[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----LA.

[Rick Halperin]

Dec. 12



LOUISIANA:

Louisiana prosecutors bend the rules again seeking a death sentence: James 
Varney


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 1st 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.

(source: James Varney, New Orleans Times-Picayune)