Louisiana Supreme Court rejects two Caddo Parish death warrants; execution dates off

The Louisiana Supreme Court threw out execution warrants Friday that a Caddo Parish judge has issued for two men convicted in separate murder cases. 

Judge Donald Hathaway, at the request of Caddo District Attorney James E. Stewart Sr., set a May 28 for the death penalty to be carried out against Darrell Draughn and a June 4 execution date for Marcus Reed. Friday’s ruling from the justices requires Hathaway to consider the defendants’ claims for relief before setting new execution dates.

Draughn stabbed his 64-year-old neighbor Lauretta White in 2000 at her Shreveport home, according to investigators. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in 2003.

Reed was convicted of killing brothers Jarquis, Jeremiah and Eugene Adams in 2010. Police said the fatal dispute was over an allegedly stolen video game console. Reed’s conviction and death sentence came in 2013.

Defense attorneys successfully argued both men were not allowed to pursue post-conviction relief to the extent allowed by law before the judge set their execution dates.

“The Louisiana Supreme Court recognized the fundamental principle that the state cannot send a man to the death chamber without at least allowing him to exhaust his appeals,” Draughn’s lawyer, Ceceilia Kappel of Loyola University’s Center for Social Justice, said in a statement. “If prisoners can be executed before they have completed all of their appeals, by warrants signed under cover of darkness, then all of our rights are in serious jeopardy.”

Stewart could not be reached Friday evening for comment on the ruling.

The Caddo death warrants were the first issued since Louisiana conducted its first execution in 15 years last month. Jessie Hoffman was the first person the state put to death using nitrogen hypoxia, a method the state legislature and Gov. Jeff Landry approved last year. 

Louisiana followed Alabama’s lead in using nitrogen gas to carry out the death penalty after struggling for years to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injection.

Draughn and Reed are among the 55 people awaiting execution in Louisiana.

Attorney General Liz Murrill, who supported the issuance of the death warrants, said Friday’s rulings show the need to revise the state’s post-conviction relief policy. In a statement through her spokesman, she noted her support for a bill in the upcoming legislative session that makes numerous changes to the applicable state law.  

“Lawyers for these individuals obtained delay after delay then did nothing,” Murrill said. “Now the victims’ families are suffering the consequences of their actions. State (post-conviction relief) needs to have predictable deadlines so this abuse of the process ends once and for all.”

Chief Justice John Weimer and Associate Justices John Guidry, Jefferson Hughes and Piper Griffin ruled in the majority in both cases Friday. 

“I understand and appreciate that this matter should be litigated and resolved expeditiously, and from the perspective of the family of the victim, justice delayed is often justice denied,” Weimer wrote in his concurrence with the Reed ruling. “However, while setting an execution date might serve a laudable goal of expediting the proceeding, doing so in this case and thereby forcing the implementation of all the protocols related to a death sentence before evaluating whether that can be realistically accomplished, only creates other delays and burdens the system with additional costs.”

Associate Justices William Crain and Jay McCallum dissented, and the court’s newest member, Associate Justice Cade Cole, concurred and dissented in part.

Cole, Crain and McCallum agreed there was no reason to withdraw the death warrants, noting that a motion was pending in the trial court to address any of the defendants’ remaining issues.   

“The majority has acted in haste and in doing so prevented the able trial court from properly addressing motions that were pending before it,” McCallum wrote in his dissent for the Draughn case. “The resolution of those motions may have very well made the matter before us moot. Execution of justice will now be delayed even further.”