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Thread: Rogers LaCaze - Louisiana

  1. #11
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    During bid for new trial, witness testifies that Rogers LaCaze confessed to 1995 triple murder

    By Helen Freund
    The Times-Picayune

    A new witness claiming to have heard a 1995 jailhouse confession took the stand Friday during a hearing for death-row inmate Rogers LaCaze, who is trying to get a new trial in the triple murder of a police officer and two restaurant employees in eastern New Orleans in 1995.

    In a bid to persuade a judge to reject LaCaze's plea for a new trial, prosecutors from the Orleans Parish district attorney's office presented the new witness, who testified that LaCaze told her he was the killer.

    The new witness, Kim Carter, contacted prosecutors in June, the day after an eight-day hearing.

    LaCaze, now 37, 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.

    In a packed courtroom in Orleans Parish Criminal District Court on Friday, Carter testified that the day she read about LaCaze's push for a new trial on NOLA.com| The Times-Picayune, she was so disturbed that she couldn't sleep and even went so far as to text a prosecutor acquaintance of hers in the middle of the night to say she wanted to come forward.

    "You can't kill people and say, 'Oh, I didn't do it'," Carter said.

    Reports show that even though nearly 20 years had passed, Carter had not previously spoken to police, prosecutors or the news media.

    Carter, who according to her testimony was friends with LaCaze's family and girlfriend, and even lived with him at one point during the early '90s, described the convicted killer as a violent man prone to outbursts.

    She then told presiding judge Michael Kirby what prosecutors are hoping will dissuade the court from granting LaCaze's bid: that during a jailhouse phone call, he told Carter he committed the murders.

    "He said he killed those people and he had to get the F out of there," Carter said of her conversation that day with LaCaze.

    Carter said she admonished him for talking so candidly on the phone, knowing that they could possibly be recorded.

    "He didn't care. He said, 'I don't give a F'."

    According to Carter, LaCaze told her that on the day of the shootings, Frank came to pick him up and was upset. Frank, who worked an off-duty detail at the restaurant along with Williams, said she was mad that she was getting fewer detail hours than Williams was, and that she suggested robbing the restaurant to get back at them for what she felt was an injustice.

    LaCaze told Carter that he waited in the car, while Frank entered the restaurant.

    LaCaze then got out of the car, he told Carter, and knocked on the restaurant's door.

    Williams answered, he said. "He said he shot him and he hit the floor," Carter testified.

    Carter said LaCaze told her that Frank was "attempting to be Captain Savior" and was in the process of bringing Cuong Vu and Ha Vu to the back of the building when he walked up to her and put a gun to the back of her head, ordering her to shoot the two employees.

    "I wasn't going down by myself, so I made that B shoot them too," Carter said LaCaze told her.

    "He said, "Antoinette didn't know who the F she was messing with," Carter testified, adding that LaCaze then told her that after Frank shot the brother and sister, he followed suit and shot them both again.

    After the murders, Carter told the court, LaCaze fled to his brother's home and asked him to help back up his alibi. LaCaze asked his brother to confirm that the two of them had been at a pool hall on Morrison Road.

    Carter told the court that police later found a credit card receipt belonging to Williams, which had reportedly been used at a nearby gas station, a fact that LaCaze's lawyers denied ever happened.

    LaCaze's Capital Appeals Project attorneys, Blythe Taplin and Sarah Ottinger, tried to discredit Carter's testimony, painting her as an unstable woman who had an unusual penchant for testifying at murder trials.

    In 2011, Carter gave similar testimony in the Houston murder trial of a man who she raised children with. She testified the man confessed to her that he had killed a child more than 10 years earlier.

    In that case as well, Taplin pointed out, Carter did not come forward with her testimony until years later. "She has a history of inserting herself into cases," Taplin said.

    Taplin said Carter's testimony was "irrelevant" and called her "unstable and erratic," adding that several people who knew Carter said she had told them she was bipolar and was taking medication for her condition.

    The defense attorneys also pointed out that the story Carter told the court wasn't feasible because Williams was shot while standing behind a bar on the other side of the restaurant, not near the front door, as Carter claimed LaCaze said.

    "What she's describing is impossible," Taplin said.

    For their part, LaCaze's lawyers countered with a witness of their own, Darran Reppond, an inmate serving time for a Florida killing. Reppond said he was once housed in the South Louisiana Correctional Center where he met Adam Frank, the brother of Antoinette Frank.

    Reppond told the court that Adam Frank had confessed to him that he had killed a New Orleans cop. And Reppond said he cooperated after prosecutors contacted him because, "Frank is a very dangerous man," and "because it's right, nothing more."

    Reppond testified that Adam Frank told him that his sister had gotten "messed up in the situation," and that he said that he "ran down an officer and shot him in the head."

    Prosecutors Andrew Pinkett and Matthew Kirkham called LaCaze a violent sociopath and argued that Adam Frank's statement to Reppond wasn't credible, as Reppond himself admitted on the stand that Frank was known for making up stories.

    "He is right where he belongs to be," Kirkham said, referring to LaCaze.

    During the hearing, LaCaze sat quietly between his attorneys. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit and wearing glasses, he chatted during breaks in proceedings and waived and smiled at several audience members prior to the hearing.

    The judge is not expected to rule on the case until early next year.

    http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/...ost-convi.html

  2. #12
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    Rogers LaCaze granted new trial in '95 eastern New Orleans triple homicide

    Reopening one of New Orleans' most horrific crimes in recent decades, a judge Thursday (July 23) granted a new trial to Rogers LaCaze, the death row inmate convicted of helping kill a police officer and two restaurant employees in eastern New Orleans in 1995.

    LaCaze will face a new trial on first-degree murder charges because a former police officer who worked for railroad companies and the State Police sat on the jury that convicted him, in violation of jury rules, said the order by Judge Michael Kirby.

    LaCaze and then-New Orleans police Officer Antoinette Frank were convicted for the March 4, 1995 killing of three during a robbery of the Kim Anh restaurant. The victims were NOPD officer Ronald "Ronnie" Williams II, 25, who was there in an off-duty security detail and was Frank's partner on the force, and siblings Cuong Vu, 17, and Ha Vu, 24.

    "For 20 years Rogers LaCaze has been asking for what every defendant is entitled to, a competent attorney and a fair trial in front of an impartial jury," said one of his post-conviction attorneys, Blythe Taplin, of the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans. "While we disagree with some of the findings in the court order, this is the only just result. Mr. LaCaze looks forward to his day in court."

    Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office immediately said it planned to appeal the order for a retrial.

    Kirby, a retired Plaquemines Parish and appeals court judge who was appointed to preside over LaCaze's post-conviction proceedings, vacated the convictions and death sentence and awarded the new trial.

    He cited the fact that David Settle, who had worked with police for 20 years up to that time, "sat on Mr. LaCaze's jury when commissioned law enforcement officers were legally barred from jury service." Further, Settle never disclosed it during the jury selection process.

    That "structural error," Kirby ruled, violates the U.S. and Louisiana constitutions. LaCaze "is thus entitled to a new trial before a properly constituted jury," he wrote in the 128-page decision.

    "Although I find the evidence of Mr. LaCaze's actual guilt compelling, he is entitled to a new trial because his trial was afflicted with a structural defect, i.e., the violation of a constitutional right so basic to a fair trial it cannot be treated as a harmless error," Kirby wrote.

    Kirby also ruled that LaCaze will remain in custody until he is retried. He declined to authorize bail, as it is allowed in capital cases. LaCaze was charged with first-degree murder.

    Cannizzaro's spokesman, Assistant District Attorney Chris Bowman, said Thursday the office was still reviewing the lengthy decision.

    "It's worth noting that despite the multitude of claims upon which the defendant sought relief, the court found merit to only one, to a single claim, that there was a law enforcement officer on the jury," Bowman said. "We respectfully disagree with Judge Kirby's analysis of that issue, and we will seek review in the appellate courts."

    A horrible crime


    The massacre at Kim Ahn restaurant stood out even amid New Orleans' ferocious crime wave in the early and mid-1990s, when the city's murder rate led the nation, regularly clocking more than 300 killings per year.

    The chilling way in which the victims were murdered, and the involvement of a police officer who committed the killings while in uniform, shocked the city and the nation. Many remembered it as the first time an NOPD member had killed another fellow officer.

    Prosecutors said the bloodbath began when Frank, then 28, and LaCaze, then 18, went to rob the restaurant around 1:50 a.m. on March 4, 1995. They shot Williams, including in the head, a week after the birth of this second child. The shooters then turned to the Vu siblings, who were killed as they dropped to their knees to pray and beg for mercy, prosecutors said.

    Another Vu family member, who survived by hiding in a storage cooler, identified Frank as one of the shooters when Frank returned to the scene under the pretense of responding to the emergency. She and LaCaze were arrested that same day.

    A jury took 1 hour and 20 minutes to convict LaCaze at the end of his trial that July. Frank was convicted in a separate trial a few months later.

    Numerous claims raised in appeal

    Kirby's ruling Thursday has no affect on Frank's conviction.

    In seeking a new trial for LaCaze, Taplin and Sarah Ottinger, also of the Capital Appeals Project, raised numerous claims, including that he did not get an impartial jury. They also argued that his trial attorney, Willie Turk, had never defended a death penalty case before. Turk has since died.

    Kirby found that Turk was incompetent during the penalty phase that led to the death sentence. But Kirby found the ineffective attorney claim is moot, because LaCaze is getting a new trial.

    The attorneys asserted that three jurors either were in law enforcement or had relatives who were homicide victims. The attorneys also say the jurors lied about their backgrounds during jury selection.

    Settle was a police officer for Southern Railway from 1978 to 1982, then worked for Norfolk Southern's police force as a sergeant until he lost that job in 1993, "for misappropriation of four tires," according to Kirby's ruling.

    At the time of LaCaze's trial, Settle worked for Louisiana State Police and testified in a post-conviction hearing that "his work related to drivers' license issues."

    "That is significant because at the time of his jury service law enforcement officers were not competent jurors," Kirby wrote.

    During jury selection, Settle did not speak up when attorneys asked a panel of potential jurors if anyone was related to someone in law enforcement. Settle didn't respond to the question when it was asked of a second panel of prospective jurors, according to the ruling.

    "Even if there is a plausible explanation for his silence here, I cannot fathom a legitimate reason for him not speaking up when the trial court directly asked the first row of his panel if anyone was related to anybody in law enforcement," Kirby wrote.

    Prosecutors argued that Settle's status with law enforcement when he was on the jury was "of no moment," because the ban on officers serving on juries was overturned before LaCaze's appeal was final, Kirby wrote.

    "I find that at the time Mr. LaCaze was tried for three counts of first-degree murder there was present on the jury 'a badge-wearing law-enforcement officer' whose presence thereon offended the impartial trial guarantee" of the state constitution, Kirby wrote.

    The judge did not find that Settle "was actively seeking to be part of the jury by his silence."

    "The record before the court abundantly establishes that, for whatever reason, Mr. Settle did not honestly answer the question and that if he had honestly answered it, he would have been found to be a legally incompetent juror" under caselaw, the judge wrote.

    Another juror who voted to convict LaCaze was employed by the NOPD as a dispatcher and was on duty at the time of the triple homicide. That woman even attended Williams' funeral. Another jury disclosed that two of her siblings were homicide victims. Kirby found no reversible error in their place on the jury.

    http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/...new_trial.html

  3. #13
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    This was a horrific crime, him and Antoinette Franks should have been executed years ago.
    "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. #14
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    DA appealing new trial for infamous 1995 triple murder

    NEW ORLEANS -- Members of the Vu and Williams families are headed to the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office on Thursday to discuss the future of the Rogers LaCaze case.

    It was part of one of the most notorious cases of police corruption in the 1990s, which involved the triple murders of an off-duty officer and two siblings.

    Eyewitness News reporter Tania Dall sat down with District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro and Officer Ronnie Williams II's family to talk about what happens next.

    "Disappointing that it's back in the media and back in courts is an understatement. I'm outraged," said Ronnie Williams Sr., sitting at his Metairie dining room table.

    Words can't describe the emotions Williams and his family are feeling right now. His son's killer Rogers LaCaze, who was sentenced to death, just got the greenlight from Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal Judge Michael Kirby for a new trial.

    Kirby made the decision based on a "structural error" because one of the jurors in the 1995 murder case was a commissioned law enforcement officer.

    As any parent who has lost a loved one to violent crime can imagine, Williams isn't happy with the judicial system these days.

    "Not only did it fail my family, it's failing the entire community. They're wondering why we're having problems, because there's no punishment for crimes and they spend more money to protect the criminals," said a frustrated Williams.

    On March 4, 1995, NOPD Officer Antoinette Frank and her boyfriend, 18-year-old LaCaze, killed three people in a robbery at the Kim Anh restaurant in New Orleans East.

    Frank's partner, Officer Ronnie Williams II, was working a detail there. Cuong and Ha Vu, children of the owners, were all murdered.

    Both convicted killers, Frank and LaCaze, have sat on death row for the last 20 years. But now the victims' families will have to re-live that fateful day.

    "They have to live through that very, very painful experience that they suffered some time ago, then they have to go through it again in court," said District Attorney Cannizzaro, who is now taking over the triple homicide case and disagrees with the recent ruling on LaCaze's case, but says his office is ready to put up a fight.

    "If it's necessary to try this case again, we certainly will do that. But in the meantime, we're going to appeal the decision of the judge to the appellate court," said Cannizzaro.

    As prosecutors gear up for their appeal in court, the Vu and Williams families are bracing themselves for more painful memories.

    "I feel sorry for everybody in my family that's got to put up with it," said Williams, who hopes some of the original attorneys on the murder trial will be called back to help.

    If the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals disagrees with the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office, Cannizzaro says he will bring their appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

    http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/loca...rder/31588617/

  5. #15
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    An appellate court on Friday (Jan. 8) overturned new trial order for Rogers LaCaze in 1995 New Orleans triple murder. 4th Circuit appellate judges Edwin Lombard, Paul Bonin and Madeleine Landrieu ruled "After review of the state's writ application in light of the applicable law and arguments of the parties, we find that the trial court erred in finding that the seating of Mr. Settle on the defendant's jury was a structural error entitling him to a new trial."

    http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/...turns_new.html

  6. #16
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    New trial plea rejected for Rogers LaCaze in notorious triple murder with ex-cop Antoinette Frank

    Rogers LaCaze scored a fleeting victory last year when a state judge granted him a new trial over one of New Orleans' most infamous massacres — the 1995 triple slaying of a New Orleans police officer and two others inside the Kim Anh Restaurant.

    But on Friday, the Louisiana Supreme Court delivered what appeared to be a fatal blow to LaCaze's attempts to secure a new trial and to stay off death row, at least through the state court system.

    In an 18-page ruling, the state's high court unanimously found that the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal got it right in January when it reversed ad hoc Judge Michael Kirby's decision to grant LaCaze a new trial based on one juror's failure to identify himself as a "badge-wearing law enforcement officer."

    The decision from the Supreme Court, which rejected numerous other claims that LaCaze's attorneys cited in their appeal, also seemed to mean LaCaze will return to death row.

    While District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office had agreed to give up on sending LaCaze back to death row for the triple killing following Kirby's ruling, Friday's Supreme Court order appeared to reinstate LaCaze's death sentence, despite no indication that the 4th Circuit had ever taken that step.

    http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orlea...c9a014471.html
    "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

  7. #17
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    On July 28, 2017, Lacaze filed a habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    https://dockets.justia.com/docket/lo...cv07252/200388

  8. #18
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    In today's orders, the US Supreme Court remanded LaCaze's case to the Supreme Court of Louisiana for further consideration in light of Rippo v. Baker, 580 U. S. ____ (2017).

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/...17zor_o7jp.pdf

  9. #19
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    Spinning their wheels on death row

    By James Gill
    The New Orleans Advocate

    Len Davis is on federal death row, while Antoinette Frank awaits execution at the state prison in St. Gabriel.

    The similarities are uncanny. Both were New Orleans police officers when they were arrested for unrelated, but equally vicious, murders. Each enlisted a mentally disabled accomplice. Each seems destined to be with us forever. Davis and his sidekick Paul Hardy were convicted in 1994, Frank and Rogers LaCaze a year later.

    The latest ruling in the case of LaCaze came only last week from the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, on the federal front, we are waiting with bated breath for document No. 2466 in the Davis saga. No. 2465, filed Feb. 15, was the government's response to a request for an evidentiary hearing about something or other. Defense counsel has to keep the wheels turning in a capital case, but this is a case record to set the eyes spinning in any normal head.

    Trial judge Ginger Berrigan sentenced Hardy and Davis to death, but the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently ruled that executing the mentally disabled violates the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment.

    After a woman called Kim Groves complained to NOPD's Internal Affairs that he had pistol-whipped a teenager on the street, Davis ordered Hardy to kill her. When Hardy shot Groves outside her home and called a jubilant Davis on his cell phone, FBI agents investigating a drug ring picked up their conversation.

    That, and other wiretaps adduced at trial, left no room for doubt about guilt, but Berrigan was obliged to resentence Hardy 17 years later because tests showed his IQ was not high enough to qualify for execution. Davis is clearly in no immediate danger either, as the documents pile up, but then a ripe old age is par for the course these days on death row, state or federal.

    State judge Frank Marullo sentenced Frank and LaCaze to death for the murders of Cuong Vy and Ha Vu, at their family's restaurant in New Orleans East, along with New Orleans police officer Ronald Williams, who was working a detail there. Police never did recover the gun used in the murder or the $10,000 that was missing.

    Frank and LaCaze were convicted largely on the strength of testimony from other members of the restaurant family who had hidden in a cooler. It emerged at Frank's trial, which came after LaCaze's, that Frank had obtained a 9 mm gun — the type used in the murder — from the NOPD evidence room per an order that bore Marullo's signature. Marullo at a meeting with counsel in his chambers during Frank's trial, claimed that was a forgery and said he had given a handwriting sample to an expert to prove it.

    When LaCaze challenged his appeal from death row, he cited Marullo's name on the release as evidence of bias. The case was transferred to an ad hoc judge and Marullo, called to testify, denied signing the release but could not remember anything about a handwriting sample.

    LaCaze's conviction and sentence were thrown out, but not on account of the gun. It was because one of the jurors at his trial failed to disclose that he had been a cop. District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro then asked the appeal court to reinstate the conviction, but not the death sentence, which would almost certainly not have stood in the long run anyway. LaCaze's IQ is about the same as Hardy's. The appeal court duly ruled as Cannizzaro requested, and the state Supreme Court agreed that LaCaze had received a fair trial, whatever was the truth about the gun.

    It was, back in the day, standard practice for judges to make confiscated firearms available to law enforcement. Besides, the jury in Frank's case knew that Marullo's name was on order assigning her the gun, and it didn't do her any good.

    Then, last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a reconsideration of the LaCaze verdict to determine whether the gun order rendered the “probability of actual bias” too high to be “constitutionally tolerable.” The justices of the state Supreme Court responded with a profound and learned analysis last week that concluded they had been absolutely right the first time.

    So the LaCaze case seems to be finally closed. Davis and Frank just stay put.

    http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orlea...72194d8cb.html

  10. #20
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    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court declined to review LaCaze's petition for certiorari.

    Lower Ct: Supreme Court of Louisiana
    Case Numbers: (2016-KP-0234)
    Decision Date: March 13, 2018

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/search....c/17-1566.html

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