CONNICK BLASTS CRACK PIPE RELEASES

Judges: Cocaine Residue Not Enough To Convict

Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick on Tuesday again turned to a
tiny part of the docket that has given him a big headache: cases in which
judges acquit defendants of possessing cocaine when they're caught with
crack pipes instead.

Connick said because some judges typically acquit such suspects, defendants
whose cases are allotted to them opt to have the judges, without juries,
decide their fate. The practice leads to uneven justice and puts people
back on the street to commit more crimes, Connick said.

Almost 80 percent of 166 such defendants tried by a judge were acquitted
between January 1995 and October 1999, according to a study conducted by
the University of New Orleans and commissioned by the New Orleans Police
Foundation.

When asked for a breakdown of results after jury trials of similar cases,
Connick said the information was not relevant. Likewise, he said he did not
know the total number of so-called "crack-pipe" cases his office prosecuted
during the period covered by the study and that fact was irrelevant.

The district attorney's office prosecutes between 7,000 and 8,000 cases
each year.

Connick said the crack pipe cases are a small but important part of the
workload. In one case, a person was arrested for murder two weeks after a
judge acquitted him, though most of the defendants who were arrested later
were charged with misdemeanors and municipal infractions, the study said.
Of the 131 people found not guilty, 63 percent were arrested again at least
once, and one person was arrested 23 times, the study concluded.

The study singled out Judges Frank Marullo and Raymond Bigelow, who
presided over more than half of the judge trials during the period studied
and together found 75 people not guilty.

"A defendant going to some courts gets convicted and defendants going to
other courts are walking out," Connick said. "It is apparent they (judges)
think the need to do a favor is greater than the consequences."

But Bigelow said Connick, his former boss, should know better. He said
Connick was wrongly trying to intimidate the court generally and him
specifically to do his bidding.

"He should know I would not do anything for anyone as a favor," said
Bigelow, who spent 11 years as a prosecutor, four as Connick's top
assistant. "It is a case where the state has failed to meet its burden of
proof, failed to prove the defendant knowingly and intentionally possessed
cocaine."

Marullo could not be reached for comment, but he and other judges have
ruled that because the pipes contained nothing anyone could smoke, only
cocaine residue, they were empty and those arrested with them could not be
convicted of intentionally possessing cocaine at that moment. Connick
contends that possession is possession, regardless of the amount.

In many of the crack pipe cases, police book pipe-toting suspects with
possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor, but the district
attorney's office instead charges them with cocaine possession, a felony
that involves harsher penalties. Under current Louisiana law, neither
judges nor juries have the option of convicting someone who is charged with
possessing cocaine of the lesser paraphernalia charge.

Orleans Parish judges tried last year to get the law changed so they could
at least convict suspects in these cases of the lesser crime and likewise
instruct jurors that they had such an option but failed. And Connick was
unable to convince lawmakers to make possessing drug paraphernalia a felony
rather than a misdemeanor.