Antoinette Frank, the infamous New Orleans police officer and the only woman facing execution in Louisiana, will argue for mercy along with four condemned men on Friday as the Louisiana Board of Pardons weighs clemency hearings for the first in a historic batch of pleas from death row.
Frank was convicted nearly 30 years ago in one of the city’s most notorious crimes, a triple homicide committed during one of the darkest chapters in the scandal-ridden history of the New Orleans Police Department.
A jury found Frank guilty of the killings that left a fellow officer and two young restaurant workers dead in a late-night robbery gone awry in New Orleans East.
She is among 56 condemned people who filed petitions in June asking Gov. John Bel Edwards to convert their death sentences to life in prison. One of them, Jarrell Neal, has since had his sentence thrown out on appeal.
Though Edwards ordered the board to hear all of the capital clemency petitions, Attorney General Jeff Landry and several district attorneys fought to block that plan. Landry replaced the board’s lawyers with his own and engineered a settlement.
Under the deal, the board will hold administrative hearings to consider if the first 20 death row applicants qualify for full pardon hearings that wouldn’t take place for another 60 days.
That leaves time only for the five applicants scheduled to be heard Friday to receive Edwards’ mercy before he leaves office on Jan. 8. An East Baton Rouge judge upheld the settlement on Thursday.
The governor this year for the first time spoke out against the death penalty, inspiring the mass push for mercy that Landry and others have criticized as both rushed and cruel to victims of Louisiana’s most notorious killers. Since 1976, Louisiana governors have granted clemency to only two death row prisoners.
RELATED | Sister Helen Prejean sues Louisiana officials over ‘secret’ settlement to slow death penalty appeals
The narratives contained in the clemency applications are remarkably different from the portraits of merciless killers that prosecutors offered up to the jurors who condemned them.
Four of the five death row prisoners who will face the board on Friday have filed petitions steeped in claims of intellectual and mental disabilities. One of them, Emmett Taylor, also asserts his innocence.
Frank claims neither innocence nor disability. Her appeal for mercy is based on a different history — one of brutal childhood abuse.
Antoinette Frank
Two decades before she turned a handgun on 17-year-old Cuong Vu and 24-year-old Ha Vu and pumped their bodies with bullets, a 2-year-old Antoinette was choked by her father.
Court filings document what Leslie Leibowitz, a clinical psychiatrist who reviewed Frank’s records, described in an interview as “unrelenting trauma” that altered Frank’s life.
As a child at home, Frank dodged boobytraps set by her father, Adam Frank, a Vietnam War veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the filings. He placed shards of wood through floor vents and covered them with rugs to conceal the danger. He also beat Frank’s mother, disfiguring her face.
Adam Frank began raping Antoinette Frank when she hit puberty, according to her clemency filings. He impregnated her three times, and she underwent three abortions.
Frank wanted to become a police officer to protect others, said her attorney, Letty Di Giulio. But the abuse left Frank “timid and easily manipulated by violent men, like her co-defendant Rogers LaCaze,” she said.
On March 4, 1995, Frank and LaCaze used a stolen key to enter Kim Anh Noodle House, where four children of the Vu family that owned the restaurant were closing up. Police officer Ronald Williams II was there working an off-duty security detail.
Authorities said Frank pushed two of the children to the back of the restaurant. LaCaze shot and killed Williams. When she rejoined LaCaze, Frank fatally shot Cuong Vu and Ha Vu.
“Antoinette told the police on the night of the crime that her co-defendant forced her to participate at gunpoint, but prosecutors depicted her as a liar,” Di Giulio said.
Attempts to reach members of the Vu family and Williams’ father were unsuccessful.
LaCaze also was sentenced to death but is now serving a life sentence after a legal challenge.
Sandra Babcock, a clinical professor at Cornell Law School and founder of the Center on Gender and Extreme Sentencing, has studied the case and said Frank, as the only woman on the state’s death row, presents a unique situation for the pardon board.
“You cannot compare that to the kind of violence that someone else who grew up as a boy, and now as a man, experienced in their life, and you have to judge that on its own terms,” she said.
Clifford Deruise
Deruise was sentenced to death in 1996 following two first-degree murder convictions in the shooting deaths of 11-month-old Etienne NaChampassak and 20-year-old Gary Booker. The Louisiana Supreme Court later vacated Deruise’s death sentence only in Booker’s slaying, owing to a jury error.
Carbia has argued that Deruise, 49, fell as a toddler from a second-story balcony in New Orleans’ St. Thomas housing project. It was the first of many hospitalizations for head injuries. Reports describe Deruise’s condition as “mental retardation.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that intellectually disabled prisoners, such as Deruise, are “categorically exempt” from being put to death, said his attorney, Matilde Carbia.
But that hasn’t been enough to remove those prisoners from death row.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams, whose predecessors prosecuted both Frank and Deruise, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Whether William’s office will oppose their petitions before the board was unclear.
Danny Irish
The only White man among the five prisoners appearing Friday before the board, Irish claims brain damage captured in medical scans, according to his attorney, Aaron Novod.
That evidence was not presented in his trial or in challenges to his conviction and death sentence, Novod said.
At age 18, Irish was convicted in 1997 of shooting his landlord, Russ Rowland, in the eye with a rifle. A friend and accomplice, Audy Keith, shot Rowland first. Keith was sentenced to life without parole. Irish, 45, has served 25 years on death row.
His impairments “affected his decision-making and judgment,” causing him to act “like someone much younger,” Novod said.
Caddo Parish District Attorney James Stewart said his office will oppose Irish’s application, based in part on a violation Irish committed while imprisoned.
“We just hope they vote not to have a clemency hearing and we can move on to other cases,” Stewart said.
Emmett Taylor
Taylor was convicted of murdering Marie Toscano, a 77-year-old Marrero pharmacy employee who was shot as she fled from a masked robber in 1997.
He confessed to the killing a day after his arrest, despite an alibi.
His clemency application points to records showing that Taylor, now 48, was submitting a urine sample at the time of the shooting as proof of his innocence.
Post-conviction testing found damage to Taylor’s frontal lobe, and psychiatrists diagnosed him with schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder, said his attorney, Talia McMath.
“People with intellectual disability are more vulnerable to falsely confessing under pressure during interrogations,” McMath said.
In a statement, Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick’s office said it “intends [to] represent the interests of the deceased victim, the surviving family members, and the citizens of Jefferson Parish” during Friday’s hearing.
Winthrop Eaton
On March 12, 1995, Eaton lay in wait for the Rev. Lea Joyner, the first trailblazing female pastor of a Louisiana Methodist church, to leave her Monroe sanctuary and walk to her car.
The white, pint-sized sedan was known throughout the small city, because the elderly pastor was a speed demon, said the Rev. Ben McGehee, who now heads the church Joyner founded.
Eaton struck her in the head with a pipe, then stabbed her in the church’s parking lot, court filings show. He wrapped her in a blanket, tying it shut with line from a weed eater, and placed her in the back of the car before leaving her in a cotton field.
Autopsy evidence suggested Joyner had been raped, an allegation Eaton, now 58, has steadfastly denied. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Eaton’s appeal. But in 1993, the Ouachita Parish trial court found Eaton was insane and ruled him incompetent to be executed.
District Attorney Robert Tew, who is opposing Eaton’s petition, did not return messages this week.
McGehee said Joyner “would not have wanted him [Eaton] to die as a result of this crime.”
But his congregation remains torn.
“When I ... tell them what I believe and what I believe Lea believed, they always agree with me that Lea would not have wanted him to die,” he said. “But some of them hold different opinions.
_____________________________________________________________________
Home | Twitter/X | Facebook | Telegram | Contact us
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde