U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether to review Angola prison inmate’s death sentence

U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether to review Angola prison inmate’s death sentence

 

 

John Simerman and Della Hasselle of The New Orleans Advocate report that the Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear the case of David Brown, the “Angola 5” member who was accused of plotting to kill a prison guard in 1999. His death sentence was endorsed in February by the Louisiana Supreme Court after a district judge had overturned it.

 

Brown’s attorneys, in their petition for a U.S. Supreme Court hearing, say the facts of the case are alarmingly similar to Brady v. Maryland, the landmark 1963 ruling that required prosecutors to turn over to the defense all evidence favorable to a defendant.

The similarities point to a pattern of stubborn refusal by Louisiana state courts to follow the Supreme Court’s directive, according to a group of law professors and legal ethicists who have filed a “friend of the court” brief in the case (Advocate).

 

Louisiana courts have “an abysmal history of consistently misinterpreting and misapplying the Brady doctrine, and there’s very little accountability,” said Ellen Yaroshefsky, a law professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who co-authored the brief. “The lesson has not been learned” (Advocate).

 

Brady violations rarely turn up until long after a conviction and sentence — when Louisiana convicts have the right to review the state’s complete case file. Since only those condemned to death are afforded a state-appointed lawyer after their convictions, such allegations of misconduct arise frequently in death penalty cases (Advocate).

 

Of the 127 death sentences reversed in Louisiana from 1976 to 2015, convictions were overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct 25 times, including nine cases of Brady violations, according to a recent study by University of North Carolina political science professor Frank Baumgartner and statistician Tim Lyman (Advocate).

 

David Brown has claimed he wasn’t there when a guard at the State Penitentiary at Angola, Capt. David Knapps, was killed, although he helped drag Knapps inside a bathroom, getting the victim’s blood on his prison garb during a group escape attempt. Brown has claimed he left before other inmates killed Knapps and that the murder wasn’t part of the escape plan (Advocate).

 

The state never accused Brown, who at the time was serving a life sentence for a different murder, of striking Knapps. But it argued that he was guilty of first-degree murder for joining in a plot with the specific intent to kill. (Advocate).

 

Prosecutors Hugo Holland and Tommy Block, however, didn’t turn over a transcript of a statement from another state inmate, David Domingue, claiming that another man accused in the murder, Barry Edge, confessed that he and fellow inmate Jeffery Clark alone had decided to kill the guard (Advocate).

 

Retired Criminal District Court Judge Jerome Winsberg, who was handling the case, overturned Brown’s death sentence, but not his conviction, in 2014. Winsberg found that “there is a reasonable probability that the jury’s verdict would have been different had the evidence not been suppressed” (Advocate).

 

But a state appeals court panel reversed Winsberg’s ruling, and the Louisiana Supreme Court then found that Domingue’s statement “provides no additional evidence as to who actually killed Captain Knapps” and “simply does not exculpate Brown” (Advocate).

 

To Brown’s attorneys, the ruling marked another instance in which the Louisiana Supreme Court skewed the evidence (Advocate).

 

In their response to Brown’s petition, prosecutors argued that Brown jumped the gun in running to the U.S. Supreme Court when he could still have asked the Louisiana Supreme Court to rehear the case; that Domingue’s statement wouldn’t have been admissible at Brown’s trial; and that even if it were, it was “neither favorable nor material” to his cause (Advocate).

 

Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick’s office, which picked up the case after other jurisdictions recused themselves, described Domingue’s statement as “wholly extraneous” to what prosecutors argued when they persuaded the jury to sentence Brown to death (Advocate).

 

That argument “focused on the fact that a life sentence would be the equivalent of no punishment at all because David Brown was already serving a life sentence at the time of the murder,” wrote Connick and prosecutors Juliet Clark and Terry Boudreaux (Advocate).

 

Even if Brown really had left the prison bathroom while Knapps remained alive, he “participated in the attack on Knapps such that he was already awash in the blood of his victim,” and he left the captain “to the tender mercies of Jeffrey Clark and Barry Edge” while moving on to further the escape plan, they argued (Advocate).

 

In their “friend of the court” brief, the law professors and legal ethicists argue that the U.S. Supreme Court should hear the Angola 5 case “because the state courts need guidance, other methods for holding prosecutors accountable have not functioned, and, left alone, the Brown ruling has the potential to usher in a new, darker age of disregard for Brady” (Advocate).

 

The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to decide Thursday whether to review the case (Advocate).

 

See the full article here.

 

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