If you do not think justice can be cold-bloodied, then maybe you haven’t heard the story of Elvis Brooks who spent more than four decades in prison for a crime he never committed.
The Louisiana Illuminator and The Lens, writing for the ProPublica Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News, this week ran a story about Brooks and how justice continues to be denied Brooks.
Attorney General Liz Murrill, like her predecessor, Gov. Jeff Landry, has consistently fought the compensation of those wrongly convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They both are typical of selfish, heartless Republicans who care only for their own, i.e. those with the financial means to perpetuate them in clinging to office. They oppose anything that remotely resembles benefits for lower income citizens while benefiting from holding public office by relying heavily on campaign contributions from supporters, itself a form of public welfare. When necessary, as in Brooks’s case, they fall back on technicalities to deny compensation for gross errors or outright malfeasnce on their part.
In Murrill’s case, she is hiding behind a law that protects wrongdoing by prosecutors through the art of dirty dealing and underhanded tactics. And Brooks isn’t her only victim in that maneuver that looks for the world as though it was invented by Karl Rove; she has opposed 22 compensation claims in which the wrongly-convicted were ultimately exonerated and in the case of Calvin Duncan, even threatened him with preventing him from obtaining a license to practice law after he enrolled in law school.
That, folks, is vincictiveness at its very worst. An individual who tries to recover from an illegal conviction and prison sentence by obtaining an education only to be threatened because he sought compensation for his wrongful conviction.
Then there is John Thompson who was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent 14 years on death road, much of it in solitary confinement. He, too, was exonerated when it was discovered the prosecutor had concealed exculpatory evidence. He sued District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. and was awarded $14 million. The DA’s office appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and it was (you guessed it) Clarence Thomas who wrote the majority opinion denying one dime in compensation to Thompson.
Landry, like his protege Murrill, has consistently opposed awarding damages to the wrongfully convicted. In June, he vetoed a bill that a Republican Legislature (if you can believe it) that would have increased compensation to the wrongfully-convicted, using a broad brush to paint exonerees as “convicted criminals” who were only interested in money.
That is patently racist–again, typical of Republicans who at the same time seem to condone pedophilia by refusing to hold certain high officials accountable. By their silence on the issue, they are complicit.
No, Landry, they are not “convicted criminals”; they were convicted, but the only criminals were the prosecutors who gamed the system to gain their conviction. A more accurate description would be to call them innocent victims of a system of justice that is light years from perfect–and you, Governor, and you, Ms. Attorney General, are a big part of that system.
I devoted an entire chapter to Brooks’s story in my book, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana. The book is available on Amazon. Following is my story of Brooks:
Far too often, when prosecutors realize they’ve really screwed up and left themselves vulnerable to legal liability, they’ll do the only “merciful” thing: offer a reduced charge, allow the wrongfully- convicted individual an opportunity for his immediate freedom in exchange for waiving the right to file suit later. Except there’s nothing about such a deal that can realistically be termed “merciful.” A more accurate description would be “cowardly.”
Prosecutors neglected to provide exculpatory evidence in murder trial of Elvis Brooks, accused of the shooting death of fifty-eight-year- old Cecil Lloyd during a robbery of a New Orleans bar at 11:00 p.m. on July 1, 1977, and it wasn’t until April 28, 2022, that he was finally able to clear his name. A memo which addressed fingerprints on a beer can that excluded Brooks, along with descriptions of the shooter which conflicted with Brooks’s appearance, was written by prosecutor Phil Boudousque, but did not surface until October 2019, forty-five years after the crime.
Testifying in his own defense at trial, Brooks said he left his job at a New Orleans furniture store around 5:45 p.m. on July 1 and went straight home where he remained until he returned to work the following day. His claims were backed up by time sheets from his place of employment. “I have never been inside the place,” he said of the bar, the Welcome Inn Bar. “In fact, I don’t go in white barrooms because I know trouble might kick off.”
He was, nevertheless, convicted of first-degree murder and three counts of armed robbery after a one-day trial on Sept. 22, 1977. He was sentenced to life without parole for the murder conviction and concurrent sentences of fifty years for each of the armed robbery convictions. He was summarily shipped off to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 1980 and for the next thirty-nine years, he filed more than twenty unsuccessful motions seeking to get his conviction overturned.
By January 2019, Brooks was being represented by the Innocence Project New Orleans which turned up several key pieces of evidence.
First, there was that note from the prosecutor’s file which said that Brooks was not the source of any fingerprints found on beer cans handled by the robbers. Second, the testimony of two witnesses was at odds with their earlier statements about what the shooter was wearing. Finally, there was no evidence in the police files from witnesses that made mention of markings on Brook’s forehead. Then, there had been another robbery the same night as the Welcome Inn robbery. That robbery was just an hour earlier and a block away and the victims of that robbery gave similar descriptions of the two perpetrators but they never identified Brooks as one of the robbers.
Upon discovery that the fingerprint evidence had never been produced, the district attorney, refusing to admit wrongdoing, in 2019 gave Brooks the option of either clearing his name or becoming a free man by agreeing for prosecutors to amend the murder charge to manslaughter so that he might be released on time served. Leon Cannizzaro, the Orleans Parish District Attorney at the time, called the deal fair. “If he (Brooks) and his attorneys truly believed in his innocence, they could have pursued post-conviction claims,” he told the Washington Post. Brooks might have countered by saying if Cannizzaro was so certain of his guilt, he never would’ve offered a deal.
The choice was clear-cut. If he took the deal, Cannizzaro’s office would not be held accountable for its misdeeds and he could not seek any compensation for his forty-two years behind bars, a Washington Post reporter wrote. If he spurned the offer and decided to try and clear his name, it was understood that Cannizzaro’s office would throw all its manpower and financial resources into fighting him.
On Dec. 9, 2021, Brooks’s attorney, Harry Daniels, filed a motion asking the court to allow Brooks to withdraw his 2019 guilty plea because it was made without full knowledge of the facts that had been withheld from him.
“When the prior district attorney’s administration (Cannizzaro) learned that the trial prosecutor had failed to turn over this fingerprint evidence, they offered Mr. Brooks the chance to leave prison alive, but never revealed the wrongdoing they had uncovered,” the motion said. “Instead, Mr. Brooks was forced to make an impossible choice between clearing his name or living his life outside the gates of Angola prison. Mr. Brooks’s guilty plea is constitutionally infirm due to the state’s withholding and the coercive nature of his plea agreement and must be withdrawn.
Orleans Parish Judge Nandi Campbell granted his motion to withdraw his 2019 guilty plea on April 28, 2022, and the state finally dismissed all charges against him.
“I cried at night in Angola,” Brooks told reporter Richard Webster of the Washington Post In 2020, two years before Judge Campbell granted his motion. “I ain’t never thought I was going to get out. So, I took the deal. It ain’t right, but that’s the way of the world.”
Louisiana Voice 