Wrongly convicted man sues NOPD, D.A.’s Office

Reginald Adams, a New Orleans man who spent 34 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit, has filed a federal lawsuit against the New Orleans Police Department and the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office.

The case and the lawsuit shed more light on constitutional violations and prosecutorial misconduct being practiced by key components of the local criminal justice system at a time when a formal complaint has already been filed with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the practices of the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office and in the midst of the implementation of a federally mandated consent decree aimed at bringing the NOPD into compliance with federal standards for constitutional policing.

Adams, who was convicted of the 1979 murder of eastern New Orleans resident Cathy Ulfers, was exonerated when Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro agreed to vacate his murder conviction, admitting that Adams had been railroaded by police and prosecutors.

In a separate investigation, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell concluded that Adams was “factually innocent” and eligible to receive $250,000 in compensation over 10 years, the maximum allowed by the state’s Innocence Compensation Fund. Adams is eligible for an additional $80,000 in compensation for “lost life opportunities.”

Cathy Ulfers, the wife of former NOPD Officer Ronald Ulfers, was killed in what appeared to be a robbery attempt. Ronald Ulfers, who was initially a suspect in Cathy Ulfer’s death, was later convicted for the murder of his second wife Debra, behind their home in Covington, La. in 1996.

NOPD detectives Sam Gebbia and Martin Venexia reportedly dismissed Ronald Ulfers as a suspect and arrested Roland Burns, who had been linked to the crime by a gun ballistics expert.

Jurors in the Reginald Adams murder trial were not told of that information and it remained in obscurity until it was discovered by Innocence Project New Orleans investigators looking for information for a separate burglary trial for Adams for which he was subsequently acquitted.

The New Orleans Advocate reported that Adams said he was given pills and beer during a trip from jail to the murder scene but police maintained that Adams identified the house where Cathy Ulfers was killed and provided them with details about the crime.
“I wasn’t trying to confess to no murder… I was high. I didn’t know what I was doing anyway,” Adams told The New Orleans Advocate in an interview.

Cannizzaro said that police and prosecutors schemed to get a murder conviction in Adams’ 1983 trial, adding that both Gebbia and Venezia lied under oath that no murder weapon had been found that ant there were no other suspects in the case.

The two Orleans Parish prosecutors in the case were Harold “Tookie” Gilbert, who is now deceased, and Ronald Bodenheimer, who later became a Jefferson Parish judge and served more than three years in prison after his conviction in the FBI’s “Wrinkled Robe” probe of judicial corruption in the Gretna courthouse.

Since Adams’ exoneration, Venezia and Bodenheimer have defended their actions and dismissed the D.A.’s claims that they railroaded Adams to get a conviction.

In his federal lawsuit, Adams “alleges that a ‘code of silence’ existed at the NOPD at all time periods relevant to Mr. Adams’ claims and that this code of silence caused Mr. Adams to spend nearly 34 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Plaintiff further alleges that this code of silence constituted a widespread, prevalent custom or practice in which officers shielded fellow officers who committed illegal acts, that NOPD policymakers had actual or constructive knowledge of the existence of the code of silence, and that NOPD policymakers were deliberately indifferent to the code’s known or obvious consequences, including that the code of silence caused constitutional violations.”

This article originally published in the April 10, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.