Dr. C. Ryan Haygood (center of table) makes a point to then-Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Dan Martiny during his testimony of alleged Louisiana Dental Board corruption on April 4, 2018.
About once a week, we take a peek at the features being viewed by casual visitors to our blog. Typically, the referrers to those posts are search engines, with Google being the most prominent of those search engines. It seems virtually every day that goes by, multiple Google queries are made for “Ryan Haygood” which, in turn, then take the searchers to our extensive feature on Haygood of almost a year ago. Since we’re nearing the one-year anniversary of that feature, we thought we’d take some time to update everyone on Haygood’s latest courtroom travails.
We launched last year’s feature on Haygood after a reader made observations entailing our pre-Haygood feature. That feature entailed Shelly Sebastian’s civil service appeal blowing up in her face, which further demonstrates the incredible inefficiencies and outdated treatment afforded to Louisiana Civil Service employees who would be fired in a nanosecond were they employed in the private sector.
One reader of that feature, “Bob,” opted to make a little constructive criticism of it. Specifically, “Bob” assessed Sound Off Louisiana‘s Burns as, “the worst writer on the planet.” “Bob” then admonished Burns to, “work on your headlines,” in stating that, “they suck.” “Bob” then further admonished Burns to, “write stories that people actually care about.”
If “Bob” continues to follow our blog, we hope he’s a tad more impressed than he was a year ago given that we got very strong interest in our breaking of this Ronald Greene feature and also this feature of some foulmouthed Louisiana State Troopers bragging of an “ass ‘whoppin” they’d previously administered during an arrest. Since both those features garnered international attention, we hope “Bob” feels we’ve heeded his advice and have published features that more people “actually care about.”
At any rate, as long-time subscribers may recall, we did in fact immediately heed “Bob’s” admonition and polled a few of our most loyal subscribers and, as we mentioned on the Haygood-linked feature above, they indicated it had been a while since we’d done a feature on Haygood. Accordingly, we published the major feature linked above to exhaustively cover Haygood from the day he graduated from Dental School until the date of our feature in early April of 2020.
For this feature, since newcomers to our blog may not wish to take the time to read the entirety of our feature of a year ago and thereby engage in what we readily admit to being a very, very deep dive into Haygood’s travails entailing the Louisiana State Board of Dentistry, and based on the encouraging feedback we received on our recent bullet-point comprehensive coverage of former Louisiana State Police Commissioner Calvin Braxton’s travails, we’re going to deploy the same format for Haygood. Here’s a table for Haygood with bullet points similar to that produced for Braxton:
| Date (Timeframe) | Event Transpiring |
|---|---|
| 2000-2005. | Graduated from LSU Dentistry School, relocated to North Carolina to work at Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem and then operate a private dental practice in Wake Forest. |
| December, 2005. | Opens dental practice in hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana. |
| July, 2007. | Louisiana State Board of Dentistry (LSBD) launches investigation of Haygood entailing allegations of performing and charging patients for unnecessary dental procedures. |
| 2010. | LSBD, based on investigative findings, revokes Haygood's license to practice dentistry in Louisiana. |
| September, 2012. | Citing procedural errors by the LSBD, the Louisiana 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overturns the revocation of Haygood's dental license. |
| February 13, 2013. | Haygood files Federal lawsuit against several LSBD members, its investigator, and a couple of hygienists. |
| March 16, 2016. | Haygood's Federal lawsuit is dismisssed. |
| March 14, 2018. | Defendants named in Haygood's Federal lawsuit file motion to assess their attorney fees against Haygood. |
| March 14, 2019. | Defendants' Motion for Attorney Fees against Haygood is granted. |
| April 4, 2019. | Haygood files this motion asking the Federal Court to reconsider its ruling on assessing defendants' attorney fees against him. |
| May 17, 2019. | Haygood defendants assert to the Federal Court that their attorney fees approximate $115,000. |
| February 7, 2020. | Federal Judge issues this ruling denying Haygood's motion to reconsider assessing defendants' legal fees against him. |
| February 28, 2020. | Haygood appeals decision awarding attorneys fees to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (it was initially denied for lack of Subject Matter Jurisdiction because the amount of legal fees was not finalized via a judgment, but the filing was later supplemented once that amount was known). |
| August, 2021 | Court ultimately awards $270,661.80 in defense attorney fees against Haygood. |
| January 28, 2022 | Court reiterates the reasonableness of the attorney fees but stays enforcement pending Haygood's appeal before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal. |
Regarding the above table, here’s the first video referenced:
April 4, 2018 Senate testimony by Haygood alleging he was targeted by competing dentists to shut his dental practice down.
[Note: The linked litigation above was filed in Federal Court in the Western District of Louisiana on February 13, 2013.
That litigation is largely a regurgitation of litigation filed in the 1st JDC in Louisiana state court on September 26, 2011 with additional defendants
added and allegations of violations of Federal Constitutional Rights, most notably Title 42, Section 1983.]
And here is the second video referenced:
May 8, 2019 Senate Commerce Committee hearing at which Sen. Cortez admonishes Sen. John Milkovich not to declare folk guilty who have not been convicted of crimes. He also expressed his concerns at Haygood’s disparaging testimony the week before entailing the Smith letter, which Haygood asserted “slandered” him and was “full of lies.” Meanwhile, Haygood had to be defended in absentia by Milkovich, who emphasized that Haygood had incurred “hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees” fighting what he perceives as “LSBD corruption.”
So, there’s the latest on Shreveport dentist Dr. C. Ryan Haygood. Since there is no evidence that attorneys for defendants in his Federal litigation have gotten around to drafting a final order to award their attorney fees against Haygood, we can’t speak for them, but we believe we’d be asking, “What’s the holdup?”
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