view full story-
Police: Repeat DWI offenders difficult to stop
A Raceland motorist stood before a Lafourche judge this past week and was sentenced to two decades behind bars for DWI, marking the ninth time he's been convicted of drinking and driving.
Prosecutors say it's unlikely to be his last. Randean “Dino” Henry's had been convicted of seven separate DWI offenses even before then-Assistant District Attorney Cam Morvant II prosecuted him in a Lafourche courtroom in February 2000 for felony drunken driving. Henry, 47, was convicted and sent to jail for 20 years, but secured an early release and was out on parole when he was stopped by police on Jan. 24, 2010.
His crime? Drinking and driving. On Wednesday, Henry stood before the same judge he faced in 2000 and got the same 20-year sentence.
But Morvant said it is possible that when Henry is released, even though his driver's license will be suspended, he will drive drunk again.
‘JUST KEEP DRIVING'
“These guys just keep driving,” Morvant said. “You and I, we're careful about not driving with an expired license, let alone a suspended license. That's not a concern for these guys. ... He's going to drive, and he's going to get drunk at the same time.”
Henry is not the only repeat DWI offender Morvant has sent to jail multiple times. The phenomenon begs the question: Are DWI offenders being punished effectively?
Morvant said he is satisfied with the sentence from a legal standpoint. “It's not a slap on the wrist,” he said. “That's a fairly substantial sentence. ... With him being in the penitentiary, I don't have to worry about him getting behind the wheel and hurting someone.”
continue reading
Published 1/30/12 - The Daily Comet
Officials arrest dead beat parents in roundup
BATON ROUGE, LA (WAFB) - Authorities said a dead beat parent roundup resulted in over 120 arrests and collection on over $70,000 in payments. The Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services reported 126 people delinquent on their child support payments were arrested in December. Officials said they owe more than $1.1 million. The DCFS said it collected $74,347.37 in payments as a result of the roundup.
Agents said whenever one of these roundups is conducted, collection officials are at the jail to collect as much as possible from the parents after they are arrested and processed. They added the parents are then given a court date to set up a new payment schedule.
"Our message is clear," said DCFS Secretary Ruth Johnson. "Failure to fulfill a court-ordered child support obligation is illegal, and not taking responsibility for financial obligations to one's children has consequences."
DCFS reported more than $385 million in child support was collected last year, but nearly $1.2 billion is currently owed by Louisiana's non-custodial parents. Officials did not release the names of those arrested.
Published 1/23/12 - wafb.com
High court: warrant needed for GPS tracking
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that police must get a search warrant before using GPS technology to track criminal suspects. The ruling represents a serious complication for law enforcement nationwide, which increasingly relies on high tech surveillance of suspects, including the use of various types of GPS technology.
A GPS device installed by police on Washington, D.C., nightclub owner Antoine Jones’ Jeep helped them link him to a suburban house used to stash money and drugs. He was sentenced to life in prison before the appeals court overturned the conviction. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said that the government’s installation of a GPS device, and its use to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a search, meaning that a warrant is required.
“By attaching the device to the Jeep” that Jones was using, “officers encroached on a protected area,” Scalia wrote. He concluded that the installation of the device on the vehicle without a warrant was a trespass and therefore an illegal search.
All nine justices agreed that the GPS monitoring on the Jeep violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Scalia wrote the main opinion of three in the case. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor also wrote one of the two concurring opinions that agreed with the outcome in the Jones case for different reasons.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote, in the other concurring opinion, that the trespass was not as important as the suspect’s expectation of privacy and that the long-term duration of the surveillance impinged on that expectation of privacy. Police monitored the Jeep’s movements over the course of four weeks after attaching the GPS device.
“The use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy,” Alito wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. Sotomayor in her concurring opinion specifically said she agreed with Alito on this conclusion.
Alito added, “We need not identify with precision the point at which the tracking of this vehicle became a search, for the line was surely crossed before the four-week mark.”
Regarding the issue of duration, Scalia wrote that “we may have to grapple” with those issues in the future, “but there is no reason for rushing forward to resolve them here.”
Alito also said the court should address how expectations of privacy affect whether warrants are required for remote surveillance using electronic methods that do not require the police to install equipment, such as GPS tracking of mobile telephones. A federal appeals court in Washington had overturned Jones’s drug conspiracy conviction because police did not have a warrant when they installed a GPS device on his vehicle and then tracked his movements for a month. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court.
The case is U.S. v. Jones, 10-1259.
Published 1/23/12 - The Advocate
Louisiana grapples with juvenile crime decision by Supreme Court
Giovanni Brown was 16 when he and another teen forced their way into a home in an upscale Harvey subdivision in 1999, armed with pistols and intent on mayhem. After holding four people against their will for hours, ransacking the home and trying in vain to force the homeowner to withdraw cash from an ATM, the teenagers stole two cars loaded with the family's property. Brown was prosecuted as an adult and convicted of aggravated kidnapping and four counts of armed robbery. He was sentenced in 2000 to life in prison with no chance of probation, parole or suspended sentence for the kidnapping, and another 40 years for robbery. Under Louisiana law, Brown would never leave prison, a reality his public defender Marquita Naquin argued during the trial.
"What can a 16-year-old do in the first 16 years of his life that demands that we throw him away?" Naquin asked the jury just before it unanimously rejected her plea. Her argument proved prophetic.
Change in the law
Like nine other lifers who were convicted in Jefferson Parish of crimes they committed as juveniles, Brown is now eligible for parole. The change follows a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Graham vs. Florida, which said juveniles convicted of crimes that don't involve murder cannot be imprisoned for life. The inmates must be afforded a "meaningful" opportunity for release, but they are not guaranteed release, the divided court said.
Now 28 and regarded as a model inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Brown asked Judge Robert Murphy of the 24th Judicial District Court on Jan. 5 to re-sentence him to 10 to 25 years in prison. He already has served 12 years.
The judge rejected his request.
One of his attorneys, Ben Maxymuk, argued that Brown is not the same kid who stood before Murphy 12 years ago. But Murphy authorized parole only. Brown must wait 17 more years before he can apply for parole.
37 states affected
Louisiana is one of 37 states affected by the U.S. Supreme Court decision. The state Department of Corrections said 48 inmates are serving life sentences for crimes other than homicide that they committed before they turned 18. Most of those cases originate from New Orleans, Jefferson Parish, East Baton Rouge Parish and Caddo Parish, said Dana Kaplan, director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana.
The rest are scattered across the state, including one in St. Tammany Parish, she said. Of the 10 from Jefferson Parish, eight were convicted of aggravated rape and two of aggravated kidnapping, according to the district attorney's office. Brown is the first of the Jefferson Parish defendants to see a ruling in his case. Although the Legislature considered a proposal that called for parole eligibility after 35 years, lawmakers, not wanting to appear soft on crime, rejected the measure.
An interim decision
The state Supreme Court stepped in, in November, with an interim decision, ruling that such offenders will be eligible for parole when they reach age 45 and have served 20 years of their sentence. Murphy cited this decision in ruling on Brown's case. The Legislature could reconsider the issue this year.
"I think we're going to look at it, but I'm not sure what we're going to do," said state Sen. Danny Martiny, R-Metairie, who sponsored a resolution last year asking the Louisiana State Law Institute to recommend to the Legislature a course of action on the Graham vs. Florida decision.
That recommendation is still a work in progress, said the institute's director, William Crawford. But the recommendation mirrors the state Supreme Court's interim requirement that inmates are eligible for parole when they reach age 45 and serve 20 years of their sentence. The committee that crafted the recommendation was made up of district attorneys, public defenders, judges and a representative for crime victims, Kaplan said.
"I believe it was a very fair, deliberative process," Kaplan said. "I support that deliberative and thoughtful process."
A stricter proposal
But the Louisiana District Attorneys Association will ask the Legislature to make Graham-affected inmates eligible for parole at age 60 and when they've served 45 years of their sentence, said Pete Adams, the association's executive director.
Bill Boada Sr., the Harvey homeowner who was robbed and kidnapped by Brown and his cohort, still can recount details of his ordeal and says Brown was "ahead of his time." Juveniles appear to be committing more violent crimes, he said. He said it's premature to establish blanket rules affecting their punishment.
"I think now is not the time for this, based on what we're seeing today," Boada said.
Brown and Eddie Christoff, then 17, accosted two brothers, ages 15 and 17, stripping the youths of their clothes and binding them with duct tape. When their father arrived home about two hours later, he was met with the barrel of Brown's revolver. They did the same to the older son's teenage girlfriend when she dropped in for a visit. Brown forced the elder Boada to an ATM to withdraw cash, but the man left his debit card at home.
Christoff was later arrested and convicted of armed robberies and second-degree kidnapping, and is serving a 45-year sentence. The Graham decision has no effect on his case.
An appeal for inmate
Maxymuk, who works with the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Montgomery, Ala., that argued a similar case before the U.S. Supreme Court, told Murphy last week that Brown has matured and his achievements at Angola are grounds for a lesser sentence. He is a Class B trusty, "reserved for the lowest-risk inmates at the prison," and he has earned a GED and certificates in six trades, Brown's attorneys wrote. He tutors other inmates and has earned acclaim through participating in the Angola Rodeo. He embarked on self-improvement, believing he would be imprisoned for life, they wrote.
Setting the stage for Louisiana appellate courts to consider Graham again, Murphy also ruled that Brown is eligible for parole for the armed robbery convictions. "To impose 40 years of additional time without benefits after a parole review of a life sentence would effectively negate Graham's ultimate directive to provide an opportunity for rehabilitation for the juvenile," Murphy wrote.
The armed robbery sentences, Assistant District Attorney Terry Boudreaux said, "should be untouched by the court." He filed notice last week of an appeal.
Published 1/22/12 - nola.com
