BATON ROUGE — Commissioner Nicole Robinson ordered state Trooper James Jefferson III held without bond Wednesday after prosecutors cited repeated bond violations in his domestic violence case.
Harry Daniels, Jefferson’s attorney, said he was disappointed by the ruling and would ask the court to reconsider.
“I’m not sure how he can be held accountable for DTS’s failures,” Daniels said after the hearing.
DTS Monitoring, a court-approved bond monitoring company, was responsible for handling the GPS-tracking ankle monitor Jefferson was required to wear as a condition of being released on bond on April 2.
In that case, Jefferson had been arrested March 31 on aggravated second-degree battery, domestic abuse battery by strangulation, domestic abuse battery in the presence of minors, filing false public records and obstruction of justice.
After he was released, the district attorney’s office said it provided to DTS Monitoring a list of addresses where a protective order prohibited Jefferson from going. The ankle monitor should have been programmed to alert DTS if Jefferson went to any of those “exclusion zones.”
Prosecutors said DTS failed to properly program Jefferson’s ankle monitor with those exclusion zones and the failure went unnoticed for more than a month.
When the error was discovered, agents from the state Bureau of Investigation used search warrants to get raw data on Jefferson’s movements from the device manufacturer. Analysis of minute-by-minute latitude and longitude data showed repeated instances of Jefferson going to two addresses – his church and his children’s coach’s home – that were forbidden.
Jefferson’s estranged wife has worked at the church for years, prosecutor Kadence Huber of the attorney general’s office said.
Daniels countered that Jefferson’s wife had been asked to step down from her role at the church after Jefferson’s first arrest in February when the couple’s problems became the subject of news coverage.
When the exclusion zone form was completed, he said, presumably with input from Jefferson’s wife, it listed a home and a work address that records show Jefferson never visited. The church and the coach’s house were listed as “other” addresses. Jefferson did not have access to that form and did not interpret the protective order as barring him from attending his church. He also went to Bible study at the church and met individually with the pastor for counseling that was a condition of his bond.
The protective order specified that he should not go to his estranged wife’s home or workplace.
“He’s not trying to violate the order,” Daniels said.
Huber said that if Jefferson was regularly attending church, Bible study and counseling at the church, more than the five observed violations would have been recorded in the weeks since he was released on bond.
Robinson said she granted Jefferson bond in April after seeing videos and hearing allegations she found “disturbing” and “very serious.”
Even with the confusion over the bond monitor, “you still bear some responsibility, Mr. Jefferson,” she said.
“You have violated your conditions. You have, and there’s just no getting around it,” she said.
Jefferson attended the hearing in a standard orange prison uniform. He has been jailed since he surrendered Friday, the day after he was indicted on eight charges related to alleged violence toward his wife in February, March and November 2025.
The charges include domestic abuse battery with a dangerous weapon with serious bodily injury, domestic abuse battery by strangulation, domestic abuse battery with child endangerment and malfeasance in office. He was charged the same day with five misdemeanor protective order violations tied to what prosecutors say was abuse of the system that family court orders some parents to use to communicate about child custody arrangements.
With regard to DTS Monitoring, Robinson said she has “very serious concerns now” about the company’s actions. She asked the attorneys if either of them had subpoenaed someone from the company to be at the hearing. They had not.
Prosecutor Cassidy Smith told Robinson that the attorney general’s office would be examining that problem further but could not elaborate in court.
Daniel Banguel, the chief executive officer of DTS Monitoring, said after the hearing that the ankle monitor was programmed properly and he was unsure why prosecutors said it wasn’t. He said he had evaluated Jefferson’s alleged violations, even talking to the coach whose address was one of the exclusion zones. Banguel said he learned that Jefferson was there for a couple of minutes to pick up his children. He said the alleged violations at the church were not significant and did not make it necessary for him to alert court personnel.
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