N.O. settles lawsuit with wrongfully convicted man

The City of New Orleans and the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office on June 7 announced that a settlement has been reached in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by former inmate Reginald Adams, a 64-year-old who spent 34 years behind bars until his murder conviction was overturned in 2014.

Terms of the settlement, which was approved earlier this month by U.S. District Judge Daniel E. Knowles III, have been sealed.

Among those named in the lawsuit were former Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick; the City of New Orleans, former Orleans Parish prosecutors Ronald Bodenheimer and Harold Gilbert; former NOPD detectives Sam Gebbia, Frank Ruiz, Jerry Ursin and Ronald Venezia; current Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro; and several unidentified persons and insurance companies.

Adams’ conviction was overturned in 2014 after a review of the case by D.A. Cannizzaro and Innocent Project New Orleans, which also led to the dismissal of the murder indictment against Adams.

Cannizzaro said in 2014 that the actions of the NOPD detectives and Orleans Parish prosecutors involv-ed in the case were “shameful.”

Although the current D.A. was not directly involved in the prosecution of Adams for the 1983 murder of Cathy Ulfers, the wife of a NOPD officer, the lawsuit contended that Cannizzaro ran an office in which “the general practice of withholding exculpatory evidence ands failing to appropriately train was so common and well-established” that it was one of the factors that led to Adams not getting released from prison until 2014.

Adams’ initial conviction was based in part on false testimony from several NOPD detectives, suppression of key evidence and statements Adams made during which he alleged that he was intoxicated and coerced to confess to the murder, all of which has been acknowledged by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.

After his initial conviction for first-degree murder was overturned by the Louisiana Supreme Court, Adams was retried in 1990 for second-degree murder and again convicted.

However, prosecutors later acknowledged that Adams was given alcohol and Valium by police during an interrogation that lasted more than four hours.

Officials also learned that other police reports that contained evidence that showed detectives learned of a weapon that was traced back to two other people was never shared with Adams’ attorneys.

Assistant D.A. Ronald Bodenheimer, it was later learned, based his case against Adams’ largely on the ill-gotten confession and the told jurors that the murder weapon was never recovered when in fact it had been.

Bodenheimer, who later became a Jefferson Parish judge, was spent more than three years in prison after being convicted of accepting bribes and other charges.

This article originally published in the June 19, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.