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Misty Roberts made history in DeRidder, Louisiana — the first woman ever elected mayor of the Beauregard Parish city. This month she walked out of the Vernon Parish jail after serving just ninety days, convicted of felonies involving her son’s sixteen-year-old friend.
The case broke open in July 2024. According to investigators, the sixteen-year-old told family members about what happened at a pool party at the mayor’s home — and a state investigation followed. Louisiana State Police arrested Roberts two days later. The charges: felony carnal knowledge of a juvenile and unlawful conduct with a minor involving the teenage friend of her own son.
Roberts denied everything from the start. Her attorney called the prosecution politically motivated. But in March 2026, a Beauregard Parish jury heard the evidence — and needed less than one hour of deliberation to convict her on both felony counts. Jurors don’t come back that fast unless the proof is overwhelming.
Then came the sentencing, and this is where the story caught fire nationally. Prosecutors asked for seventeen years in prison. Judge Kent Savoie sentenced the former mayor to ninety days in the parish jail, a five thousand dollar fine, and two five-year suspended sentences running alongside five years of probation.
The conditions of that probation are strict: drug screenings and court-ordered psychological therapy, and any violation can put her behind bars for up to ten years. She was also ordered onto the state’s registry back in March, immediately after the conviction — a designation she’ll carry for years.
On September 7, less than three months after her sentencing, Roberts walked out of the Vernon Parish jail — a free woman, a convicted felon, and a registered offender.
The community’s reaction has been fierce. The victim’s mother didn’t hold back, calling Roberts “a predator with hair extensions” outside the courthouse. One DeRidder resident told local reporters the sentence was “a slap on the wrist for a child predator.” Prosecutors had sought seventeen years. The math people keep doing: seventeen years requested, ninety days served. That gap is the entire story.
There’s also the question everyone in DeRidder is asking: how did a sitting mayor end up here at all? Roberts served on the city council before winning the mayor’s office, and her 2022 election made local history. Now her name appears in the same sentence as some of the worst official misconduct cases Louisiana has seen.
After the sentencing, the Beauregard Parish District Attorney did something rare: filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider — and give her more time. The court refused on August 31. But at that same hearing, Judge Savoie admitted something bigger. He explained that when he picked the ninety-day sentence, he’d asked for a list of similar cases — more than thirty of them — and leaned on it. What he’d been handed, he said, were plea-deal outcomes, not jury-trial verdicts like Roberts’s. “I made an assumption, and that assumption was wrong. I was wrong in that respect.”
And then he declined to change a thing — saying he would not punish Roberts for exercising her right to a trial instead of taking a plea. So the sentence stands: ninety days, a five-thousand-dollar fine, five years of probation, the registry. As of this week she’s out of jail. Whether prosecutors revisit the case, or federal charges ever materialize, is an open question. What’s not open is the verdict: a jury took under sixty minutes to decide.
