Louisiana Voice

The 26^th Judicial District Court may have outsmarted justice and made a mockery of the state constitution requirements for selecting jury venires and in the process, managed to get its britches caught on its own pitchfork.

Funny thing is, the practice of alleged jury manipulation and document forgeries may well not be limited to the two-parish (Bossier and Webster) 26^th JDC.

Moreover, as many as 25 percent of the inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola currently serving sentences as a result of split-verdict convictions could conceivably see those convictions thrown out, depending on the results of a case now pending before the Louisiana Supreme Court.

One can only imagine the cost in re-trying thousands of inmates but that’s the price you pay when you manipulate jury selection and/or refuse to comply with the unanimous verdict requirements for felony convictions.

On April 20, 2020, two years ago almost to the day, the U.S. Supreme Court RULED that jury verdicts in trials for serious crimes (felonies) must be unanimous.

The ruling came on a landmark Louisiana case, Evangelisto Ramos v. Louisiana, in which a 10-2 jury verdict of guilty in a murder case was overturned, dealing a death blow, theoretically, at least, to Jim Crow laws as they applied to the selection of black jury members and their lack of influence on verdicts.

Louisiana and Oregon were the last two states that did not require unanimous jury verdicts in felony cases before the Ramos decision two years ago. Now, the only – and by far the biggest – question remaining is this: Does Ramos apply retroactively?

And how does Ramos impact Jim Crow?

I will take the latter question first. Following Reconstruction, southerners remained as determined as ever to deny African-Americans their rights. In fact, with the freedom of slaves, there was a severe labor shortage on southern plantations. But by continuing to honor split jury decisions in open violation of the 6^th Amendment, blacks began finding themselves convicted of crimes and sentenced to Angola where they were then rented out to the plantation owners for profit.

Allowing convictions with split jury verdicts, it became immensely easier to convict blacks of felonies and if there happened to be the inconvenience of a couple of black jury members, any propensity by them to acquit was quickly voted down by the 10-vote majority, meaning their presence was, for appearance’s sake, just for appearance’s sake.

As a point of clarification, unanimous jury verdicts have always been the requirement for capital murder cases.

And with some 6,000 inmates incarcerated at Angola, making Ramos retroactive could wreak havoc on the Louisiana judicial system for years to come. An already strained to the breaking point system would simply collapse under the added expense and time involved in holding new trials for as many as 1,500 prisoners.

To be sure, the problem is of Louisiana politicians’ own making. In 1898, Louisiana took the lead over other southern states by passing a law that recognized the split jury decision. Only then, the approved split was 9-3, where it remained until the state constitutional convention scaled it back to 10-2.

The ramifications of Ramos aside, there’s a case in the 26^th JDC that should have officials squirming uncomfortably – all because a retired military and commercial pilot spent seven years of his life documenting what he maintains are manipulated venires, violations of venire requirements and outright forgeries and altered documents.

Gary Holder is not your garden variety malcontent. He is a father whose world was turned upside-down on the night of Nov. 18, 2011.

“My son Chris was misdiagnosed at age 15 and for the next five and one-half years, the doctors had him on 34 major psychotropic drugs, as many as eight or nine drugs at the same time. Every one of these drugs has two “black box” warnings:

• Do not give to children under the age of 18 years or young adults (age 26), and
• Do not combine.

“That night, he went into what was diagnosed as a prescribed drug-induced schizophrenic rage and brutally killed his mother, my wife,” Holder said. “The subsequent trial was a political trial because District Attorney Skyler Marvin was up for reelection and also [becase] Chris’ mother was a prominent physician.”

Holder said after the trial, an individual called him to say he had some information concerning the jury selection in Chris Holder’s trial. “He said he had a friend that worked in the (Bossier) clerk of court’s office (who) told him that the jury had been manipulated and that they had been doing this for many years.”

He said he spent the next seven years investigating the jury selection procedures of the 26^th JDC and thoroughly reviewed numerous General Venires. “I discovered that in each venire, every jury selection law in the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedures, federal laws, the rules and regulations of the Louisiana Supreme Court, the US Constitution and the Louisiana Constitution had been violated.

“I also discovered numerous documents had been altered and/or forged. I hired one of the nation’s most qualified forensic document and handwriting analysists to examine the paperwork.” (More on that in a subsequent installment later this week.)

In February, the Louisiana Supreme Court agreed to take up the 25-year-old murder conviction of REGINALD REDDICK to determine if Ramos will indeed be applied retroactively.

Because of the discreprancies Holder insists he has uncovered in the 26th JDC, the cases of his son, Ramos, and Reddick are inextricably interwoven.

“The hearing of Reddick is long overdue and needs to be heard and argued in the open,” the senior Holder said. “It is very clear that Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry is against the idea of retroactivity for these 1500 or more inmates,” he said. “He believes that he has the number of justices on the Louisiana Supreme Court to block this ban. He also believes that the justices on the Louisiana Supreme Court can hide behind the black robes of the United States Supreme Court justices and their ruling in the Ramos case on retroactivity. But Landry cannot hide behind the rampant cesspool of corruption and cheating. Nor can he hide from the stench of the corruption and the cheating in the jury selection process.”

Indeed, the state attorney general – nor any other attorney, prosecutor or otherwise – should ever “have” a judge or judges to achieve any purpose. A judge, by definition, should be impartial, weigh all the evidence, and render a just and fair decision. To say Landry “has” the judges he needs is to taint the Louisiana Supreme Court from the outset.

TOMORROW: How jury venires are manipulated