A 51-year-old man serving a life prison sentence appears set to go free after 12 years behind bars, after a federal judge found that former Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick’s office failed to turn over a police report that directly contradicted the trial testimony of two New Orleans cops
District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office this week refused to retry the cocaine-possession case that sent Eddie Triplett away for life in 1999 as a four-time felon under the state’s habitual offender law.
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The decision comes two months after U.S. District Court Judge Helen “Ginger” Berrigan set aside Triplett’s conviction and life sentence, in the latest case of withheld evidence by a DA’s office under heavy fire for its history of repeated constitutional violations.
Berrigan found that prosecutors failed to give Triplett’s trial attorney a police report with a narrative indicating that NOPD patrol officers Jeff Keating and Edgar Staehle stopped a man they identified as Michael Cola at exactly the same time and place they arrested Triplett.
The report says the officers spotted Cola on a bicycle and arrested him after seeing him grab a plastic bag with white powder from his pocket and stuff it in his mouth. The officers repeatedly testified at trial, however, that it was Triplett who held the cocaine and stuffed it in his mouth that night on the 8900 block of Green Street and that he was the only one they stopped.
Triplett testified that he was riding a bike down Green Street and that police stopped him and another man, who then dropped something to the ground. After running Triplett’s criminal record, the officers let the other man go, Triplett said.
The early, handwritten police report makes no mention of Cola, but the full, far more detailed typewritten one does, according to Berrigan.
“Both Officer Keating and Staehle insisted at trial that no one else was detained at that time and place, other than Triplett,” wrote Berrigan, who took the federal bench in 1993 under President Bill Clinton.
“In short, the testimony given by Officers Keating and Staehle at trial mirrored the police report in all aspects, except the crucial one — the contemporaneous police report named Michael Cola as the person detained, not Eddie Triplett,” Berrigan wrote.
It’s unclear why, if the officers were seeking to pin blame exclusively on Triplett, they wrote a later report that named Cola.
The failure by the DA’s office to turn over the narrative violated Triplett’s rights under Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires the government to turn over all evidence favorable to the defense, Berrigan ruled.
Officers still on force
The decision by Cannizzaro’s office to drop the case comes less than two weeks after U.S. Supreme Court justices dressed down an assistant district attorney for trying to defend a similar decision by Connick’s office not to turn over evidence in a 1998 murder case.
Cannizzaro said his office never fought Triplett’s federal petition. In an interview Friday, Cannizzaro said the failure to turn over the report was a clear violation and that it also was clear the officers lied on the stand.
Staehle, an 18-year NOPD veteran, is a quality-of-life officer in the 2nd District and Keating is a detective, according to a police spokesman.
Cannizzaro said he was unaware that the officers remained on the force. Asked whether their testimony in the case warranted action, Cannizzaro paused, then said, “It is my responsibility to forward that at the very least to NOPD.”
Remi Braden, the NOPD spokeswoman, said that Deputy Chief Arlinda Westbrook, head of the Public Integrity Bureau, had contacted Cannizzaro’s office late Friday and was looking into the case.
Showing a pattern
In March, a narrow U.S. Supreme Court majority overturned a $14 million judgment against the DA’s office in the case of John Thompson, who spent 14 years on death row before a private investigator discovered a hidden blood report shortly before his scheduled execution. The majority found that the DA’s office couldn’t be held responsible for failing to train prosecutors to turn over exculpatory evidence based on a single case and that Thompson failed to prove a pattern of misconduct.
In that case, Cannizzaro described the failure to turn over evidence as “the unethical actions of a rogue prosecutor.”
But the appeal of Juan Smith, which Cannizzaro’s office recently argued before the Supreme Court, had eerie similarities. A decision is still pending in that case.
Several justices made it clear in oral arguments that Connick’s office should have turned over earlier statements by the lone eyewitness in Smith’s conviction in a 1995 quintuple murder.
Cannizzaro declined to say whether he now sees a pattern from the Connick era, which ended in 2003 after three decades.
“I’m not going to pass judgment on any of my predecessors,” said Cannizzaro, a former prosecutor under Connick and then a Criminal District Court judge for 17 years.
Surge in exonerations
According to the Innocence Network, the discovery of Brady violations committed by Orleans Parish prosecutors at trial has contributed to exonerations of 10 people in the past two decades. Another review by the public defender’s office found 28 violations since the Brady decision. Cannizzaro’s office has disputed that number, saying it’s actually 13.
Just how many might still emerge is up in the air, said Jim Looney, executive director of the Louisiana Appellate Project.
“It’s almost luck of the draw. Can you find somebody who knows what was missing? If you can find DNA and then come back and find out there was a report, then that’s a smoking gun. There’s so many of these where there is no smoking gun,” Looney said.
“When you have all of this and the Supreme Court says you can’t sue ’em unless you show this pattern, basically there is no penalty for a DA who does that.”
Before his conviction in the 1998 case, Triplett pleaded guilty in 1993 to possession with intent to distribute cocaine and received a 10-year prison sentence. In that case, Connick’s office declined to seek a higher sentence under the state’s habitual offender law, court records show.
His earlier criminal record was not immediately available.
Triplett’s federal public defender, Valerie Welz Jusselin, did not return messages Friday. Just when Triplett might be released was unclear. A spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections could not be reached.
