U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether to review Angola death sentence

U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether to review Angola prison inmate’s death sentence

The U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t weigh in often on whether convictions should be overturned because prosecutors failed to turn over evidence — four times in the past two decades.

Three of those cases came from Louisiana. Each time, the high court chastised prosecutors for violating the rights of defendants and the state’s courts for letting the problem slide.

Yet, according to defense advocates and national legal scholars, Louisiana still hasn’t gotten the memo. They’re urging the Supreme Court to step in again with a stronger lesson.

The high court is expected to decide this week whether to hear the case of David Brown, the “Angola 5” member who was accused of plotting to kill a prison guard in 1999. His death sentence was endorsed in February by the Louisiana Supreme Court after a district judge had overturned it.

Brown’s attorneys, in their petition for a U.S. Supreme Court hearing, say the facts of the case are alarmingly similar to Brady v. Maryland, the landmark 1963 ruling that required prosecutors to turn over to the defense all evidence favorable to a defendant.

The similarities point to a pattern of stubborn refusal by Louisiana state courts to follow the Supreme Court’s directive, according to a group of law professors and legal ethicists who have filed a “friend of the court” brief in the case.

Louisiana courts have “an abysmal history of consistently misinterpreting and misapplying the Brady doctrine, and there’s very little accountability,” said Ellen Yaroshefsky, a law professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who co-authored the brief. “The lesson has not been learned.”

Brady violations rarely turn up until long after a conviction and sentence — when Louisiana convicts have the right to review the state’s complete case file. Since only those condemned to death are afforded a state-appointed lawyer after their convictions, such allegations of misconduct arise frequently in death penalty cases.

Of the 127 death sentences reversed in Louisiana from 1976 to 2015, convictions were overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct 25 times, including nine cases of Brady violations, according to a recent study by University of North Carolina political science professor Frank Baumgartner and statistician Tim Lyman.

Only two of those cases were overturned at the state level, Lyman said.

“It gives a good insight as to what’s going on in Louisiana (in regard) to Brady,” he said. “It’s mostly federal court” where convictions or death sentences get reversed.

Federal district courts and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have vacated numerous convictions when they’ve found that Louisiana courts botched the decision.

In their petition for Brown, attorneys Billy Sothern and Letty DiGiulio highlighted parallels between their defendant’s situation and the original Brady case.

In the Brady case, the high court faulted prosecutors for not turning over a statement from John Brady’s alleged accomplice in which he admitted killing someone during an armed robbery. Brady acknowledged he was present at the murder, and there was evidence that he urged the other man to strangle the victim. But the U.S. Supreme Court said suppressing the statement violated Brady’s due process rights, so it vacated his death sentence.

David Brown has claimed he wasn’t there when a guard at the State Penitentiary at Angola, Capt. David Knapps, was killed, although he helped drag Knapps inside a bathroom, getting the victim’s blood on his prison garb during a group escape attempt. Brown has claimed he left before other inmates killed Knapps and that the murder wasn’t part of the escape plan.

The state never accused Brown, who at the time was serving a life sentence for a different murder, of striking Knapps. But it argued that he was guilty of first-degree murder for joining in a plot with the specific intent to kill.

Prosecutors Hugo Holland and Tommy Block, however, didn’t turn over a transcript of a statement from another state inmate, David Domingue, claiming that another man accused in the murder, Barry Edge, confessed that he and fellow inmate Jeffery Clark alone had decided to kill the guard.

Retired Criminal District Court Judge Jerome Winsberg, who was handling the case, overturned Brown’s death sentence, but not his conviction, in 2014. Winsberg found that “there is a reasonable probability that the jury’s verdict would have been different had the evidence not been suppressed.”

But a state appeals court panel reversed Winsberg’s ruling, and the Louisiana Supreme Court then found that Domingue’s statement “provides no additional evidence as to who actually killed Captain Knapps” and “simply does not exculpate Brown.”

To Brown’s attorneys, the ruling marked another instance in which the Louisiana Supreme Court skewed the evidence.