Prosecutor juggles cases beset by delays and witness problems
The Times-Picayune
Posted by Gwen Filosa, staff writer
September 23, 2007 9:47PM
Assigned to represent the state of Louisiana at hearings in three separate high-profile murder cases — all set for the same morning — Francis X. deBlanc III braved a thicket of criminal justice dysfunction all by himself on Friday.
The veteran trial lawyer, who returned to the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office in June after a lengthy stretch in private civil law, trudged through a day of slings and arrows.
As one of the few seasoned lawyers in an office plagued by chronic turnover, deBlanc had to juggle three of the city’s most sensational post-Katrina murder cases:
– A teen accused of blasting away at a family traveling in a car, killing a popular musician.
– A mother accused of giving her son the gun he used to shoot another Central City boy.
– A Central City man accused of massacring five teens as they sat in a sport utility vehicle in the predawn hours of a day in June 2006.
This was deBlanc’s work pile for the day: three cases beset by delays and witness problems, all of which cast New Orleans under a national microscope because of the merciless nature of the crimes.
As if that load weren’t enough, deBlanc, 35, soon found himself facing another kind of pressure that has increasingly weighed on Orleans Parish prosecutors: judges fed up that the overworked, understaffed lawyers of District Attorney Eddie Jordan’s office are holding up the courts’ dockets.
And this time, it got personal.
Shuttling among three cases — with three different judges, on three different floors — deBlanc found himself the target of an arrest warrant issued by Judge Julian Parker, who was exasperated by deBlanc’s absence from his courtroom while the prosecutor scurried around the courthouse, attending to the other cases.
Judge Lynda Van Davis indicated she was spoiling to do the same, though she never issued a warrant.
The threat of being held in contempt of court tightened the squeeze on deBlanc. In addition to negotiating vexing legal issues in a triad of heinous and convoluted murder cases, he now faced the possibility of getting dragged into one of the hearings by a police escort and bound in handcuffs. At worst, he could wind up in jail.
That result would have been extreme even for the courthouse at Tulane and Broad, but the frustrations and headaches of deBlanc’s day were hardly unusual for Orleans Parish prosecutors at Criminal District Court.
Such problems help explain why so much often appears to go wrong there, and why there is so much turnover in the ranks of prosecutors, even the experienced, relatively well-paid ones whom Jordan has hired for his Violent Offender Unit.
Five lawyers have quit the unit in recent weeks, most recently Cate Bartholomew, one of Jordan’s most experienced prosecutors, who joined the office about three months ago specifically to work on the elite unit dedicated to cases involving homicides, rapes and shootings.
In a letter to the editor published in Friday’s Times-Picayune, Bartholomew described repeatedly being “placed in a position of defending my office’s failures” before a judge.
“I have had enough,” she wrote. “My physical health and emotional well-being are not worth $80,000. Neither is my professional reputation.”
Questioning key witness
DeBlanc’s Friday had begun in Judge Raymond Bigelow’s second-floor courtroom, with the prosecutor questioning the key witness — a 15-year-old girl — in the murder of Dinerral Shavers, the Hot 8 Brass Band drummer killed in December.
Shavers, 25, caught a fatal bullet to the head while driving his family along Dumaine Street the evening of Dec. 28. The crime helped inspire thousands of citizens to march on City Hall a few weeks later to demand action to quell the city’s escalating violence.
The young witness had already evaded the state’s grasp once. In June, Jordan’s office dropped the charges against David Bonds after the girl’s mother refused to let her daughter identify a killer in a city where witnesses have good reason to fear retribution.
In Bigelow’s courtroom Friday, Bonds, 18, sat in his gray, jail-issued clothes while deBlanc questioned the teenage witness, who clearly was agitated. In an attempt to comfort her, Bigelow cleared his courtroom and locked the door.
A group of reporters, lawyers and court watchers waited outside until the girl finished answering questions from deBlanc and two defense lawyers.
While deBlanc worked that case, Parker had been stewing in Section G, waiting to hear pleadings in the case of the mother who supposedly provided a gun to her son. Fed up with deBlanc’s truancy, Parker issued a warrant for the prosecutor’s arrest.
“Everyone wants me,” deBlanc told a deputy who came into Bigelow’s Section I courtroom at midday with orders to deliver him to Parker’s section immediately. “Lynda (Van Davis) is threatening to throw me in jail. There’s one of me.”
‘I’ll pray for you, Francis’
Indeed, Van Davis had been at work on the third floor in Section B, where the suspect in the Central City massacre of five teens, Michael Anderson, 20, also sat waiting for deBlanc to arrive to take care of motions in his first-degree murder case, which was still pending a trial date.
Although Van Davis didn’t go as far as Parker, deBlanc had heard through the courthouse grapevine that she was considering issuing a warrant to compel his presence in her courtroom: a somewhat common threat made by jurists trying to reach the end of their daily dockets.
Back in Bigelow’s courtroom, the deputy listened to deBlanc’s rejoinder and offered the only help he could: “I’ll pray for you, Francis,” he said, walking off.
As deBlanc made his way out of Bigelow’s courtroom, the judge wished him well. But he offered no help in soothing the prosecutor’s relations with other judges.
“Once you’re out the door, you’re on your own,” Bigelow told deBlanc as Jordan, the district attorney, calmly sat behind his prosecutors in the front row of the courtroom for several hours. He remained silent as the pressure rained down on one of his top prosecutors.
In his courtroom downstairs, Parker continued to fume over deBlanc’s tardiness. But the judge would have to keep waiting. Despite Parker’s threat to have deBlanc brought before him in handcuffs, another murder case beckoned.
‘Waiting all day’
As with the case against Bonds, the suspect in the Shavers killing, deBlanc needed to salvage the case against Anderson, which the DA had dropped when the sole eyewitness strayed from prosecutors’ reach in July. Jordan’s team revived the case only after the witness turned up as the star of a news conference staged by the New Orleans Police Department, vowing that she had wanted all along to take the witness stand against Anderson.
Entering Van Davis’ courtroom, deBlanc was ready to energize the case’s second life. Instead, he got a lifeline of his own.
Bobby Freeman, deBlanc’s supervisor in the Violent Offender Unit, was already in court, ready to handle the Anderson case. So as Freeman prepared for a hearing during which he would hand over crime scene photos to the defense, deBlanc ventured off to face more vexing issues in the murder case against Clarence Johnson, 17, and his mother, Vanessa Johnson.
Of course, the most immediate issue was an irritated Parker.
“I’ve been stuck in Section I,” deBlanc told the judge when he arrived after 2 p.m., dashing in from the antique elevator and pulling along his wheeled file carrier.
DeBlanc told the judge he needed a few minutes to confer with the detective on the Johnsons’ case.
“DeBlanc, we’ve been waiting all day for this hearing,” Parker said as the victims’ family watched from the audience. “After all I’ve been through with you on this case, you haven’t spoken with the detective?”
“I’ve not spoken to him today,” deBlanc corrected.
When deBlanc exited for a brief huddle with the officer, Parker shared his ire with a bunch of defense lawyers.
“I can’t even get the DAs to approach,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here all day.”
‘Fear of retaliation’
DeBlanc’s day in Parker’s court didn’t improve much. In proceeding with murder charges against the Johnsons, who are both accused in the murder of 17-year-old Robert Dawson in February, his case against the mother — accused of giving her son a gun and telling him to use it — suffered a blow.
The state’s only cooperating eyewitness — who had been in jail, held on a $250,000 “material witness bond” enacted by Jordan’s office to keep him from disappearing — testified that Clarence Johnson killed his friend Dawson on the evening of Feb. 7 after the pair had scrapped on a basketball court outside the Guste public housing complex.
But the witness, a young man in handcuffs and jailhouse orange, contradicted the detective who had taken the stand right before him, saying he had never told police that he watched Clarence’s mother hand him a gun with the instructions to “go get them all”: a story that has become gospel in the minds of detectives and the public. That alleged exchange, relayed by police the day of the shooting, represents the linchpin of the murder charges against Johnson’s mother.
Another young man from the neighborhood witnessed Dawson’s killing, but his mother told police she would never let her son speak to detectives, let alone testify.
Not in this neighborhood, the mother said.
“For fear of retaliation, for where they live at,” Detective Ron Ruiz said on the witness stand, having waited almost six hours to testify while deBlanc was upstairs on the Shavers murder case.
Attorney eludes arrest
Parker freed the witness to Robert Dawson’s killing from jail after deBlanc retracted the material-witness bond meant to keep the young man from drifting away.
And deBlanc ended up escaping arrest. Parker’s warrant had become moot the moment he entered the courtroom.
In the end the Johnsons and Bonds were both scheduled to go on trial in November. Anderson’s case got stuck on pretrial appeals and was slated for more hearings next month.
In the face of a harrowing schedule, deBlanc appeared remarkably cool-headed as Friday morning faded into late afternoon, and work on all three cases got done.
His schedule this week includes more hearings in murder cases in the cavernous old courthouse at Tulane and Broad.
Gwen Filosa can be reached at gfilosa@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3304.
