Pubdate: Fri, 10 Jan 2003
Source: Times-Picayune, The (LA)
Copyright: 2003 The Times-Picayune
Contact:  http://www.nola.com/t-p/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/848
Author: Gwen Filosa

COURT IS ADJOURNED

New Orleans' Longtime and Controversial DA Harry Connick Says He Has
No Regrets and Looks Forward to His Family Time and His Singing Career

They had to block off a lane of Tulane Avenue to make room for the
crowds that came to watch the inauguration of District Attorney Harry
Connick on April 1, 1974.

In so many ways, it was a different era.

Moon Landrieu was the new mayor. Edwin Edwards was a first-term
governor. Richard Nixon was months away from resigning the presidency.
And Connick had narrowly drummed the flamboyant 12-year incumbent, Jim
Garrison, out of the Orleans Parish district attorney's office by
about 2, 200 votes.

On the steps of the criminal courthouse that morning, Connick appeared
as a reformer promising to get tough at trial, end rampant plea
bargaining and slam shut the "revolving door" at the state prison in
Angola.

Bold, brash and stubborn to the bone, he was every inch a New Orleans
character in the making.

"Starting today, not tomorrow or next week, if you take a life, commit
assault, armed robbery, rape or any other violent crime that shocks
and terrorizes the decent people of this city, we'll prosecute you,"
said Connick, then 48, to a cheering audience. "We will not rest until
we destroy the source of violent crime."

A month earlier, he had vowed that violent repeat offenders weren't
getting out of prison on his watch. "If I have to stand out in front
of some prison with a shotgun," Connick said. "It's as simple as that."

Three decades and countless cases later, Connick is retiring as the
longest-serving Orleans Parish district attorney -- probably one of
the longest-serving DAs in the country. In March, on his 76th
birthday, he announced he would not seek a sixth term. On Monday,
Eddie Jordan, another prosecutor promising reform, will take over the
office that Connick defined for more than a generation.

'We've done a lot'

A 29-year career in the public eye comes to an end today, along with
the astonishing ability of one elected official to attract contention
at seemingly every turn. He scrapped with judges over bail bond
reductions, led a drive for in-school drug testing of teens and didn't
flinch in defending his lawyers from accusations of misconduct. He
weathered criticism that his fierce loyalty to the Catholic Church
clouded the prosecutions of priests such as Dino Cinel, who resigned
from the priesthood after admitting that he picked up young men and
took them to the rectory for sexual encounters he would videotape.

Nothing new, Connick said this week, conjuring up a string of cases
his office pursued that he felt powerful interests wanted left alone.

He went back to the John "Hot Rod" Williams basketball point-shaving
scandal at Tulane, which ended in an acquittal at trial but prompted
the school to close its basketball program for years.

"It seems like we weren't supposed to touch that," Connick said. "The
minute it broke, it was, 'Don't fool with Hot Rod Williams or Tulane
basketball.' "

It was the same when Connick wanted to force the riverboat casinos to
leave shore before gambling could begin. "The boats -- 'Let them stay
where they are.' One judge after another told us that. Then it was,
'Don't fool with the Saints' contract with the Dome.' All of these
have special interests involved. We've done a lot."

Connick took different hits most recently: for not going after city
taxi bureau and brake-tag corruption cases as zealously as Mayor Ray
Nagin appeared to be, for having low conviction rates, for rejecting
more cases than his office accepted.

More troubling was the allegation that dangerous suspects had been
allowed to fall through the system's cracks, two of whom are charged
with terrorizing a Faubourg St. John couple in a brazen
kidnapping-robbery-murder on LePage Street in September after they
were released on an unrelated case.

His critics don't understand criminal law or prosecution, said
Connick, hanging tough to the last. The system he believes in requires
proof in hand before charging, he said. His lawyers did their jobs.

"We came into this office with that rule: If you're going to charge a
citizen, you damn well better have good reason for doing that," he
said. "People call the indigents' lawyer the public defender. That's
what Webster's calls it," he said this week. "But the prosecutor has
more opportunity to do good for the citizens than any defense lawyer
can do." 'I was a better prosecutor'

Connick got his start, as it happens, defending accused criminals as a
city Legal Aid lawyer in 1962, but was soon drawn to
prosecution.

"We're the ones who really defend the rights of anyone," Connick said
this week, seated in his near-vacant office. The books and framed
diplomas were boxed away. Blue and white "Re-Elect Connick" buttons
and stickers sat, like footnotes, in a spot near the door.

"That's why I wanted to be a defense lawyer, and I was a good one.
Then I found out I was a better prosecutor."

In 1965, he joined the U.S. attorney's office and eventually led the
prosecution of gamblers and drug dealers. He resigned in 1969 to enter
private practice with his first wife at the firm of Connick and
Connick, and start a campaign for district attorney.

Connick lost to Garrison in the primary but walked away with 40
percent of the vote and enough political fire to successfully strike
back at the incumbent in the 1973 election.

By all accounts, though, Connick inherited a mess. About 7,500 cases
stuffed the court dockets, including a host of petty crimes unfit for
trial. Garrison oversaw about 100 trials in his last year. By his
third year as district attorney, Connick was steering more than 1,000
cases to trial.

Many years later, Connick appeared jovial as he packed up almost three
decades of mementos in his office. Pushed, he'll answer his critics,
but his mood was not to engage the past.

Instead, his office buzzed with talk of celebrations. A party for the
office staff and supporters was set for Thursday night at the French
Quarter Tipitina's. A Mass in his honor will be said today at 11 a.m.
at Mater Dolorosa Church on Plum Street. And Connick's friends will
host a tribute dinner for him tonight at the Fairmont Hotel. His
famous son, musician Harry Connick Jr., is in town for his father's
farewell.

'I don't mind heat'

Connick's final months in office may have had rocky moments, but the
district attorney never stopped swinging back. He took a pounding for
how his office handled the earlier case against the LePage Street
murder suspects. Candidates vying to replace him attacked Connick more
than each other. They blasted the office's conviction rate. They
criticized him for failing to work with other law enforcement agencies.

"I felt like I was running again," he said. "I was amused by a lot of
things they were talking about."

The candidate he endorsed, Dale Atkins, ultimately lost to former U.S.
Attorney Eddie Jordan as foes accused her of being the candidate most
likely to perpetuate the status quo of the Connick years.

"That campaign was very unusual. They hurt my candidate by hurting
me," Connick said. "I don't mind heat, I don't mind confrontation. Hit
me, but don't hit me below the belt."

Connick is the first to say his political value deflated during the
election. Along with Atkins' defeat, his time-tested ability to help
top assistants land judgeships also suffered when First Assistant Tim
McElroy lost the race for criminal court judge to law professor Darryl
Derbigny.

For more than a generation, Connick had served as a kingmaker,
endorsing candidates for the bench and other offices. He was both an
ally and a beneficiary of ex-Mayor Marc Morial's political machine.

Orleans Parish Criminal District Court has four of Connick's former
first assistants on the bench: Judges Terry Alarcon, Camille Buras and
Raymond Bigelow and Chief Judge Dennis Waldron.

"Had I not been first assistant, I probably would not be a judge
today," said Alarcon, who began his legal career in Connick's office
and was his top aide from 1982 to 1984. In 1996, he won a criminal
court judgeship.

Connick was loyal to his charges and respected the independent
thinkers on his staff, Alarcon said.

"He never held that against me, the fact that we disagreed," he said.
"That takes a pretty good man to be able to respect somebody else's
opinion, especially when they're your boss."

Connick shook off competitors for the DA's office at every turn in an
extraordinary example of political staying power in the face of a
changing electorate. A white candidate in a majority black city,
Connick held onto his job.

"I've been able to do it because of my politics," he said simply.
"That's not easy to do."

'I've been a defendant'

Connick has led an office dogged for years by high turnover, low
starting salaries for young lawyers and staggering caseloads. But he
saved his loudest answer to critics for his final week in office,
bringing to town two blue chip law professors who praised his
case-management philosophy in a Stanford Law Review article.

"We thought we were going to find a mess," said Ronald Wright, who
teaches at Wake Forest University, recalling his first visits years
ago to Connick's office to begin research.

Instead, below a surface of perceived turmoil, the academics said, the
Orleans Parish prosecutor had installed a "progressive and honest"
system of resisting plea bargains and only going after only the cases
he knew he could win.

To those over the years who have accused Connick of misusing the power
that comes with the DA's office, the chief prosecutor turned the
question around.

"If we were insensitive to the rights of individuals, we would just
charge them," Connick said, adding, "I've been a defendant myself."

In 1990, Connick was acquitted by a federal jury of racketeering
charges that accused him of wrongly returning seized records to a
bookie. "I know what it is to be indicted, by none other than the
United States government. I've been there. It's not nice. I know what
it means to have someone misuse power on me."

'I've had no regrets'

Whether he is seen as colorful or combative, Connick has made few
major moves that didn't draw arguments. He helped install voluntary
drug testing using hair samples in private and public schools, a
practice that has spread to about 21 local schools. Civil libertarians
say he went too far, but federal agencies have praised the program for
getting help to youths using drugs rather than punishing them.

When the Bush administration's drug czar, John Walters, visited New
Orleans last month to check out the high school drug-testing programs,
he gave Connick an award for distinguished service. Connick recently
traveled to a conference in South Carolina to talk to officials of
various federal agencies, and he said he will keep his role as
spokesman for drug testing.

But the most serious allegation made against the DA's office was that
prosecutors unfairly and in some cases illegally withheld evidence
from the defense in high-profile murder cases.

Shareef Cousin, the teenager sent to death row for the 1995 murder of
a Slidell man outside a French Quarter restaurant, became a
sympathetic figure among death penalty foes. The state Supreme Court
threw out his conviction, finding prosecutors had wrongly used hearsay
evidence, and Connick's office decided not to try the tortured case a
second time.

Cousin remains in prison, having pleaded guilty to unrelated armed
robberies before his murder trial.

Another one-time death row inmate whose case ignited charges of
prosecutorial misconduct is Curtis Kyles, who served 11 years on death
row in the 1984 killing of a Gentilly woman before the U.S. Supreme
Court reversed his conviction in 1995. Connick's prosecutors had
improperly withheld evidence that would have raised doubts about
Kyles' guilt, the high court ruled in a 5-4 decision. The actions of
Connick's assistants threatened to reduce the justice system "to a
gladiatorial level unmitigated by any prosecutorial obligation for the
sake of truth," the court said.

But Connick entered the arena again and again against Kyles, each time
failing to overcome hung juries, before throwing in the towel in 1998,
when the fifth jury to consider the case deadlocked. Such legal
wrangling sometimes eclipsed the crime at hand, Connick said. "The
issue ought to be, did this person do this and can we prove it?

In both cases, Connick is adamant that prosecutors had the right man
and were forced to drop the cases only because they couldn't get a
conviction.

"We tried him because he was guilty," he said of Cousin. "He was a
murderer. We had good honest people on those cases."

He does not think those cases tarnished his legacy. Too much focus has
been placed on the few convictions overturned, he said.

"Keep in mind, too, there are 1,000 cases and convictions sustained,"
Connick said. "Don't judge me by the exceptions."

He wants to spend more time with his family, which includes three
grandchildren. His sideline singing act is booked well into 2004.
Otherwise, he has had little to say about his retirement.

"Generally speaking, no. I've had no regrets. It's an important job,
one that I really enjoyed," he said. "I just want to clean my closet
out, you know."
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake