ONE OF THE "ANIMALS"

From AP and The Washington Post:

KENNER, La. -- A 73-year-old diabetic grandmother and church elder who fled Katrina's floodwaters for the safety of a hotel ended up in prison instead for more than two weeks -- all over a bite of food.

Police in this New Orleans suburb arrested Merlene Maten the day after the hurricane on charges she took $63.50 in goods from a looted deli. Though never before in trouble with the law, her bail was set at a stiff $50,000 and she was shipped away to a state penitentiary....

Despite intervention from the nation's largest senior lobby, volunteer lawyers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and even a private attorney, the family fought a futile battle for 16 days to get her freed.

Then, hours after her plight was featured in an Associated Press story, a local judge on Thursday ordered Maten freed on her own recognizance...

Defense attorney Daniel Becnel, family members and witnesses said police snared Maten in the parking lot of a hotel after floodwaters swamped her New Orleans home. She had paid for her room with a credit card and followed authorities' instructions to pack extra food, they said.

She was retrieving a piece of sausage from the cooler in her car and planned to grill it so she and her husband, Alfred, could eat, according to her defenders....

The family thinks cops may have been frustrated because they were having trouble catching real looters in the area. Not that it matters -- $50,000 bail and two-plus weeks in a Louisiana penitentiary for a sausage?

By the way, Kenner is where David Duke held a white-supremacist conference in 2004. Holocaust denier David Irving gave a talk at the North Kenner Library in 1994.

Merlene Maten looks like this:



Draw your own conclusions.