Results 1 to 7 of 7

Thread: Frank Ford Cosey - Louisiana

  1. #1
    Guest
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    5,534

    Frank Ford Cosey - Louisiana




    Summary of Offense:

    Convicted and sentenced to death in the murder of Delkie Horton, 12, on July 6, 1990.

  2. #2
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Location
    Germany
    Posts
    13,014
    No. 00-9397 Status: DECIDED
    Title: Frank Ford Cosey, Petitioner
    v.
    Louisiana
    Docketed: Lower Ct: Supreme Court of Louisiana
    April 12, 2001 (1997-KA-2020)

    ~~Date~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~Proceedings and Orders~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Apr 11 2001 Petition for writ of certiorari and motion for leave to proceed in
    forma pauperis filed. (Response due May 12, 2001)
    May 11 2001 Brief of respondent Louisiana in opposition filed.
    May 22 2001 DISTRIBUTED for Conference of June 7, 2001
    Jun 11 2001 Petition DENIED.
    ************************************************** ******
    Jul 6 2001 Petition for rehearing filed.
    Jul 13 2001 DISTRIBUTED.
    Aug 6 2001 Rehearing DENIED.

    http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.a...es/00-9397.htm

  3. #3
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    20,875
    June 25, 2016

    Twenty years later, Baton Rouge child killer’s death sentence has yet to be carried out as legal appeals proceed at snail’s pace


    By Joe Gyan Jr.
    The Advocate

    Twenty years ago to the month, Dr. Stephen Speeg and 11 other residents of East Baton Rouge Parish convicted Frank Ford Cosey in the 1990 rape and murder of a 12-year-old Baton Rouge girl and decided he should die for what Speeg described on the jury verdict form as “an especially heinous, atrocious and cruel” crime.

    Two decades later, Cosey’s appeals continue to move at a snail’s pace in the 19th Judicial District Court, the very court where he was unanimously found guilty of first-degree murder by Speeg — the jury foreman — and his fellow jurors, and sentenced to death.

    But much to the chagrin of at least one Louisiana Supreme Court justice, and to Speeg to a degree, the 56-year-old Ford is no closer today to the death chamber than he was 20 years ago.

    Speeg said Thursday he is all for a defendant receiving his due process under the law. But, he added, “It’s just absurd that it takes this long.”

    He said his only concern is with the victim’s family.

    “That’s where my prayers are,” Speeg said.

    In a ruling earlier this month in Cosey’s case, Justice Scott Crichton voiced concern over what he described as “the inordinate span of time” that has elapsed since the jury recommended in June 1996 that Cosey die for his crime. A Baton Rouge state judge formally imposed the death penalty three months later.

    Crichton noted that after the state Supreme Court affirmed Cosey’s conviction and sentence in 2000 and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case the following year, Cosey himself filed in 2001 what is termed in legal circles as a “shell” application for post-conviction relief in the 19th Judicial District Court.

    Crichton characterized Cosey’s petition as “an apparent place-holder strategic maneuver.”

    Then, in 2012 and 2013, Cosey’s post-conviction attorneys supplemented the bare-bones petition he filed more than a decade earlier.

    Last year, state District Judge Don Johnson denied most of Cosey’s claims, which include allegations that he received ineffective assistance from his trial and appellate attorneys.

    “Now, in 2016 (after the savage murder, two decades after the verdict, and more than a decade after the ‘shell’ application) this case, on collateral review, has finally reached this Court,” Crichton wrote June 17. “In my view, this gamesmanship and delay is unreasonable and unacceptable.”

    Cosey’s current attorney, Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana director Gary Clements, believes gamesmanship is a poor choice of words.

    “It’s not a word I would have chosen. I wouldn’t call it gamesmanship. I’d call it defense,” he said.

    Clements stressed that post-conviction cases are complicated and take time to resolve.

    “The system has moved on,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can.”

    Johnson, the 19th Judicial District Court judge presiding over the Cosey post-conviction case, did offer Cosey perhaps more than a glimmer of hope in May 2015 when he ruled the condemned killer is entitled to an evidentiary hearing on his claim that he is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution.

    The state Supreme Court, on June 17, did not disagree with Johnson on that point.

    Clements said it is possible the hearing on Cosey’s claim of intellectual disability, formerly called mental retardation, could be held this year.

    Cosey served time for an armed robbery conviction and was on parole when he raped and killed 12-year-old Delky Nelson on July 6, 1990. She lived across the street from Cosey on El Scott Avenue off Joor Road.

    Cosey was accused of beating the child; stomping on her face so hard that the last two letters of the word “Reebok” were imprinted on her left cheek; slitting her throat and leaving her nude body spread-eagled on her back in her mother’s bedroom.

    Cosey’s fingerprints were discovered near the body, and DNA results proved his semen was found on a blanket near her body.

    Cosey contends, and his trial attorneys argued to Speeg and his fellow jurors, that another neighborhood man — now-deceased Patrick Jenkins — killed the girl. Jenkins committed suicide in 1994, two years before Cosey’s trial, after killing his girlfriend and their 8-month-old child.

    Speeg said the jury was an educated group that looked at all of the evidence, which he called indisputable. He said the death penalty was a just decision.

    The state Attorney General’s Office has been handling the case since 2009, the year East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore III was sworn in and recused his office. Moore was one of Cosey’s attorneys in the 1990s.

    “In the best interest of our state, the Louisiana Department of Justice has and will continue to pursue this case fairly, diligently and efficiently,” Ruth Wisher, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Jeff Landry, said Friday.

    Cosey’s trial attorneys included Tony Marabella, now a 19th Judicial District Court judge, and Frank Holthaus, a prominent Baton Rouge lawyer.

    “That’s counsel that you and I probably couldn’t afford together,” Speeg said when told of Cosey’s claim of ineffective assistance of trial counsel.

    http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rou...1ee970af6.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  4. #4
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    Yes this is the real title.

    Former child killer continues the fight to get off death row

    By Ariel Salk
    brproud.com

    For years, convicted rapist and murderer, Frank Ford Cosey, has been fighting to be removed from death row sighting a lack of mental capacity that would disqualify him from this form of punishment.

    In the summer of 1990, Frank Ford Cosey raped and murdered 12-year-old Delky Nelson in her home after her mother stepped out of the house. One of the former prosecutors of the case, Beau Brock, remembers the case to the last detail.

    “He tricked a child into going in by giving her what we think was a gift and then raping her and then slitting her throat, and then afterward stomping on her face to make sure she was dead,” Brock said.

    Ford then left the child’s body in a sexual manner for her mother to find.

    “Even on video, it was one of the most heinous things I’ve ever seen,” Brock said.

    In 1996, Cosey was found guilty by a unanimous jury after a lengthy trial. He was sentenced to be put to death for his crime but is now challenging his fate by claiming that he does not have the mental capacity.

    The Supreme Court has already upheld the sentence in 2000 but the same court has ruled it illegal for intellectually disabled convicts to be sentenced to death.

    “He has every right to challenge the case,” Brock said. “The conviction I believe was a solid conviction.”

    For years, Ford’s legal team has been building a case arguing that he does not have the mental capacity to be put to death. Brock said he has not been a part of this case since the 90s but argues Ford’s legal team was solid.

    “He had the best defensive team ever probably in the state of Louisiana representing him,” Brock recalled. “Two people had been presidents of the Baton Rouge Bar Association, two of the brightest in the country Tony Marabella and Frank Holthaus and the third defense attorney was Hillar Moore who is the DA. “If there was a diminished capacity of some kind of IQ thing or something like that, they would have raised it then.”

    The State rested its case Thursday after days of questioning a psychological expert, Dr. Jill Hayes based out of Tennessee. For days, Dr. Hayes explained the results of various evaluations that she performed on Ford in order to get an understanding of his mind in intellectual capacity. And while it was speculated that Ford had educational difficulties, some of which could be attributed to drug and alcohol use, she explained that nothing points to a major disorder or deficit.

    https://www.brproud.com/news/former-...off-death-row/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #5
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    7,316
    “Former” child killer. Criminal rights activists get more pathetic every day.
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

  6. #6
    Senior Member CnCP Addict maybeacomedian's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2014
    Location
    IL
    Posts
    657

    12-year-old Delky Nelson (Photo Source: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/...39;tres-nelson)

  7. #7
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Location
    Tennessee
    Posts
    7,316
    Paywalled but Cosey’s death sentence was vacated due to “ intellectual disability”.

    https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_ro...98ead61d3.html
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

    Tried so hard and got so far, but in the end it doesn’t even matter - Linkin Park

    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •