Charles Jacobs

Judge Jacobs is the son of Edward Craney Jacobs (born August 1943), the dean emeritus of Liberal Arts and a former professor of English at Louisiana Tech University in Ruston. He received the Bronze Star while serving in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. His mother, the former Karen Rae Langpap (born August 1941), formerly of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is an English professor at Louisiana Tech. Both of his parents received their terminal degrees from Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, where they resided at the time of Jacobs' birth.

Edward Charles Jacobs, known as Charles Jacobs (born May 13, 1970), is a lawyer from Springhill, Louisiana, who is one of the six judges, all Republicans except for one vacancy, of the Louisiana 26th Judicial District Court, encompassing neighboring Bossier and Webster parishes in the northwestern corner of his state. Jacobs ran without opposition to succeed the retiring Division D judge, John M. Robinson, in the nonpartisan blanket primary held on November 4, 2014, in conjunction with general elections in the other forty-nine states.

Jacobs is married to the former Melanie Jane McConnell (born November 16, 1971), a special education supervisor for the Webster Parish School Board. She is the daughter of Lynn Williamson McConnell of Norwood in East Feliciana Parish and Robert Morris McConnell (1946-2014), a Louisiana Tech graduate and a banker originally from Clinton, also in East Feliciana Parish in southeastern Louisiana.

Jacobs was for fifteen years the city attorney for Springhill and also similarly represented Cullen, and Sarepta in Webster Parish. In 2003, the Webster Parish Police Jury considered appointing Jacobs to the board of the North Webster Industrial Park to replace the chairman, Eugene Eason, a Republican who served briefly as a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1991. Two jurors, including Charles Odom of Minden, whose wife, Patti Cook Odom, ran unsuccessfully against Eason for state representative, claimed that Eason had been unwilling to cooperate with other industrial park members and municipal and parish officials in the administration of the facility. However, jurors voted 8-2 to retain Eason in the position. "The park speaks for itself. It is growing and successful. We've done a lot and we have a lot of good things on the horizon," Eason said. Eason died in 2007.

Jacobs has been a public defender, an assistant under District Attorney Schuyler Marvin, and represented clients before the Louisiana Circuit Court of Appeal for the Second District and the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, both in Shreveport. Prior to becoming judge, Jacobs had also maintained a legal office in Minden. In 2004 and 2005, Jacobs represented three landowners near the Minden Airport who challenged a municipal plan to expropriate their lands for airport expansion. The landowners claimed the expansion would not benefit the city in any meaningful way and that the amount offered was not clearly defined among ten impacted property owners.

Jacobs has three siblings, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Andrew. Andrew Jacobs, a graduate of Louisiana State University and Louisiana State University Law Center in Baton Rouge, has been since 2009 an assistant district attorney for the 26th Judicial District Court.

Jacobs' educational institutions are unavailable. Out of law school in Baton Rouge and admitted to the bar in 1996, his first job was in John Robinson's law office in Springhill before Robinson became state court judge in 1999. Robinson subsequently swore Jacobs into office as his successor district judge on January 1, 2015.

John Jacobs, the only child of Judge and Mrs. Jacobs, graduated in 2017 from North Webster High School in Springhill, where he was a tennis player. The Jacobses are United Methodists.

In 2017, plaintiffs James Wheat and Danny Brinson, after their arrests in Bossier City for violating a state statute forbidding panhandling, filled a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana against Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Curtis Whittington and all judges of the 26th Judicial District Court, including Chief Judge Parker Self and Judge Jacobs. Wheat and Brinson allege that Bossier Parish unjustly jails defendants who cannot pay for bail or the required $40 fee to the office of the public defender. Nor does Bossier Parish permit defendants to seek a lowering of the bail amount, which is instead automatically set by the court. The suit claims that the parish has for years violated a "bedrock principle of our legal system that a person cannot be detained or imprisoned solely for their inability to pay a fee. Such an incarceration violates the substantive due process and equal protection clauses of the Constitution.”

Jacobs' other judicial colleagues are Jeff R. Thompson, Mike Nerren, and Michael O. Craig, and until 2017 Jeff Cox, who joined the Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit. Cox was named a defendant in the Wheat-Brinson suit because he was a member of the 26th Judicial District Court at the time of the panhandling case.