ST. FRANCISVILLE – Prosecutors laid out new arguments Thursday against two ankle-monitor companies and two of their employees, alleging their failure to act contributed to the 2021 murder of Peggy Rayburn.

Inside the West Feliciana Parish Courthouse, District Attorney Sam D’Aquilla argued that American Electronic Monitoring, AEM of Louisiana, and workers from each company ignored multiple violations by Rayburn’s estranged husband, Marshall Rayburn, who was out on bond and required to wear an ankle monitor.

According to prosecutors, Rayburn repeatedly drove by his wife’s home, a violation that should have triggered immediate action.

“He parked across the street from the house, and he walked over and he covered the ankle monitor up with aluminum foil,” D’Aquilla said.

Despite clear alerts, he says the companies failed to notify law enforcement.

“Ankle monitor was sending reports back to the company, and the company knew where he was. They knew that he was in a restricted area,” D’Aquilla explained.

Thursday’s hearing centered on whether the state could use Matthew Dennis with the Assured Supervision Accountability Program as an expert witness to explain how proper monitoring should work and where the system failed.

“The whole point is the monitoring company was not monitoring him, and he was not monitoring other people,” D’Aquilla said.

Prosecutors argued Dennis could help show the jury what oversight should look like.

“We would like to have an expert sit on the stand and say the monitoring company, the owner, and the employee did not do their job,” the DA said.

D’Aquilla noted that at the time of the murder, Louisiana had no clear standards governing how ankle-monitoring companies were supposed to operate.

“They didn’t really have any standards or any laws to go by telling them how to operate,” he said.

The judge ruled that Dennis could not be qualified as an expert witness, at least for now. D’Aquilla says he plans to appeal that decision.

The trial is currently set for January 12, but the appeal could delay it.

Since the Rayburn case, Louisiana lawmakers passed a 2024 law requiring ankle-monitoring companies to report violations like Rayburn’s to law enforcement within four minutes or face fines and possible jail time.