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Thread: Antoinette Renee Frank - Louisiana Death Row

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    Antoinette Renee Frank - Louisiana Death Row


    Cuong Vu, 21, Ha Vu, 17, and Police Officer Ronald Williams, Jr., 25




    Summary of Offense:

    Frank was a 23-year-old rookie New Orleans police officer when she and Rogers LaCaze terrorized the family-owned Kim Anh restaurant, shooting dead Officer Ronald Williams, and siblings Ha and Cuong Vu during a 1995 robbery. Frank's accomplice was Rogers LaCaze. He was also sentenced to death.

    For more on Rogers LaCaze: http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/...ghlight=lacaze

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    April 22, 2008

    NEW ORLEANS — A death warrant has been signed for a former New Orleans police officer convicted of murder and facing execution.

    State Judge Frank Marullo on Tuesday signed the death warrant for Antoinette Frank, who was found guilty of murdering her partner and two others inside a New Orleans East restaurant in 1995.

    According to the warrant, Frank will be executed by injection on July 15, 2008. Meanwhile, an attorney for Frank says he will appeal Marullo’s order.

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    April 23, 2008

    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.

    "She has a lot of litigation to go," said Gary Clements, of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, who first met Frank last month and formally signed on to take over her appeal today. "I am quite confident that Judge Marullo knows this and is fully aware" that his execution order will be overturned.

    "No one will be executed July 15," said Clements, who made his first courtroom appearance as Frank's attorney Tuesday. "Not Antoinette Frank, not anyone."

    Clements, who has handled capital appeals for 16 years in Louisiana, has been appointed to represent Frank through the Louisiana Public Defender program. Frank was deemed indigent at her trial in 1995, when attorney Robert Jenkins received what Tulane and Broad's veterans consider the city's most notorious murder case.

    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.

    Rogers LaCaze was separately ordered to die by lethal injection by another Orleans Parish jury for his cohort role in the armed robbery turned slaughter.

    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.

    About 90 convicts remain on the state's death row. Clements 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.

    Marullo said today that he followed the letter of the law in the Frank case, despite what Clements argued before him at court. Frank's former attorneys, Denise LeBoeuf and Nick Trenticosta did not file for a re-hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, which in February denied their request to revisit Frank's death sentence, the judge noted.

    That failure to file for a rehearing, Marullo wrote in the death warrant is equal to "finalizing the judgment and sentence reached by the trial court." "This thing has been well-litigated," said Marullo after Tuesday's hearing. "They never filed for a rehearing. If you read the law, it says 'handled expeditiously.' So I set the execution date. We followed the statute."

    Frank, originally from Opelousas, was a 23-year-old NOPD rookie officer when she staged the lethal armed robbery on the Kim Ahn, where she had worked a detail, the jury found.

    One of the Vu relatives testified in ghastly detail at the Frank trial, recounting how from a hiding spot in a darkened freezer she watched Frank and LaCaze stalk the restaurant before unleashing a rampage on her brother and sister.

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    May 17, 2008

    LOUISIANA----impending female execution stayed

    N.O. cop killer's execution canceled----Antoinette Frank gets more time to appeal The Louisiana Supreme Court on Friday canceled the July 15 execution of cop killer Antoinette Frank, ordering a local judge to allow more time for her lawyers to file a post-conviction appeal of her 1995 sentence for 3 1st-degree murders. Instead of a July execution, Frank will receive an additional 90 days in which to file her appeals, 6 justices ruled Friday, granting the defense team's application.

    The 90-day clock begins on June 10 -- the deadline that a local court had given Frank to file her appeal at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court.

    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.

    Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Frank Marullo, acting on his own, signed the 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 to hold. Officials there said last month that they haven't updated the "media witness" list for executions since the last time the prison held a lethal injection 6 years ago.

    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.

    Frank's attorney, Gary Clements, of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, said that Frank's appeal has really only just begun. Frank has a constitutional right to begin the state post-conviction stage of her appeal and, if unsuccessful there, turn to the federal system for relief.

    About 90 convicts remain on the state's death row. Clements said that Frank is among 66 condemned inmates who have yet to exhaust their state appeals.

    Frank's former attorneys, Denise LeBoeuf and Nick Trenticosta, did not file for a re-hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court, which in February denied their request to revisit Frank's death sentence, the judge noted.

    Their failure to file for a rehearing, Marullo wrote in the death warrant, is equal to "finalizing the judgment and sentence reached by the trial court."

    Separate juries in 1995 found that both Frank and her cohort, Rogers LaCaze, orchestrated an ambush on the Kim Anh restaurant in eastern New Orleans and deserve execution for the triple murder.

    Williams, 25, had worked with Frank in 1995 when she was a 23-year-old NOPD rookie officer moonlighting at Kim Anh for security details.

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    August 28, 2008

    Convicted killer Antoinette Frank appears in court

    By Gwen Filosa
    The Times-Picayune

    Antoinette Frank returned to an Orleans Parish courtroom this morning, almost 13 years after a jury condemned her to die by lethal injection for a 1995 rampage that left three people dead at a local Vietnamese restaurant.

    Prosecutors and relatives of one victim gathered with the expectation that the state court would issue an order for Frank's execution.

    But Judge Frank Marullo, who presided over her trial and set today's hearing, postponed the matter after meeting with Frank's appellate lawyers. At issue is Frank's recent appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which on Feb. 19 refused to review her death sentence.

    Frank's attorneys have 25 days from that ruling to ask for a rehearing. Marullo said he had called today's hearing prematurely and rescheduled it for April 14. Seperate juries found that Frank and Rogers LaCaze orchestrated an ambush on the Kim Anh restaurant in eastern New Orleans in 1995, and deserve execution for gunning down NOPD officer Ronald Williams, and siblings Ha and Cuong Vu.

    Williams, 25, had worked with Frank in 1995 when she was a 23-year-old NOPD rookie officer moonlighting at the Kim Anh for security details.

    Williams' family filled the front row in Marullo's courtroom this morning. Williams' father said he is frustrated with the criminal justice system, but will continue to closely follow Frank's appeals, in the hopes that the state will execute her for the triple murder that rocked New Orleans and became the nadir for the long-trouble police department.

    Frank, it turned out, had failed portions of the psychological exams needed for admittance to the police academy and should never have been issued a badge and gun, the public learned only after the Kim Anh murders.

    "I would rather she be executed, then I wouldn't have to see her in court again," said Ronald Williams, the father of slain NOPD officer Ronald Williams. "Forgiveness, no.

    It's turned lives upside down, with our families and her family."

    LaCaze, 18 at the time of the murders, also received the death penalty. At their separate back-to-back trials, each tried to blame the other for plotting and carrying out the Kim Anh attack.

    Louisiana hasn't executed a convict since 2001. Frank was one of the last convicted killers condemend to die by an Orleans Parish jury, as juries over the past decade have been reluctant to hand down the death penalty.

    The last New Orleans murderer sent to death row was Phillip Anthony, for the 1996 triple killing at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen in the French Quarter. He remains on death row at the Angola men's prison.

    Frank on Wednesday returned to her home at the women's prison in St. Gabriel, where she is one of two women awaiting a death sentence in Louisiana.

    An Orleans Parish jury sentenced Frank to death on October 20, 1995, seven months after the triple homicide shocked a city grappling with an escalating murder rate. At trial, Chau Vu recalled witnessing Frank, who had worked a police detail at the popular Vietnamese restaurant, enter the eatery with an 18-year-old LaCaze for a third time in one night. Vu went to hide money in a microwave, only to return to the dining room to find Frank pushing her back into the kitchen.

    Chau Vu said she heard gunshots behind Frank. Vu and her brother hid in a darkened freezer, peering through a window to watch as Frank and LaCaze ran back and forth through the kitchen and hearing more gunshots. Chau and Quoc Vu finally emerged to find the restaurant's on-duty police officer, Williams, lying shot in the head, and their sister, Ha Vu, 24, and brother, Cuong Vu, 18, motionless on the floor.

    When police cars pulled up, Frank ran up to Chau Vu. "She say: 'What happen to your brother and sister?' " Vu testified in 1995. "And I say: 'You was there, you know everything. Why you ask me that question?'"

    Source

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    September 11, 2008

    NEW ORLEANS -- A state judge has scheduled the execution of convicted killer Antoinette Frank for December 8.

    On Wednesday, Judge Frank Marullo rejected arguments by her attorney that he lacks sufficient documentation from the police and district attorney's office to file a post-conviction appeal.

    Frank, a former New Orleans police officer convicted for her role in the murders of three people at an eastern New Orleans restaurant in 1995, last year lost an appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

    That appeal was about whether Frank received sufficient expert assistance during the penalty phase of her trial, when the jury who convicted her of murder considered whether to impose death by lethal injection or life in prison.

    Gary Clements, director of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, says he plans to file an appeal of the death warrant signed by Marullo by October 1.

    Source

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    November 26, 2008

    NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Louisiana's Supreme Court has blocked the scheduled Dec. 8 execution of a former police officer convicted of three murders.

    Antoinette Frank was convicted and sentenced to death months after she and an 18-year-old accomplice killed her fellow police officer and two others during the robbery of a New Orleans restaurant in 1995.

    Her first round of appeals lasted 12 years, amid court fights over whether she had received sufficient expert legal assistance during the penalty phase of her 1995 trial.

    In a new round of appeals, defense attorneys said they have had too little time to reveiew voluminous documents arising from the case.

    The state Supreme Court ruling, made public Wednesday, effectively cancels a death warrant signed by a state judge in September.

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    September 11, 2009

    Kim Anh trial judge's testimony sought during appeal seeking post-conviction relief

    By Gwen Filosa
    The Times-Picayune

    Fourteen years after an Orleans Parish jury sentenced Rogers LaCaze to death by lethal injection for helping former cop Antoinette Frank commit a triple murder at a Vietnamese restaurant, attorneys for both want anyone but Judge Frank Marullo to hear their latest appeals.

    Judge Laurie White heard arguments Friday at Criminal District Court over whether Marullo can remain the presiding judge over one of the city's most infamous murder cases.

    It isn't a question of whether Marullo is a fair judge on the case, attorneys for LaCaze said Friday. He is needed on the witness stand, they said.

    Marullo, who signed execution orders for both LaCaze and Frank last year only to be reversed by the Louisiana Supreme Court for not giving either enough time to appeal, presided over their separate trials in 1995.

    Now, both LaCaze and Frank are seeking post-conviction relief from the same judge, who they now want to question about allegations that he once signed over a handgun from the court's evidence room to Frank.

    Only Marullo can testify about whether he may have provided a 9 mm handgun to then-officer Frank before the 1995 bloodbath that shamed a city already besieged by police corruption and relentless violence, defense attorneys said Friday.

    White, who didn't rule Friday, set another hearing for Oct. 15 for LaCaze's motion to remove Marullo from the case, and set a hearing for the same day for Frank to appear in court on her separate motion for a new presiding judge.

    Marullo, who has denied ever providing a handgun to the rookie cop, held in-chambers discussions over the inquiry before Frank's 1995 trial, defense attorney Jelpi Picou said Friday.

    But none of the information was taken under oath and none of it was made available to LaCaze's trial lawyers.

    "None of this was known to Rogers at the time, " Picou said.

    "This all came out weeks later when Antoinette Frank's trial began. Rogers was already on death row. These issues will have to be probed post-conviction."

    Prosecutors accused the defense teams of "judge-shopping" in a last-ditch effort to unravel the capital murder convictions and death sentences handed down in 1995 -- just months after the March 4 murders of police officer Ronald Williams II, Cuong Vu and Ha Vu during a robbery attempt at the Kim Anh restaurant in eastern New Orleans.

    The Louisiana Supreme Court has affirmed both the convictions and death sentences for Frank and LaCaze.

    Post-conviction relief is when convicts get the chance to present new evidence in an effort to win a new trial or at the very least, reverse a death sentence.

    Assistant District Attorney Alyson Graugnard said that the defense was grasping at straws.

    "That gun was never linked to the gun used in the crime, " she said.

    "Judge Marullo has already spoken on this matter before. The transcripts are the best evidence in post-conviction relief."

    Graugnard said, "The defense is manipulating the system, wanting to find a judge more to their liking."

    Picou replied, "I have no personal issue with Frank Marullo. I can think of a handful of judges I'd rather not go up before. If I'm forum-shopping, I'm in the wrong forum. I don't like any of the stalls in this bazaar."

    Attorneys for Frank have filed post-conviction relief motions accusing Marullo of campaigning for re-election on the fact that he presided over the back-to-back death sentences for the Kim Anh murders as argument that he shouldn't handle the post-conviction hearings.

    In 2002, Marullo denied Frank's request for a new sentencing hearing after several days of testimony by a psychiatrist who said that as a child Frank had been repeatedly raped and impregnated by her father, who forced her to have abortions.

    Moments after hearing closing arguments, Marullo denied any new hearing and said it would be "ludicrous" to grant the defense's request for another penalty phase hearing.

    "I don't do the popular thing, " Marullo told Frank's defense team. "I do whatever I think is correct."

    Attending court Friday were relatives of the slain officer Williams and LaCaze's fiancee.

    Ronald Williams Sr., who dutifully attends each court hearing for both Frank and LaCaze, called post-conviction relief part of a "dysfunctional justice system."

    "Now they're going to come in and open up all the files and taxpayer-funded lawyers are trying to find something to get him off on, " said Williams, whose namesake son was 25 years old and the father of 5-year-old and 1-week-old sons when he was killed while working a security detail.

    "Their only goal is to delay from one appeal to another, " Williams said.

    Source

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    January 4, 2010

    Antoinette Frank case to stay in Marullo's courtroom

    The capital case of Antoinette Frank, the rookie New Orleans cop convicted of the 1995 triple murder that included a fellow officer, will remain in the courtroom of Judge Frank Marullo, another judge at Criminal District Court ruled Monday.

    Frank, who remains on death row for the killings of police officer Ronald Williams II, Cuong Vu and Ha Vu during a robbery at the Kim Anh restaurant in eastern New Orleans, is about to file post-conviction appeals at the district court and her attorneys say that Marullo has showed bias by signing two premature execution warrants. Both were struck down by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

    After hearing arguments in September, Judge Laurie White on Monday found no grounds to take the case from Marullo's docket.

    "There is no cause to recuse Judge Marullo based on his signing of two execution warrants," White wrote in a seven-page decision. "A death penalty case is not standard fare even for an experienced jurist like Judge Marullo, but any harm to Antoinette Frank in the premature signing was remedied by the Louisiana Supreme Court's ruling."

    Capital appeals attorney Gary Clements said he would appeal White's decision to the state Supreme Court.

    A jury on Sept. 12, 1995, sentenced Frank to die by lethal injection, two months after another jury condemned Rogers LaCaze to death row for his role in the murders. Marullo presided over both trials.

    Frank appeared via video conferencing Monday at Criminal District Court.

    Lawyers for LaCaze also want Marullo taken off his case, but White has not ruled on that request yet. LaCaze's attorneys want to call Marullo to the witness stand for post-conviction hearings and say that a witness cannot also preside as judge.

    Both Frank and LaCaze are in the post-conviction phase of their state appeals, when a convict has the chance to present new evidence in an effort to win a new trial or reverse a death sentence.

    (Source: The New Orleans Times-Picayune)

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    There is a new show called "Fatal Encounters" on the Investigative Discovery channel. Tonight's episode featured Antoinette Frank. It will air again at 1:00 a.m. EST, and again 7:00 p.m. Saturday night.

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