GIST: "An emergency broadcast alert blares from Elvis Brooks’s
cellphone, warning him that a tornado has been spotted in the area.
“Seek shelter now,” the electronic voice urges. Brooks
shrugs off the threat, though his small, narrow house, a rental on
Alexandria’s west side, seems no match for dangerous weather. The thing
is, he’s been through much worse. In
October, he left the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola after
serving 42 years of a life sentence for murder. He’d maintained his
innocence from the start, and his departure should have been a joyous
moment. Lawyers working on his case had discovered fingerprint evidence
previously concealed by prosecutors that pointed to a wrongful
conviction. Yet
Brooks, now 62, didn’t walk out of Angola an innocent man. To secure
his freedom, he had to “make a deal with the devil.” Rather than
languish even longer as he tried to clear his name, he pleaded guilty to
a lesser charge, forfeiting his right to sue, in exchange for immediate
release. “I
cried at night in Angola,” confesses Brooks, sitting on his couch next
to a pillow with “Blessed” stitched on its front. “I ain’t never thought
I was going to get out. So I took the deal. It ain’t right, but that’s
the way of the world. It’s a crooked world like that.”............Wrongful convictions, especially those involving prosecutorial
misconduct, often lead to multimillion-dollar lawsuits. If a prosecutor
can persuade the incarcerated person to plead guilty in exchange for
freedom, the risk of a costly settlement goes away. Orleans
Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro made the offer to Brooks just
before a court hearing on whether his conviction should be set aside.
Brooks agonized over what to do. If
he pleaded to manslaughter and three counts of armed robbery —
admitting to something he denied as vehemently as ever — the district
attorney’s office would not be held accountable and he could not seek
any compensation for his 42 years behind bars. If he rejected the offer,
the consequences were implicit: Prosecutors would fight him at every
turn. Cannizzaro
declined an interview request, saying in a statement that Brooks’s case
had been reexamined and his guilt confirmed. He defended his
prosecutors, called the conviction “properly attained” and explained
that Brooks was released only because he appeared to be “rehabilitated
and will not go out to re-offend.” “If
he and his attorneys truly believed in his innocence, they could have
pursued post-conviction claims,” the prosecutor added. “Notably, they
did not.”His office has secured five such plea deals in the past eight years. He has issued similar statements after each.........Just
before closing time on July 1, 1977, two people robbed the Welcome Inn
bar in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, shooting and killing a customer.
Nearly three weeks later, police arrested Brooks. He lived nearby in a
shotgun house with his parents and six of his 11 siblings. He was a
19-year-old high school dropout who sometimes stole cars for joyriding.
“But we didn’t go around trying to hurt anyone,” he insists. No
physical evidence tied Brooks to the crime, and a dozen people
testified that he was at a family party at the time of the shooting. The
state’s entire case, the Innocence Project New Orleans argued last
year, relied on three white witnesses from the dimly lit bar who gave
conflicting descriptions of the robbers. The
trial lasted a single day. The jury found Brooks guilty of first-degree
murder and sentenced him to life, a relief of sorts given that he’d
faced the death penalty. Yet jurors were never told that fingerprints
taken from the robbers’ beer cans didn’t match Brooks’s fingerprints. Or
that police believed the same men had robbed several people less than
an hour earlier, with each victim ruling Brooks out as a suspect............. But the week before a hearing on his request that his conviction be vacated, Charell Arnold of the
Innocence Project New Orleans
received a call. Cannizzaro’s office said it had “very exciting news”
and detailed the plea deal. The attorney drove to Angola the next day. She
believed they would ultimately prevail, Arnold told Brooks, but it
would take time. The last person who rejected a similar offer spent an
additional five-plus years behind bars before he won his release. In the
stale room where they were meeting, sitting at a small folding table,
Brooks suddenly shut down. Arnold remembers him putting his head on the
table, his hand over a tattered Manila envelope. It contained all the
legal documents he had amassed during the years of trying to prove his
innocence. Cannizzaro’s office later characterized the deal as an act of “mercy.” Arnold was enraged.“There
is nothing merciful about asking someone to plead guilty to a crime the
evidence clearly shows they didn’t commit,” she shot back. “It’s
coercive, and to call it anything else is laughable.”
