to 22 years in prison for trying to kill her attorney.
Prosecutors argued that Patricia Currie should get the maximum sentence of 50 years, while her attorneys sought the minimum of 10 years. Judge Alan Zaunbrecher of 22nd Judicial District Court settled on a 22-year sentence. Currie was 75 when she raised a loaded shotgun toward Keith Couture in 2016. Couture had represented the woman in a bankruptcy case.
Couture testified that Currie showed up at his office when he was alone, and he found her sitting in the lobby wearing latex gloves and plastic grocery bags on her feet. She had a towel across her lap. When he asked why she was there, she said she had come to kill him, showed him the shotgun under the towel and raised it, but he wrestled it away and called the Sheriff's Office.
Deputies found the gun was loaded and that she had four additional shells in her undergarments. A St. Tammany Parish jury convicted Currie in August of attempted second-degree murder, which carries a minimum sentence of 10 years.
Currie testified that she was just trying to scare Couture.