Rogers LaCaze - Louisiana
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Cuong Vu, 21, Ha Vu, 17, and Police Officer Ronald Williams, Jr., 25
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Rogers LaCaze
Summary of Offense:
Was convicted of killing Cuong Vu, Ha Vu and New Orleans police officer Ronald Williams inside a New Orleans East restaurant in 1995. LaCaze's accomplice was New Orleans police officer Antoinette Frank. She was also sentenced to death.
For more on Antoinette Frank, see: http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...toinette+frank
Judge orders evidentiary hearing for death row inmate Rogers LaCaze to be re-opened
A judge's ruling has reopened the evidentiary hearing to determine whether or not death row inmate Rogers LaCaze should get a new trial. The ruling on Thursday followed the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office's recent disclosure that a witness with new, relevant information came forward for the first time ever the day after a post-conviction evidentiary hearing for LaCaze held between June 17 and June 26, when that person saw news media coverage of the proceedings.
Presiding Judge Michael Kirby ruled that the new witness' testimony doesn't "wholly refute" LaCaze's arguments for a new trial, though it does cast his claims about things such as police brutality, mental retardation and actual innocence "in a completely different light." Kirby ordered the state and LaCaze's Capital Appeals Project attorneys to arrange mutually available hearing dates and secure a courtroom at Tulane and Broad.
LaCaze, now 36, and former New Orleans police officer Antoinette Frank, 42, were charged in the shooting deaths of NOPD officer Ronald "Ronnie" Williams II, 25; Cuong Vu, 17; and Ha Vu, 24, during a robbery at Kim Anh restaurant March 4, 1995. Williams, like Frank, provided off-duty security at the restaurant, and the Vu siblings worked there.
Separate juries in 1995 convicted LaCaze and Frank, and both defendants were sent to death row. LaCaze and his team of attorneys sought post-conviction relief, and there was an evidentiary hearing in which some 30 witnesses testified.
A ruling on the hearing was expected sometime around early August.
However, on June 27, "due solely to the press surrounding the aftermath of the evidentiary hearing," a person whose name is not contained in any police report related to the Kim Anh investigation came forward and divulged to the state what prosecutors described as "pertinent information."
That person appeared before a grand jury on July 11. The D.A.'s Office moved to reopen the evidentiary hearing and supplied a transcript of the grand jury testimony to Kirby, who read it before LaCaze's lawyers could ask him to wait to do that until he had looked over their opposition to the state's motion, the ruling said.
In part, two of LaCaze's lawyers, Blythe Taplin and Sarah Ottinger, argued that the state violated grand jury secrecy laws and urged Kirby to dispose of the D.A.'s motion without considering the testimony. Kirby said he disagreed, though, concluding the testimony directly concerned an issue pending before him and that its disclosure was permissible.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/...ary_heari.html