253(B), the EastBaton Rouge Parish Clerk of Court (“Clerk of Court”) has established an electronic system for the filing and storage of any pleading, document or exhbit filed in the 19th Judicial District Court and Family Court for East Baton Rouge Parish.Įffective October 1, 2020, the Clerk of Court's civil suit records department no longer maintains paper files, with the exception of probate proceedings. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.PAPERLESS POLICIES FOR CIVIL, FAMILY, AND PROBATEĮffective June 4, 2018, and prusuant to C.C.P. Law enforcement told The Associated Press that officers who searched his home found a handwritten copy of an Adolf Hitler speech.Ĭopyright 2022 The Associated Press. He wasn’t charged with a hate crime, but an FBI agent testified that Gleason searched the internet around the time of the crimes for topics including Nazi propaganda and white nationalism. And authorities also said Gleason had fired gunshots through the front door of a Black family. Gleason also had been charged in the fatal shooting of Bruce Cofield, 59, a homeless man who was sitting at a bus stop on a busy street in Baton Rouge two days before Smart was killed. Smart, 49, was shot in a park near Louisiana State University as he was walking to his overnight shift as a restaurant dishwasher in September 2017.Īfter Gleason died, a district judge, following state court doctrine and precedent, vacated the conviction and dismissed the indictment, according to Thursday’s ruling. He had begun a life sentence for the first-degree murder of Donald Smart. Gleason, 27, hanged himself in his cell at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in Sept. “In my view, the victims of defendant’s shocking and senseless crimes, their relatives and friends, and the entire community impacted by defendant’s vicious spree, deserve the finality of his conviction being unambiguous in the records of the court system,” Crichton wrote. In a partial dissent, Justice Scott Crichton agreed that the precedent that essentially exonerated Gleason should be abandoned, but he wanted to go farther, noting evidence that Gleason had killed two men in what appeared to be racially motivated attacks. Kenneth Gleason, a white man whose murder conviction in the killing of a Black man was vacated because he killed himself while his appeal was pending should not have been legally exonerated, Louisiana's Supreme Court ruled Thursday, Nov. “To abate a conviction would be as to say there has been no crime and there is no victim.”įILE - The rear view on Chartres Street of the newly renovated home of the Louisiana Supreme Court, located in the French Quarter, New Orleans on May 10, 2004. ![]() “Abatement of the conviction subordinates the victim’s constitutional guarantees of fairness, dignity, and respect to the reliance interests of the convicted,” Griffin said. “It ignores consideration that the state has an interest in preserving a presumptively valid conviction,” Griffin wrote. Writing for the court, Justice Piper Griffin said the practice of vacating convictions upon a defendant’s death is short-sighted. The high court’s order said that from now on in such cases, appeals will be dismissed, and a note will be placed in the court record stating that the conviction removed the defendant’s presumption of innocence but was neither affirmed nor reversed on appeal. It reversed an appeals court order and decades of precedent that said convictions and indictments in Louisiana must be tossed when the convicted defendant dies before his or her appeal is resolved. Thursday’s ruling in the case of Kenneth Gleason - convicted in one Black man’s death, charged in another and accused of an attack on a Black family’s home. NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A white man whose murder conviction in the killing of a Black man was vacated because he killed himself while his appeal was pending should not have been legally exonerated, Louisiana’s Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
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