Opinion ID: 18487
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Burge's First Murder Trial

Text: 18 While Burge was serving a sentence in a Mississippi prison on an unrelated conviction of receiving stolen property, Pearson confessed to authorities that he and Burge picked up Frierson at midnight on October 16 and drove him to a bridge on Highway 90, where they argued over money and Burge shot Frierson several times. Pearson also stated that Burge threw the gun off Interstate 10 into Lake Pontchartrain. 19 In 1983, Burge and Pearson were indicted for the second degree murder of Frierson. In April 1984, prior to District Attorney Reed's taking office in January 1985, Burge's attorney filed a Brady motion, requesting any and all exculpatory evidence. 1 In July 1984, Rick Swartz (Swartz) of the St. Tammany Parish District Attorney's Office (the District Attorney's Office) produced what he represented to be all of the exculpatory evidence that the Sheriff's Office had turned over to the District Attorney's Office. Later, in April 1994, Swartz gave an affidavit stating that, prior to that Brady production, he made inquiry into the existence of said exculpatory evidence . . . [and] reviewed the investigatory file provided by the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office and inquired of the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office and of the investigators assigned to the case as to the existence of any exculpatory evidence. In the affidavit, Swartz stated that the October 18 [sic], 1980 statement of Mrs. Frierson to Hale, in which she said that she did not see with whom her son left on the night he was murdered, and Jo Ella Prestwood's April 20, 1981 statement to Hale, in which she said that Pearson admitted to her that he had murdered Frierson, were not part of the investigatory file made available to him by the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office. 20 Burge's defense attorney at his 1986 murder trial, Wendell Tanner, testified at a 1990 hearing that he had never seen the October 17, 1980 statement of Mrs. Frierson, the April 1981 and November 1983 statements of Prestwood, or Hale's handwritten reesumee of his investigation. 21 In December 1984, the District Attorney reduced the murder charge against Pearson to being an accessory-after-the-fact to the Frierson murder in exchange for Pearson's testimony against Burge. In January 1986, in preparation for Burge's murder trial, the District Attorney's Office discovered that the copy of the Sheriff's investigatory file that had been made from the original investigatory file and delivered to the previous District Attorney in 1980 (first copy of investigatory file) was missing, and asked the Sheriff's Office for another copy. Captain Debra McCormick (McCormick), the chief of records for the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office, testified that because the Sheriff's investigatory file had not been microfilmed by the time of Burge's 1986 trial, she would have made a copy of the file (second copy of the investigatory file) from the Sheriff's original. In April 1986, District Attorney Walter Reed assigned Paul Katz (Katz) as Special Assistant District Attorney to prosecute Burge. In a deposition, Katz testified that the second copy of the investigatory file given to the District Attorney's Office by the Sheriff's Office in 1986 did not contain Mrs. Frierson's October 17, 1980 statement and that it included only two of Prestwood's statements. Katz also testified that he could not recall whether thefile contained the detectives' reesumees of their investigations. 22 At Burge's first trial for second degree murder in September 1986, Pearson testified that he witnessed Burge fatally shoot Frierson on October 17, 1980. Mrs. Frierson, contrary to her original October 17, 1980 statement that was not disclosed or produced for the defense, testified that she saw her son leave her house with Burge and Pearson on the night of the murder. Mrs. Frierson also testified that she told Hale that on the morning Frierson's body was found, after Burge called Lt. Hermann in their presence, Burge told her and Glenda detailed information about Frierson's death, i.e., that Frierson's body had been found shot four times with a .44 caliber gun under the East Pearl River bridge. Glenda Frierson Hale, the victim's sister and Hale's wife, testified that Burge had threatened to kill her brother only a few days before the murder, and corroborated Mrs. Frierson's testimony that on the morning after the murder, Burge provided Mrs. Frierson and her with the details of the crime that only a perpetrator would know. 23 The trial court inspected two statements by Prestwood, and ruled that they were not exculpatory. Prestwood's crucial April 1981 statement that Pearson confessed to being the trigger man was not disclosed and thus was not one of the statements viewed in camera by the court. A jury convicted Burge of the second degree murder of Frierson. The court sentenced Burge to life imprisonment at hard labor without parole. 24 In a February 1995 affidavit, Lt. Hermann stated that a tape recording he had made of a conversation with Burge after the murder, which Lt. Hermann had given to Hale, had disappeared. According to Lt. Hermann, immediately after Burge's conviction, as he and Hale were leaving the courthouse, Lt. Hermann brought up the subject of the missing tape. Lt. Hermann stated that Hale opened the trunk of his car and showed him several reports and statements pertaining to the Frierson murder investigation. When Lt. Hermann asked Hale why the documents were in his trunk, Hale allegedly told Lt. Hermann that [s]ome of this stuff could probably make us lose the case. Lt. Hermann stated in his affidavit that while he did not look at the documents, he was certain that some of the statements were original transcripts because he saw typewriter indentations in the paper. 25 According to Lt. Hermann, when he asked Hale how he had gotten Glenda Frierson Hale and Mrs. Frierson to lie on the witness stand, Hale told him, Over a period of time there is a little brainwashing, you tell them the story of what happened, and what you need to win a case in court and they begin to believe it. In his 1995 affidavit, Lt. Hermann also stated that Hale said that he told prosecutor Katz about the problem with the case, you know about Jean and Glenda testifying and Katz said he would take care of it. 26 Lt. Hermann testified that he persuaded Hale to turn over to him the documents in Hale's trunk, and that he allowed Burge's attorney to inspect, but not copy, these documents. After reviewing these documents, Burge's attorney filed a Petition For Post-Conviction Relief in state court alleging that the State unconstitutionally deprived the defense of the following exculpatory evidence: (1) the October 17, 1980 statement of Mrs. Frierson in which she said that she did not see who picked up Frierson the night of the murder; (2) Hale's handwritten supplemental report referring to Detective Brooks's statement that Spears told him that Pearson told her that he had murdered Frierson, and Prestwood's statement that Pearson told her he had shot Frierson in the head; (3) Hale's final report referring to the statement of Bernice Frierson that two days before the murder, Pearson had given Frierson, the victim, two days to come up with money that he owed Pearson. 27 When the court granted a hearing on Burge's motion, the District Attorney's Office discovered that the second copy of the investigatory file was missing, and again asked the Sheriff's Office for another copy. Burge's attorney also had a subpoena duces tecum issued to the Sheriff's Office requesting production of Prestwood's April 20, 1981 statement, any statements by Pearson and Glenda Frierson, and any reports or examinations relating to Burge's automobile. Captain McCormick of the Sheriff's Office testified that she could not recall whether she made copies of the investigatory file for the District Attorney's Office (third copy of the investigatory file) and Burge's attorney (fourth copy of the investigatory file) from the Sheriff's original or microfilm files. 28 At a June 1990 evidentiary hearing on Burge's Petition For Post-Conviction Relief, Wendell Tanner, Burge's original defense attorney, testified that despite his request for Brady material in 1986, the District Attorney's Office did not give him Hale's initial reesumee of his investigation, Prestwood's April 1981 or November 1983 statements, Mrs. Frierson's October 17, 1980 statement, or an evidence receipt showing that Hale had given investigators an envelope containing paint scrapings from a pillar of the bridge near where Frierson's body was found. The trial court granted Burge's Motion for a New Trial based solely on its finding that Mrs. Frierson's October 17, 1980 statement was exculpatory evidence that constituted Brady material that had been withheld from the defense. 29