FILED Supreme Court of the Unite~ State~, Summaries of Law

Download FILED Supreme Court of the Unite~ State~ and more Summaries Law in PDF only on Docsity! No. 07-15 IN THE ~3 FILED SUPREME Supreme Court of the Unite~ State~ DERRICK TODD LEE, Petitioner, V. STATE OF LOUISIANA, Respondent. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the Louisiana Court of Appeal, First Circuit BRIEF IN OPPOSITION TO PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI * Counsel of Record RICHARD J. WARD, Jr. District Attorney ANTONIO M. "TONY" CLAYTON * Chief Felony Prosecutor ELIZABETH A. ENGOLIO Assistant District Attorney EIGHTEENTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT PARISH OF WEST BATON ROUGE STATE OF LOUISIANA Post Office Drawer 880 Plaquemine, Louisiana 70765 (225) 687-5210 Counsel for the State of Louisiana WILSON-EPES PRINTING CO. INC. - (202) 789-0096 - WASHINGTON, D. C. 20002 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF AUTHORITIES ................................ STATEMENT OF THE CASE ............................ ARGUMENT ........................................................ I. WHETHER THE CONSTITUTION ALLOWS STATES TO SECURE CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS BY NON- UNANIMOUS JURY VERDICTS IN NON-CAPITAL FELONY CASES? ........... II. WHETHER DNA EVIDENCE IN- TRODUCED AT PETITIONER’S TRIAL WAS PROPERLY ADMITTED PUR- SUANT TO THE INEVITABLE DIS- COVERY DOCTRINE? ............................. CONCLUSION .................................................... Page ii 1 2 2 9 13 (i) IN THE upreme eurt ef nitel tate No. 07-1523 DERRICK TODD LEE, Petitioner, V. STATE OF LOUISIANA, Respondent. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the Louisiana Court of Appeal, First Circuit BRIEF IN OPPOSITION TO PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI STATEMENT OF THE CASE Geralyn Desoto met her killer, the petitioner, Derrick Todd Lee, at the door of her mobile home in the Parish of West Baton Rouge, Louisiana on January 14, 2002. After Lee convinced her to let him use her telephone, he forced his way in and brutally beat her in the face and head. Though Desoto struggled, she was stabbed into submission and was ultimately killed by Lee when he slashed her throat open. Lee left his footprint in blood on Desoto’s chest, indicating he also stomped on her before he left. DNA collected from the scene conclusively linked Lee to Desoto’s murder as well as the murders of sev- 2 eral other women in South Louisiana from 1992 to 2003. Lee was indicted by a West Baton Rouge Parish Grand Jury with First Degree Murder and was tried for Second Degree Murder, a violation of LA R.S. 14:30.1, of which he was found guilty. The Louisiana Court of Appeal, First Circuit af- firmed the conviction and sentence obtained in the Eighteenth Judicial District Court of Louisiana;1 the Louisiana Supreme Court denied writs.2 ARGUMENT I. WHETHER THE CONSTITUTION ALLOWS STATES TO SECURE CRIMINAL CONVIC- TIONS BY NON-UNANIMOUS JURY VER- DICTS IN NON-CAPITAL FELONY CASES? Prior to 1972, the number of jurors required for a conviction was shaped by tradition. With Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404 (1972) and Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U.S. 356 (1972), Louisiana was permitted to allow convictions supported by less than unanimous juries in non-capital felony cases. The principle of stare decisis, therefore, cannot be ignored as is suggested by the petitioner. Though the issue presented requires constitutional analysis, the jurisprudence established must not be disturbed without special justification, which the State of Louisiana asserts does not exist. This doctrine is essential as it promotes even- handed, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles, fosters reliance on judicial decisions, and contributes to the actual and perceived integrity State v. Lee, 964 So.2d 967 (La.App. 1 Cir. 5/16/07) State v. Lee, 977 So.2d 896 (La. 3/7/08) 3 of the judicial process. Hohn v. U.S., 524 U.S. 236 (1998); State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997); Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 (1996). "It is indisputable that stare decisis is a basic self- governing principle with the Judicial Branch, which is entrusted with the sensitive and difficult task of fashioning and preserving a jurisprudential system that is not based upon ’an arbitrary discretion.’" Pat- terson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164 (1989) citing Boys Markets, Inc. v. Retail Clerks, 398 U.S. 235 (1970) and The Federalist, No. 78, p. 490 (H. Lodge ed. 1888) (A. Hamilton). Without a development in the law that undermines precedent, being proven to be impractical or becoming inconsistent with the sense of justice or the social welfare, stare decisis prohibits the petitioner’s proposition. Patterson, supra citing Runyon v. McCrary, 427 U.S. 160 (1976). Neither petitioner nor any of his amici satisfy any of the considerations which would trigger the overrul- ing of Apodaca or Johnson set out in Planned Parent- hood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992): whether the rule has proven to be intol- erable simply in defying practical workability; whether the rule is subject to a kind of reliance that would lend a special hardship to the consequences of over- ruling and add inequity to the cost of repudiation; whether related principles of law have so far devel- oped as to have left the old rule no more than a rem- nant of abandoned doctrine; whether facts have so changed, or come to be seen so differently, as to have robbed the old rule of significant application or jus- tification. Louisiana has for some time employed the states’ right to obtain a conviction by non-unanimous jury 6 embedded, so accepted, so fundamental an expec- tation that a change would result in actual dislo- cations to the states in their application of the Sixth Amendment. Petitioner’s suggestion that Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000), and its progeny so undermine Apodaca and Johnson that their principles are no longer recognizable as sound law, if ever they were, is wholly unsupported. Likewise, petitioner claims that recent decisions regarding the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, right to counsel, and right to compulsory process and their import to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment create the same expectation of jury verdict unanimity; however, this is not necessarily so. Jury unanimity is distinct from the aforementioned Sixth Amendment rights cited by petitioner, in that, it is nowhere enunciated in the Sixth Amendment. Petitioner’s approach to jury una- nimity makes an assumption that is not required by the Sixth Amendment. Furthermore, the position taken by petitioner and its amici, that circumstances have so changed, or come to be seen so differently, as to have stripped Apodaca and Johnson of their justification, is not compelling in light of the deliberate examination of the Sixth Amendment rights by the Apodaca/ Johnson Court. The evolution of understanding of the consequence of non-unanimous jury verdicts sub- mitted by the opposition fails to dissolve the reason- ing set out in Apodaca. The current rule observes that it is neither necessary nor possible to have every distinct voice in the community represented on every jury and to prevent conviction of a defendant in any 7 case; albeit, that voice has a right to sit on the jury.4 Additionally, it cannot be assumed that minorities are unable to adequately represent their viewpoints or that the majority will necessarily refuse to weigh the evidence and reach a rational decision. Petitioner makes much of the recent quotations of William Blackstone5 by this Court in the line of cases following Apprendi; however, the notion that the framers incorporated every common-law feature of the jury into the Sixth Amendment was rejected by the Court in Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78, 99 (1970). "[T]here is absolutely no indication in ’the intent of the Framers’ of an explicit decision to equate the constitutional and common-law characteristics of the jury." Id. The Court has focused instead on "the function that the particular feature performs and its relation to the purposes of that jury trial." Id. At 99- 100. In Williams, the Court rejected the argument that the Sixth Amendment protected a right to a twelve-person jury, even though the history es- tablished that it was a common practice very familiar to the framers of the constitution. "To read the Sixth Amendment as forever codifying a feature so incidental to the real purpose of the Amendment is to ascribe a blind formalism to the Framers which would require considerably more evidence than we have been able to discover in the history and language of the Constitution or in the reasoning of our past decisions." Id. at 102-03. It follows then, that the use of Blackstone’s re- marks on the "unanimous suffrage of twelve of [the defendant’s] equals and neighbours" has no more effect Apodaca, supra at 413. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769) 8 on Apodaca and Johnson than it did on Williams. Further, if the Court’s citation of Blackstone in recent Sixth Amendment analyses was intended to be so controlling as insisted by petitioner, then six person juries, which have also been found to be within the Sixth Amendment, are also vulnerable. If the Blakely6 Court had intended to overrule what a majority of the Court had held in Apodaca and Johnson (i.e., a state criminal defendant may be con- stitutionally convicted by a less-than-unanimous jury), it surely would have done something more than simply quote Blackstone to wipe from the books all that was said in those two decisions about the unanimity rule and the requirements of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. That the Court mentioned neither Apodaca nor Johnson in Blakely is strong indication that it had no intention to overrule those decisions in the course of requiring jury trials for certain sentenc- ing decisions. Indeed, the Oregon and Louisiana state courts have correctly rejected arguments similar to the one peti- tioner makes here, concluding that Apprendi and Blakely do not address the issue of the constitutional- ity of a non-unanimous jury verdict and, therefore, they do not purport to overrule Apodaca or Johnson. See, e.g., State v. Bowen, 215 Or. App. 199, 202, 168 P.3d 1208, 1209 (2007) ("Nothing in Blakely purports to overrule Apodaca; indeed, Blakely does not include any reference to Apodaca. Rather, . . . jury unanim- ity-or the lack thereof--was immaterial to the analy- sis in Blakely, and its antecedent, Apprendi . .., which both addressed the constitutionally prescribed role of the jury, as opposed to the court, in determin- 6 Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004) 11 any other female victim linked to the "serial killer" through DNA analysis. Thereafter, the defendant was linked via DNA evi- dence to several murders in South Louisiana, includ- ing the Geralyn DeSoto case. After a hearing on the motion to suppress the DNA evidence obtained via the East Baton Rouge Parish subpoena duces tecum, the trial court ruled that Lee’s DNA sample was legally obtained without infringe- ment of his constitutional rights. Hence, the subse- quent DNA sample obtained via the West Baton Rouge Motion to Compel was constitutional. The State argued before the trial court that con- stitutional safeguards were observed when ordering Lee to submit to the swabbing and maintains that position; however, in light of the Supreme Court of Louisiana’s decision to abrogate the lower court’s ruling and subsequent application of the inevitable discovery rule in the Nineteenth Judicial District Court’s companion case, we, agree that a DNA sample would have inevitably been procured considering the intense investigation which was narrowing to Lee as the serial killer. Be~bre Lee was approached for a DNA sample, it had been confirmed that several of the Baton Rouge and the Lafayette, Louisiana murders were at the hands of one man. Soon, the investigation opened to races other than Caucasian men. An attempted murder victim from the Parish of St. Martin, Louisi- ana, D.A., was linked through a partial DNA profile to the other known victims. Lee’s only living victim had provided a sketch of him, which produced fruitful tips to the Serial Killer Task Force pointing to Lee. D.A. was also able to identify Lee in a photographic line-up. 12 Convictions should not be set aside due to a consti- tutional violation during collection of evidence when the evidence would have been ultimately or inevita- bly discovered. Nix w. Williams, 467 U.S. 431 (1984). In Nix, this Honorable Court held that although the defendant’s statement providing the location of his victim’s body was obtained in violation of the defen- dant’s right to counsel, the search group would have ultimately or inevitably discovered the victim. There- fore, the evidence was deemed admissible as evidence of the location and condition of the body. The Serial Killer Task Force had already processed 18,000 leads and was investigating Lee prior to the positive DNA test results. Lee would not have es- caped law enforcement without an alibi or exclusion by DNA which would have been obtained by consent or other less intrusive means. State v. Lee, 976 So.2d 109 at 129 (La. 1/16/08). Therefore, no societal interest would be served by excluding this evidence; undoubtedly, the probative evidence of Lee’s DNA, which was markedly at each crime scene, was properly presented to the jury. That is, the purpose of the exclusionary rule would not be satisfied by the reversal of this conviction in light of the inevitable discovery of the DNA evidence. Nix, supra. Thus, this assignment of error should be found to lack merit. No. 07-15 IN THE ~3 FILED SUPREME Supreme Court of the Unite~ State~ DERRICK TODD LEE, Petitioner, V. STATE OF LOUISIANA, Respondent. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the Louisiana Court of Appeal, First Circuit BRIEF IN OPPOSITION TO PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI * Counsel of Record RICHARD J. WARD, Jr. District Attorney ANTONIO M. "TONY" CLAYTON * Chief Felony Prosecutor ELIZABETH A. ENGOLIO Assistant District Attorney EIGHTEENTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT PARISH OF WEST BATON ROUGE STATE OF LOUISIANA Post Office Drawer 880 Plaquemine, Louisiana 70765 (225) 687-5210 Counsel for the State of Louisiana WILSON-EPES PRINTING CO. INC. - (202) 789-0096 - WASHINGTON, D. C. 20002 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF AUTHORITIES ................................ STATEMENT OF THE CASE ............................ ARGUMENT ........................................................ I. WHETHER THE CONSTITUTION ALLOWS STATES TO SECURE CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS BY NON- UNANIMOUS JURY VERDICTS IN NON-CAPITAL FELONY CASES? ........... II. WHETHER DNA EVIDENCE IN- TRODUCED AT PETITIONER’S TRIAL WAS PROPERLY ADMITTED PUR- SUANT TO THE INEVITABLE DIS- COVERY DOCTRINE? ............................. CONCLUSION .................................................... Page ii 1 2 2 9 13 (i) IN THE upreme eurt ef nitel tate No. 07-1523 DERRICK TODD LEE, Petitioner, V. STATE OF LOUISIANA, Respondent. On Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the Louisiana Court of Appeal, First Circuit BRIEF IN OPPOSITION TO PETITION FOR WRIT OF CERTIORARI STATEMENT OF THE CASE Geralyn Desoto met her killer, the petitioner, Derrick Todd Lee, at the door of her mobile home in the Parish of West Baton Rouge, Louisiana on January 14, 2002. After Lee convinced her to let him use her telephone, he forced his way in and brutally beat her in the face and head. Though Desoto struggled, she was stabbed into submission and was ultimately killed by Lee when he slashed her throat open. Lee left his footprint in blood on Desoto’s chest, indicating he also stomped on her before he left. DNA collected from the scene conclusively linked Lee to Desoto’s murder as well as the murders of sev- 2 eral other women in South Louisiana from 1992 to 2003. Lee was indicted by a West Baton Rouge Parish Grand Jury with First Degree Murder and was tried for Second Degree Murder, a violation of LA R.S. 14:30.1, of which he was found guilty. The Louisiana Court of Appeal, First Circuit af- firmed the conviction and sentence obtained in the Eighteenth Judicial District Court of Louisiana;1 the Louisiana Supreme Court denied writs.2 ARGUMENT I. WHETHER THE CONSTITUTION ALLOWS STATES TO SECURE CRIMINAL CONVIC- TIONS BY NON-UNANIMOUS JURY VER- DICTS IN NON-CAPITAL FELONY CASES? Prior to 1972, the number of jurors required for a conviction was shaped by tradition. With Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U.S. 404 (1972) and Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U.S. 356 (1972), Louisiana was permitted to allow convictions supported by less than unanimous juries in non-capital felony cases. The principle of stare decisis, therefore, cannot be ignored as is suggested by the petitioner. Though the issue presented requires constitutional analysis, the jurisprudence established must not be disturbed without special justification, which the State of Louisiana asserts does not exist. This doctrine is essential as it promotes even- handed, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles, fosters reliance on judicial decisions, and contributes to the actual and perceived integrity State v. Lee, 964 So.2d 967 (La.App. 1 Cir. 5/16/07) State v. Lee, 977 So.2d 896 (La. 3/7/08) 3 of the judicial process. Hohn v. U.S., 524 U.S. 236 (1998); State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3 (1997); Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, 517 U.S. 44 (1996). "It is indisputable that stare decisis is a basic self- governing principle with the Judicial Branch, which is entrusted with the sensitive and difficult task of fashioning and preserving a jurisprudential system that is not based upon ’an arbitrary discretion.’" Pat- terson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164 (1989) citing Boys Markets, Inc. v. Retail Clerks, 398 U.S. 235 (1970) and The Federalist, No. 78, p. 490 (H. Lodge ed. 1888) (A. Hamilton). Without a development in the law that undermines precedent, being proven to be impractical or becoming inconsistent with the sense of justice or the social welfare, stare decisis prohibits the petitioner’s proposition. Patterson, supra citing Runyon v. McCrary, 427 U.S. 160 (1976). Neither petitioner nor any of his amici satisfy any of the considerations which would trigger the overrul- ing of Apodaca or Johnson set out in Planned Parent- hood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992): whether the rule has proven to be intol- erable simply in defying practical workability; whether the rule is subject to a kind of reliance that would lend a special hardship to the consequences of over- ruling and add inequity to the cost of repudiation; whether related principles of law have so far devel- oped as to have left the old rule no more than a rem- nant of abandoned doctrine; whether facts have so changed, or come to be seen so differently, as to have robbed the old rule of significant application or jus- tification. Louisiana has for some time employed the states’ right to obtain a conviction by non-unanimous jury 6 embedded, so accepted, so fundamental an expec- tation that a change would result in actual dislo- cations to the states in their application of the Sixth Amendment. Petitioner’s suggestion that Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000), and its progeny so undermine Apodaca and Johnson that their principles are no longer recognizable as sound law, if ever they were, is wholly unsupported. Likewise, petitioner claims that recent decisions regarding the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause, right to counsel, and right to compulsory process and their import to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment create the same expectation of jury verdict unanimity; however, this is not necessarily so. Jury unanimity is distinct from the aforementioned Sixth Amendment rights cited by petitioner, in that, it is nowhere enunciated in the Sixth Amendment. Petitioner’s approach to jury una- nimity makes an assumption that is not required by the Sixth Amendment. Furthermore, the position taken by petitioner and its amici, that circumstances have so changed, or come to be seen so differently, as to have stripped Apodaca and Johnson of their justification, is not compelling in light of the deliberate examination of the Sixth Amendment rights by the Apodaca/ Johnson Court. The evolution of understanding of the consequence of non-unanimous jury verdicts sub- mitted by the opposition fails to dissolve the reason- ing set out in Apodaca. The current rule observes that it is neither necessary nor possible to have every distinct voice in the community represented on every jury and to prevent conviction of a defendant in any 7 case; albeit, that voice has a right to sit on the jury.4 Additionally, it cannot be assumed that minorities are unable to adequately represent their viewpoints or that the majority will necessarily refuse to weigh the evidence and reach a rational decision. Petitioner makes much of the recent quotations of William Blackstone5 by this Court in the line of cases following Apprendi; however, the notion that the framers incorporated every common-law feature of the jury into the Sixth Amendment was rejected by the Court in Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78, 99 (1970). "[T]here is absolutely no indication in ’the intent of the Framers’ of an explicit decision to equate the constitutional and common-law characteristics of the jury." Id. The Court has focused instead on "the function that the particular feature performs and its relation to the purposes of that jury trial." Id. At 99- 100. In Williams, the Court rejected the argument that the Sixth Amendment protected a right to a twelve-person jury, even though the history es- tablished that it was a common practice very familiar to the framers of the constitution. "To read the Sixth Amendment as forever codifying a feature so incidental to the real purpose of the Amendment is to ascribe a blind formalism to the Framers which would require considerably more evidence than we have been able to discover in the history and language of the Constitution or in the reasoning of our past decisions." Id. at 102-03. It follows then, that the use of Blackstone’s re- marks on the "unanimous suffrage of twelve of [the defendant’s] equals and neighbours" has no more effect Apodaca, supra at 413. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1769) 8 on Apodaca and Johnson than it did on Williams. Further, if the Court’s citation of Blackstone in recent Sixth Amendment analyses was intended to be so controlling as insisted by petitioner, then six person juries, which have also been found to be within the Sixth Amendment, are also vulnerable. If the Blakely6 Court had intended to overrule what a majority of the Court had held in Apodaca and Johnson (i.e., a state criminal defendant may be con- stitutionally convicted by a less-than-unanimous jury), it surely would have done something more than simply quote Blackstone to wipe from the books all that was said in those two decisions about the unanimity rule and the requirements of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. That the Court mentioned neither Apodaca nor Johnson in Blakely is strong indication that it had no intention to overrule those decisions in the course of requiring jury trials for certain sentenc- ing decisions. Indeed, the Oregon and Louisiana state courts have correctly rejected arguments similar to the one peti- tioner makes here, concluding that Apprendi and Blakely do not address the issue of the constitutional- ity of a non-unanimous jury verdict and, therefore, they do not purport to overrule Apodaca or Johnson. See, e.g., State v. Bowen, 215 Or. App. 199, 202, 168 P.3d 1208, 1209 (2007) ("Nothing in Blakely purports to overrule Apodaca; indeed, Blakely does not include any reference to Apodaca. Rather, . . . jury unanim- ity-or the lack thereof--was immaterial to the analy- sis in Blakely, and its antecedent, Apprendi . .., which both addressed the constitutionally prescribed role of the jury, as opposed to the court, in determin- 6 Blakely v. Washington, 542 U.S. 296 (2004) 11 any other female victim linked to the "serial killer" through DNA analysis. Thereafter, the defendant was linked via DNA evi- dence to several murders in South Louisiana, includ- ing the Geralyn DeSoto case. After a hearing on the motion to suppress the DNA evidence obtained via the East Baton Rouge Parish subpoena duces tecum, the trial court ruled that Lee’s DNA sample was legally obtained without infringe- ment of his constitutional rights. Hence, the subse- quent DNA sample obtained via the West Baton Rouge Motion to Compel was constitutional. The State argued before the trial court that con- stitutional safeguards were observed when ordering Lee to submit to the swabbing and maintains that position; however, in light of the Supreme Court of Louisiana’s decision to abrogate the lower court’s ruling and subsequent application of the inevitable discovery rule in the Nineteenth Judicial District Court’s companion case, we, agree that a DNA sample would have inevitably been procured considering the intense investigation which was narrowing to Lee as the serial killer. Be~bre Lee was approached for a DNA sample, it had been confirmed that several of the Baton Rouge and the Lafayette, Louisiana murders were at the hands of one man. Soon, the investigation opened to races other than Caucasian men. An attempted murder victim from the Parish of St. Martin, Louisi- ana, D.A., was linked through a partial DNA profile to the other known victims. Lee’s only living victim had provided a sketch of him, which produced fruitful tips to the Serial Killer Task Force pointing to Lee. D.A. was also able to identify Lee in a photographic line-up. 12 Convictions should not be set aside due to a consti- tutional violation during collection of evidence when the evidence would have been ultimately or inevita- bly discovered. Nix w. Williams, 467 U.S. 431 (1984). In Nix, this Honorable Court held that although the defendant’s statement providing the location of his victim’s body was obtained in violation of the defen- dant’s right to counsel, the search group would have ultimately or inevitably discovered the victim. There- fore, the evidence was deemed admissible as evidence of the location and condition of the body. The Serial Killer Task Force had already processed 18,000 leads and was investigating Lee prior to the positive DNA test results. Lee would not have es- caped law enforcement without an alibi or exclusion by DNA which would have been obtained by consent or other less intrusive means. State v. Lee, 976 So.2d 109 at 129 (La. 1/16/08). Therefore, no societal interest would be served by excluding this evidence; undoubtedly, the probative evidence of Lee’s DNA, which was markedly at each crime scene, was properly presented to the jury. That is, the purpose of the exclusionary rule would not be satisfied by the reversal of this conviction in light of the inevitable discovery of the DNA evidence. Nix, supra. Thus, this assignment of error should be found to lack merit. 13 CONCLUSION For the foregoing reasons, the petition for writ of certiorari on behalf of Derrick Todd Lee should be denied. Respectfully submitted, * Counsel of Record August 6, 2008 RICHARD J. WARD, Jr. District Attorney ANTONIO M. "TONY" CLAYTON * Chief Felony Prosecutor ELIZABETH A. ENGOLIO Assistant District Attorney EIGHTEENTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT PARISH OF WEST BATON ROUGE STATE OF LOUISIANA Post Office Drawer 880 Plaquemine, Louisiana 70765 (225) 687-5210 Counsel for the State of Louisiana