DA's office targeting
repeat offenders
By Gwen Filosa, Staff writer, New Orleans
Times Picayune
New
Orleans police said they watched Phillip Taylor fall off his bicycle in the
city's 9th Ward a few months after Hurricane Katrina, and after detecting
the scent of booze, decided to search him. They turned up a single rock of
crack cocaine, and Taylor went off to jail. It wasn't a shocker for prosecutors because Taylor, 40, has a lengthy rap sheet of cocaine-related convictions. The drill was clear: Hold a trial, call a cop to the witness stand and rack up one more conviction. And that's just what happened at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, as a jury found Taylor guilty as charged on June 22.
But District Attorney Eddie Jordan wants Taylor imprisoned for good, citing his repeat offenses and digging up a 1984 attempted robbery conviction. With his most recent rock possession his fourth strike, Taylor faces a sentence of 20 years to life.
"I'm on a mission to crack down on repeat offenders," Jordan said in a news release that announced Taylor's conviction in June. "They should not expect to get a slap on the wrist if they choose to live a life of crime."
The mission is clear. Jordan's prosecutors have been trying to ensure that those caught with illicit drugs get the maximum prison sentence, in spite of the first-term DA's campaign promise not to wield the repeat offender law as a bully club.
Drug addicts like Taylor who have a stack of priors all related to their struggle with crack, heroin or pain pills, are easy prey for district attorneys. Typically, the state's witnesses are all cops and the narcotics are bagged, tagged and handed to the jury as physical evidence.
Jordan's staff has worked about 35 trials post-Katrina, either by jury or judge. A number of them have been drug possession and dealing cases, including Taylor's case.
On Thursday night, prosecutors failed to persuade a jury to convict a woman accused of attempted murder for an alleged violent scrap with another woman over a man.
Defense attorney Ike Spears won the jury over with a closing argument that questioned why Jordan's office isn't going after the violent drug-trade murders that have all but taken Central City hostage for the past several months.
In response to such criticism, Jordan maintains his office is handling its caseload appropriately. Convicts like Taylor, prosecutors acknowledge, are offenders with a long list of criminal offenses who have had plenty of chances. Taylor got 90 days in 2003 for first-time possession of marijuana, and was sent to a "drop-in" drug treatment program, his court record shows.
Less than a year later, Taylor pleaded guilty to possession of drug paraphernalia and got six months in jail, all suspended. Five months later, he violated that probation with the same charge and a judge gave him 100 days in jail and ordered him to complete a drug rehabilitation program.
Taylor's recent court history is all about his addiction to crack cocaine.
"He's a drug addict," his public defender Joseph Meyer said Friday, after Judge Darryl Derbigny gave Taylor three years in prison.
Taylor, however, was sentenced by Derbigny without his public defender by his side. Meyer was busy with another client in the courtroom while the judge and prosecutors ushered Taylor back to prison, and the veteran defense lawyer said he wasn't told the sentencing was happening at the time.
No matter. Taylor is due back in court to face a sentence likely to exceed his natural life.
"We will continue to aggressively prosecute repeat offenders to ensure that they receive prison time when appropriate," Jordan said through his spokesman Friday. "For all three murder cases we have tried post-Katrina, we've obtained guilty convictions. We'll continue to focus attention and our prosecutorial resources on violent, repeat offenders."
Tough sentencing
Louisiana's repeat offender sentencing law is one of the toughest in the nation, in a state where murder and aggravated rape convictions mean mandatory life without the chance of parole, if a convict is lucky to escape a death penalty hearing.
At court, it's called the "multiple bill," a process that essentially takes a convict to court once again after his sentencing and accuses him of being a repeat offender who deserves to go away for far more years than the crime at hand carries. Like a bill of indictment, the multiple bill form is filed by prosecutors, who note the convict's record and ask the judge to hand down sentences that range from 20 years to life.
The multiple bill came up during Jordan's campaign for district attorney, as he beat back opponent Dale Atkins and heavily chastised retiring incumbent Harry Connick for having more iron will than compassion.
"The multiple bill will be used strategically as a way to achieve harsh prison terms for people who deserve it," Jordan said two days after he won office in late 2002. "We will not use it across the board."
In 2002, Jordan said his administration would set new priorities for prosecuting criminals. "We need to find a way to deal with drug addiction in a way that makes sense," he said in an interview. "You end up where you're not giving proper attention to cases that deserve the most attention. Certainly, a simple possession case is not equal to a homicide case. Sometimes a defendant is going to deserve a second chance."
Not lately, though. Jordan has repeatedly issued edicts to "crack down" on those convicts who keep making repeat appearances in handcuffs.
"My office is cracking down on offenders of all kinds," Jordan said in another statement this week. "We continue to seek the maximum penalty for multiple offenders."
Same goes for Eddie Robert, busted in 2003 on a 9th Ward corner for having 1.8 grams of marijuana in a bag and $14 in cash.
Robert, now 25, was found guilty by a 12-person jury for selling marijuana and sentenced to five years in prison. But Jordan's office argued that Robert's prior conviction, a 1999 case in which an 18-year-old Robert pleaded guilty to having cocaine and received 30 months, made him a repeat offender. Derbigny agreed and changed the sentence to 15 years in prison.
Robert's case isn't over yet, however, and remains on appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court.
"The defendant's past criminal history is not of a violent nature," the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal ruled in May, tossing out the sentence and sending the case back to Derbigny. With an original bond set at $2,500, the court added that Robert "was neither a violent criminal nor a flight risk."
Jordan 'out of touch'
Jordan is going after every case he can to maximize his statistics, his courthouse critics say.
"He's out of the loop and he's out of touch," said defense attorney David Capasso, who on Friday watched his client, Darryl L. Arnold, get 7 1/2 years for attempted possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. "The multiple bill is set up to punish people who are a danger. It's supposed to be used for violent offenders. It's immoral to put people in jail after Katrina for marijuana. There are hundreds of cases like that."
Arnold, 23, was arrested in early 2004 for having 69.8 grams of marijuana, doled out inside 40 individual plastic bags, all stashed in a paper bag, police said. A jury in March 2005 convicted him of the lesser charge of "attempted possession" with intent to sell it.
Judge Camille Buras, who had previously given Arnold four years in prison, settled on 7 1/2 after finding him a repeat offender. Arnold could have received 30 years.
"Four years is a just sentence," Capasso said. "Let him go to boot camp. Let him go on with his life."
Drug cases have filled the dockets at Tulane and Broad for decades, ranging from first-time marijuana possession -- a misdemeanor -- to multiple-defendant drug-dealing felonies.
On Wednesday, a jury found 32-year-old Alsando Dowell guilty of possession of heroin, from an Oct. 18, 2004, incident at Third and South Miro streets.
After spotting police officers, Dowell tossed a brown paper bag containing heroin to the street and ran, prosecutors Greg Thompson and Eusi Phillips said. Within 40 minutes, jurors convicted Dowell, who is due in court for sentencing by Derbigny on Oct. 24. Yet the coveted second chance, or at least a sentence that doesn't approach a decade, doesn't always pan out.
An early test case
The case that defense lawyers and judges at Tulane and Broad can quote from extensively is that of Lemeul "Lembo" Dorthey.
Dorthey in 1993 became a test case for sending repeat drug offenders to prison for decades.
Judge Leon Cannizzaro was uncomfortable giving Dorthey, then 27, a lengthy stretch for his crack cocaine addition that landed him in court for possession. Then-DA Connick fought back, saying Dorthey qualified for a fourth-offense bid for 20 to life. The case ended up at the Louisiana Supreme Court, which sided with the judge.
Cannizzaro, now a 4th Circuit Court of Appeal judge, finally gave Dorthey seven years in prison.
But Dorthey eventually graduated from bumbling pot dealer to a player in a mid-scale heroin trafficking ring. Last year, he pleaded guilty to having a role in an organized New Orleans heroin operation out of the Guste public housing complex in Central City. The dealers sold heroin within 1,000 feet of three elementary schools, prosecutors said.
The U.S. attorney's office portrayed Dorthey as the ringleader in a heroin packaging outfit, and named him in each of the 37 counts of the indictment issued in 2005. He had faced up to 40 years in prison, double the usual 20-year maximum sentence for heroin dealing, because the drug deals were close to schools.
This time, the convict copped a plea instead of facing trial. Dorthey is doing 10 years at federal prison.
From the Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, where he was held pretrial since the parish prison lacks the room to hold pretrial Orleans defendants, Taylor was stunned to hear of Jordan's plans to multiple bill him. Prison officials refused to allow a reporter to visit him, but Taylor responded by mail to a reporter's written questions.
In the letter, Taylor said he was framed by police in his recent case. He doesn't even have a bike and he doesn't drink, he wrote, and the cops planted the rock on him.
"I guess by my record, the DA think I'm a menace to society," Taylor wrote. "I have struggled for many years . . . I been doing a lot of crazy things in my life. I try to use drugs, but it made my life more depress. So I try selling for awhile and I was doing good, I thought, before I got caught . . . I really need to get myself together back in society and live a better life."
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Gwen Filosa can be reached at gfilosa@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3304.