A politically-conservative organization is set to launch its campaign to rethink the issue of capital punishment next week in Baton Rouge but a press release on Tuesday indicates the group is more concerned with the cost of capital punishment in terms of dollars than in the human cost of lives adversely affected by numerous documented cases of wrongful convictions.
Louisiana Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, “a network of conservatives who question the alignment of capital punishment with their conservative principles,” will hold a news conference to officially announce the group’s formation next Wednesday at 11 a.m. at Capitol Park Event Center’s Fishbowl Conference Room at 702 River Road North in Baton Rouge.
Speakers scheduled for the event include:
- King Alexander of Lake Charles, a member of the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee;
- David Marcantel of Jennings, member of the Louisiana Republican State Central Committee;
- Robert Maness of Madisonville, member of the St. Tammany Republican Parish Executive Committee and unsuccessful candidate for a number of elected offices;
- Marcus Maldonado of New Orleans, described as a “liberty activist;”
- Hannah Cox, national manager, Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
Louisiana is one of 12 state-based CCADP groups the press release says are “part of a nationwide trend of conservatives rethinking capital punishment.”
“The latest study shows the death penalty costs Louisiana taxpayers nearly $16 million a year more than life without parole, and this waste of money is a big reason why conservatives in Louisiana are speaking out against the death penalty,” Cox said. “For a state with one of the highest violent crime rates, Louisiana is flushing away enormous resources that could be used to make its people much safer.”
What the news release did not say was that no fewer than 60 Louisiana inmates have been exonerated after it was determined that they were wrongly convicted, according to the National Registry of Exonerations which lists more than 2500 exonerations nationwide.
Of those 60 Louisiana exonerations, 15 were on death row awaiting execution.
One of the principal reasons for the high number of wrongful convictions is that prosecutors are not held accountable in a country where virtually all but judges and prosecutors must answer for their actions.
District attorneys want a high rate of convictions to hold up to the public when re-election time comes around and if they have to fudge with the evidence in order to obtain a conviction, many prosecutors have no compunctions about doing so.
And why not? It’s practically impossible to successfully sue a district attorney for his actions and judges are absolutely immune.
A good example of how difficult it is to extract some measure of retribution from a DA can be found in the case of John Thompson of New Orleans. Convicted of a murder he did not commit because the DA withheld exculpatory evidence, he spent 14 years on death row before the Innocence Project of New Orleans obtained his freedom. He sued DA Harry Connick and won a $14 million judgment that was appealed all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court which struck down the award. For 14 years of his life taken away by subterfuge on the part of the prosecutor, he got nothing.
Thompson died in 2017 at the age of 55, just 14 years after his 2003 exoneration. Fourteen years on death row followed by 14 years of freedom during which time the courts deprived him of any remuneration for the “inconvenience” of 14 years behind bars and now…he’s dead.
But sometimes the actions of a prosecutor can be so egregious that the protections against legal liability must be stripped away to allow the exoneree to seek recompense for the damages done to him and his family.
Apparently, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick felt that 21st JDC District Attorney Scott Perrilloux may have committed such a breach of protocol and ethics in a Livingston Parish murder conviction when she ruled that a lawsuit by Michael Wearry could go forward.
Dick, chief judge for the U.S. Middle District, ruled that Perrilloux’s “alleged use of intimidation and coercion to produced fabricated testimony went beyond the scope of the prosecutor’s role as an advocate of the state” by costing Wearry more than 20 years of his life on death row.
In light of Judge Dick’s ruling and a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that called the entire case “a house of cards,” Perrilloux’s claim of prosecutorial immunity came up pretty thin.
The Wearry case stems from the brutal murder of 16-year-old pizza delivery boy Eric Walber whose body was found on a gravel road not long after he delivered pizza to a remote area in Livingston Parish in 1998.
The lawsuit was filed against Perrilloux and Marion Kearney Foster, former Livingston Parish Chief of Detectives who, together, built their case against Wearry on the basis of the testimony of then 10-year-old Jeffrey Ashton who has since recanted his testimony, claiming he was threatened by Perrilloux and Foster and that Perrilloux coached him on his trial testimony..
He now says he was nowhere near the crime scene and that he never saw Wearry,” said Ashton, now 30. “I seen none of that. On the night that everything happened, I was not in Springfield, period. We was at the Strawberry Festival (in Ponchatoula).”
Ashton says Perrilloux and Foster threatened to take him to juvenile hall if he didn’t say what they wanted him to say in his testimony and that “you’re going to be there for life.”
The case languished for two years before a jailhouse snitch told authorities he participated in the murder and named Wearry and four others. The problem with Sam Scott’s story, however, was that he got several details about the crime wrong.
He said the murder occurred on Blahut Road but police reports show that it actually happened several miles from there, on Crisp Road.
The jury wasn’t told, for example, that Scott gave five statements over two days, getting both the color and make of the car wrong. In his initial statement, he said that Walber was shot but he was not. He was kidnapped in his own vehicle and then beaten before being run over several times.
Moreover, Wearry’s then-girlfriend, Renarda Dominick, said she and Wearry were at a Baton Rouge wedding reception until well beyond the time of the murder but prosecutors, never eager to admit wrongdoing, claim he could have participated in the murder after returning from the reception.
Like Ashton, Dominick said authorities went so far as to arrest her for traffic tickets she had already paid in an effort to get her to change her story.
Undaunted by the double-team scolding from Judge Dick and the U.S. Supreme Court for his office’s sloppy work, Perrilloux immediately began planning to re-try Wearry. But Wearry’s lawsuit forced an abrupt change of plans. With the lawsuit hanging over him like the sword of Damocles, Perrilloux quickly agreed to a plea deal with Wearry in December 2018, just a month before his scheduled retrial for first-degree murder. Wearry entered a guilty plea to a lesser charge of manslaughter and agreed to a 25-year sentence with credit given for more than 20 years already served.
Whether or not Wearry was involved, this was the best deal for him. Even if he was innocent, it was his only chance of not having to endure another grueling trial at the hands of a prosecutor who had already shown his propensity to win at any cost, even if it meant bending the rules to the breaking point. And another conviction would mean Wearry would never get out of prison.
And again, whether or not Wearry was involved, the actions by Perrilloux and Johnson are inexcusable. These people are elected to protect us, not to resort to unethical behavior to obtain a dubious conviction in order to bolster their resumes at election time.
With most public officials, we ask only for honesty and integrity. With prosecutors and judges, the bar must be set higher because they deal with human lives and the consequences can be catastrophic. With them, we must also demand absolute adherence to the highest standards of justice. No one is perfect, but perfection must be the objective.
Every time.
Louisiana Voice 