The Times-Picayune: Louisiana prosecutors bend the rules again seeking a death sentence: James Varney

[Stefanie Faucher]

http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/12/louisiana_prosecutors_bend_the.html#incart_river

Louisiana prosecutors bend the rules again seeking a death sentence: James Varney
By James Varney,
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA)
December 12, 2014 at 2:23 PM, updated December 12, 2014 at 2:33 PM

There's something's rotten in Caddo Parish. Prosecutors there have been at it again, "it" meaning withholding evidence in a death penalty case.

On Thursday, Judge Jerome M. Winsberg, the retired New Orleans judge handling the Angola 5 trials in West Feliciana, issued a ruling that provided the latest twist to that never-ending saga.

After more than $10 million and nearly 15 years, one would think the entire Angola 5 matter would be resolved. The case involves the killing of an Angola guard, Capt. David Knapps, in a 1999 escape attempt. It lingers not because of real questions about the five defendants' guilt or innocence but because the state so desperately wants to kill them.

In the case of David Brown, Winsberg held that prosecutors withheld a confession from another member of the Angola 5, Barry Edge, that put the onus of Knapps' killing on Edge. Brown's sentencing might have gone differently, Winsberg concluded, if the confession had been provided to the defense.

In other words, if the prosecutors had followed the law.

Brown did not get a new trial, as Winsberg found the evidence of Brown's involvement in the escape attempt sufficient. But Brown will now have a new sentencing hearing.

Why this lust to get a death sentence? Why is it not enough to send a man to Angola forever?

Even those who favor capital punishment must acknowledge it is one thing to seek it and quite another to do so with illegal tactics. Surely even death penalty proponents see that too often Louisiana has seen capital cases unravel because of prosecutorial misconduct.

In New Orleans, no less an authority than the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on the matter. The justices rebuked former District Attorney Harry Connick's office for trying to kill a man while burying evidence that man may not have done the crime.

That doesn't seem to have fixed the problem, though. It's past time Louisiana got serious here. Prosecutors who engage in such unethical practices should, at a minimum, be stripped of their license to practice law. In egregious cases of misconduct - which is to say, those cases when prosecutors should have known or suspected the defendant was not guilty - I see no reason why a prosecutor should stand above the law. Arrest them.

Brown's case does not appear to reach that level, although two of the prosecutors involved in his Angola 5 trial were fired in July for unrelated reasons. Caddo Parish Assistant District Attorneys Hugo Holland and Lea Hall falsified paperwork the DA's office used to buy automatic weapons, a bizarre matter that wound up costing taxpayers nearly $450,000 in settlement costs.

That incident does color one's perception of the Brown case, however. Holland and Hall were a part of a district attorney's office that sounds almost unhinged, according to an account published in The Shreveport Times. A whistleblower in the office described prosecutors equipping their rides with sirens and wearing SWAT gear and acting generally like they fancied themselves vigilantes rather than professionals.

Nor is this the first time we've seen something sinister from Caddo Parish prosecutors. In March, Glenn Ford was freed after 30 years on death row. It was Caddo Parish prosecutors who sent Ford there even though they had a pretty good idea at the beginning Ford didn't commit murder.

In what moral universe is it proper for the people to be represented by such unthinking cowboys when the issue involves seeking another person's death? This is justice run amok; this is purely vengeance.

The hurt imposed by these miscarriages isn't limited to the man staring at execution. We like to think we live under a rule of law, and that those laws are administered by men and women who take seriously oaths to protect us.

But once again we have prosecutors operating like outlaws. No one is safe in that environment. It need not be a capital crime. Why should any person feel the system is fair when we have so many instances of prosecutorial misconduct?

There's something diabolical about state-sanctioned killing in bad faith. Death penalty proponents have to be uncomfortable with that. Decent and honorable prosecutors doing good things for us have to be embarrassed and upset that these violations of defendants' rights occur with such regularity and in different parishes.

There's a way out of this intolerable situation, though. Abolish the death penalty. Whether one favors or opposes it, there is no question it is not being properly and fairly adjudicated in Louisiana.
 
James Varney can be reached at jva...@nola.com.


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Stefanie Faucher
Communications Director
8th Amendment Project
sfau...@8thamendment.org
Mobile 510.393.4549
8thamendment.org