Citizen Crime Watch Blog

Man freed by judge gets 25 years in drug case
Thursday, June 26, 2008
From staff reports

A New Orleans drug dealer who was released from jail by a former Criminal District Court judge — despite having a cache of weapons, drugs and $186,000 in his home when arrested — was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison on Wednesday.

Brian Expose, 35, had pleaded guilty to five drug-trafficking and gun charges last fall. He was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier.

Following his March 2006 arrest by the New Orleans Police Department, Expose became a prime example of the questionable release practices of former state Judge Charles Elloie, who released Expose on his own recognizance within 24 hours after the raid on his Algiers house.

Elloie retired from the bench last year after he was indefinitely suspended by the Louisiana Supreme Court in fall 2006, in part because of his practices of lowering bond for suspects, including for violent criminals.

Orleans judge promises two death warrants on Monday
by Gwen Filosa, The Times-Picayune
Monday June 16, 2008, 3:05 PM

Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Frank Marullo today said he will sign two execution warrants in separate capital cases on Monday, including the convicted accomplice in the 1995 Kim Anh triple murders that left a police officer and two siblings dead.

Marullo, the most senior judge at the Tulane Avenue courthouse, said he didn’t plan on ordering two convicted murderers to die by lethal injection on one day, but scheduling conflicts left him no choice.

The judge announced his plans today at a hearing scheduled for Rogers LaCaze, who remains on death row at the Angola state prison after an Orleans jury condemned him to die for the armed robbery turned triple killing at the eastern New Orleans restaurant. …

LaCaze was convicted, along with former police officer Antoinette Frank, in the gunshot deaths of Officer Ronald Williams,25, and siblings Cuong Vu, 21, and Ha Vu, 17, at the Kim Anh restaurant where all of them, including Frank, had worked. The separate juries heard graphic eyewitness testimony from one of the Vu children who recounted how she hid in a freezer and helplessly watched Frank and LaCaze storm through the family-owned restaurant flashing guns between sounds of gunfire. …

Frank, 37, remains on death row at the women’s prison at St. Gabriel, awaiting the state’s lethal injection needle for the shooting deaths of New Orleans police officer Ronald Williams, 25, and siblings Cuong Vu, 21, and Ha Vu, 17, at the Kim Anh restaurant where all of them, including Frank, had worked.

If Marullo indeed signs a pair of execution warrants Monday - the second is for convicted murderer Juan Smith of New Orleans - it will be the judge’s third death warrant of the year, in a parish that in recent history has been relcutant to condemn convicts to die by lethal injection.

Orleans Parish juries have sent 38 convicts to death row in the past 30 years, the state Supreme Court has said.

Smith, 33, awaits the lethal injeciton needle for a triple murder in eastern New Orleans on Feb. 5, 1995. The Kim Anh murders took place before 2 a.m. on March 4, 1995.

Smith was condemned to die after a trial in 1996 for the nightmare that police found on Morrison Avenue: Andre Smith and Tangie Thompson were found face down in their own blood inside a den of the New Orleans home. Beneath Thompson was her son, Devyn Thompson, 12, also shot to death. Prosecutors called it an attempted robbery turned bloodbath and a jury unanimously agreed that the death penalty was the proper punishment. …

Prosecutors haven’t asked for any death warrants in the Kim Anh case. Instead, Marullo has been acting on his own, coupling requests for post-conviction relief with execution orders. Marullo’s first such death warrant this year, issued for Antoinette Frank, was canceled by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Marullo signed Frank’s death warrant April 22 as the Williams family watched in court. Marullo said then that the 13-year-old case has been “well-litigated” and that he was following the law, which requires that a capital case be “handled expeditiously.”

The state prison at Angola, where all executions take place, didn’t expect the July 15 date for Frank to hold. Officials there said in April that they haven’t updated the “media witness” list for executions since the last time the prison held a lethal injection six years ago.

Attorney Gary Clements, of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, appealed for more time, arguing the Marullo was ignoring the state law that allows a convicted murderer time to file a post-conviction appeal before receiving an execution date. Instead of a July execution, the state Supreme Court granted Frank an additional 90 days in which to file her appeals.

Clements can only represent Frank in this case, since to represent co-defendants in any criminal case is a classic conflict of interest.

The 90-day clock began on June 10 — the deadline that Marullo in April had given Frank to file her appeal at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, while signing her death warrant at the same time.

Louisiana last executed a convicted killer on May 10, 2002, at Angola. Leslie Dale Martin died by lethal injection for the rape and strangulation of Christina Burgin in Calcasieu Parish.

Louisiana has 85 convicts remain on death row. Frank is one of two women. They are housed at the state’s only women’s prison at St. Gabriel.

Clements has said that Frank is among 66 condemned inmates who have yet to exhaust their state appeals, which take place before a death row inmate may ask the federal system for a review.

An Orleans Parish jury hasn’t sent a convict to death row since 1997, when Phillip Anthony was condemned for the triple killing at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen in the French Quarter.

On Sept. 12, 1995, the Frank jury unanimously returned a guilty-as-charged verdict on three counts of capital murder and then recommended she be put to death. Marullo formally sentenced her to die Oct. 20, 1995 - seven months after the triple killing at Kim Anh.

The Williams family has been steadfast in advocating for the death penalty for both Frank and LaCaze.

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Witness killer gets life term
Victim was to testify about N.O. drug ring
Friday, June 06, 2008
By Susan Finch

A New Orleans man will spend the rest of his life in prison for killing a federal witness five years ago to keep her from testifying in a trial involving a large-scale cocaine trafficking ring, one of whose members ordered the hit and supplied the gun to carry it out.

U.S. District Judge Martin L.C. Feldman imposed the mandatory sentence on Donald “Big” Sylvester for his conviction by a jury last fall on charges of conspiring with Terrance “Breeze” Lash, 34, to distribute 5 kilograms of cocaine and, at Lash’s behest, murdering the witness, Demetra “Deedy Bird” Norse, on a street corner near her home with a .45-caliber handgun he got from Lash.

Prosecutors said Norse, who was in her 30s, was killed in retaliation for telling a federal grand jury and a law enforcement officer about Lash’s drug dealing, as well as to stop her from taking the stand in the federal trial of another of the drug conspirators.

Lash, already in federal prison after being convicted in 2006 on the same charges as Sylvester, was described by prosecutors as a “big-time drug dealer” who distributed 100- to 150-pound shipments of cocaine that another man brought from Houston every week.

U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said Norse was targeted after she made the mistake of telling “thugs” involved in the drug dealing that she had been called by the grand jury; such information is normally kept secret and federal witnesses are advised to be discreet, prosecutors said.

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Fourth suspect convicted in robbery in which cop died
Man found guilty on all counts; three other men already in prison
Thursday, May 15, 2008
By Gwen Filosa
The Times-Picayune

Almost six years after a New Orleans police officer was fatally shot outside a St. Roch bar, the last of four suspects will be sent to prison for his role in the ambush.

An Orleans Parish jury convicted Michael Davis, 37, on all three counts of armed robbery with a firearm after one hour and 20 minutes of deliberations.

Davis, a four-time convicted felon, faces up to 198 years in prison on each count. Judge Julian Parker will sentence him.

The guilty-as-charged verdict, based on three 11-1 votes by the jury Wednesday evening, ends a case that forced the victim’s family and friends to spend nearly six years attending court hearings and listening to the ghastly details of officer Christopher Russell’s last moments.

Russell, 35, was shot in the head in August 2002 after unwittingly driving up to the scene of an armed robbery at a St. Roch bar. Inside Club Tango, four men had forced patrons at gunpoint to strip and hand over cash and jewelry, threatening to kill anyone who resisted.

When the police cruiser pulled up outside, lights flashing, the gunmen panicked and fled, but not before ensuring that the officer, who was dispatched to the scene without being told that it was a crime in progress, could not pursue.

Russell’s family, including his widow, who was pregnant with their son when the New Orleans native was gunned down, returned to Orleans Parish Criminal District Court for the final trial connected to the 2002 killing. The three other suspects had already been convicted and are serving long prison sentences.

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Two men to serve prison time in teen’s heroin death
by Gordon Russell, The Times-Picayune
Thursday May 01, 2008, 8:24 AM

Two young men charged with providing the heroin that helped kill a Lusher High School student in January are expected to serve prison sentences of up to 15 years after they pleaded guilty Wednesday to a federal charge of conspiring to distribute heroin.

One of the defendants, David “Bird” Battenberg, also pleaded guilty to a second charge of selling heroin to a person younger than 21. Battenberg, 27, and his co-defendant, Diego Perez, 18, are scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 6 by U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier. …

Had Battenberg’s and Perez’s participation in the drug trade not been linked to a fatal overdose, the two would be facing far shorter sentences. But in their plea agreements, both stipulated that their conduct “led directly to the overdose death of 16-year-old Madeleine Prevost,” according to U.S. Attorney Jim Letten’s office.

Another defendant in the case, Henry Deeb Gabriel, 23, who was charged along with Perez and Battenberg, has not come to an agreement with authorities and is expected to go to trial. Gabriel is accused of buying the heroin — through Perez and Battenberg — that Prevost ingested on the night before she died.

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Orleans judge sets July 15 execution date for Antoinette Frank
by Gwen Filosa, The Times-Picayune
Tuesday April 22, 2008, 1:13 PM

Orleans Parish Judge Frank Marullo today signed a death warrant for convicted killer Antoinette Frank, the former police officer sentenced to die by lethal injection for the 1995 triple murder at a local Vietnamese restaurant.

Marullo, acting on his own, ordered the state of Louisiana to execute Frank on July 15, between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., on the lethal injection table located at the state penitentiary at Angola.

But Frank’s state-appointed defense attorney said that the judge’s order won’t stand under the law and that Frank will receive her Constitutional guarantee to begin the state post-conviction stage of her appeal - and, if unsuccessful there, the beginning of her federal appeals.

Marullo set the next hearing date for June 10 at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, telling the defense team to turn in its post-conviction appeal at that time.

Forty-nine days, however, flies in the face of the legal standard in which capital defense attorneys have to file such an appeal, said Frank’s newly appointed public defender. The American Bar Association standard is that a post-conviction state death penalty appeal requires an average 3,300 attorney hours, he said. …

Frank, who will turn 37 on April 30, remains at the women’s prison at St. Gabriel. In 1995, an Orleans Parish jury unanimously decided that she deserved the death penalty for the rampage at the Kim Anh restaurant that left dead police officer Ronald Williams, 25, and siblings Ha and Cuong Vu - who had worked with their family at the restaurant, then located in eastern New Orleans.

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Man gets 25 years in prison for killing
Plea agreement whittles down murder charge to manslaughter
Thursday, April 17, 2008
By Gwen Filosa
The Times-Picayune

The New Orleans convict who took on the nickname “B-Stupid” from the city’s streets where he was raised appeared in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court on Tuesday to receive a 25-year prison sentence for a Mardi Gras 2006 murder.

Ivory Brandon “B-Stupid” Harris, 22, had already pleaded guilty to manslaughter for the killing of Jermaine “Manny” Wise, who was gunned down Uptown on Fat Tuesday 2006.

But instead of the original second-degree murder charge, the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office agreed to let Harris admit to the manslaughter charge as part of a plea deal that federal prosecutors hashed out for Harris, who had dodged two prior murder raps, including a 2004 killing in the C.J. Peete housing development when Harris was 16.

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