Amid Threatening Comments by Current DA, Death Penalty Dominates Caddo Parish Prosecutor Election

Capital pun­ish­ment is dom­i­nat­ing the dis­cus­sion in the runoff elec­tion between James E. Stewart, Sr. and Dhu Thompson to suc­ceed act­ing Caddo Parish, Louisiana District Attorney Dale Cox. Cox’s con­tro­ver­sial state­ments about the death penal­ty — includ­ing that the state needs to ​“kill more peo­ple” — have focused nation­al atten­tion on the parish, which ranks among the two per­cent of U.S. coun­ties respon­si­ble for 56 per­cent of the inmates on death row nationwide. 

On October 27, defense attor­neys in the death penal­ty retri­al of Eric Mickelson request­ed Cox’s removal from the case after they over­heard him say­ing he want­ed to ​“cut their (exple­tive) throats.” The atten­tion sur­round­ing Cox, as well as the 2014 exon­er­a­tion of Glenn Ford and charges that Cox may have put an inno­cent man, Rodricus Crawford, on death row has forced Stewart and Thompson to focus on their pro­posed cap­i­tal punishment policies. 

Stewart said he would place an empha­sis on ethics and pro­fes­sion­al­ism in the DA’s office: ​“The eval­u­a­tion and screen­ing of cas­es with an eth­i­cal and pro­fes­sion­al stan­dard alle­vi­ates the Glenn Ford type of cas­es. You don’t get so caught up in the case that you miss cer­tain things along the way, and that can hap­pen if peo­ple are not look­ing at the case cor­rect­ly.” He said he’d like to get rid of peremp­to­ry chal­lenges, in which pros­e­cu­tors can strike jurors with­out cause. A recent study found that Caddo pros­e­cu­tors had sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly employed peremp­to­ry chal­lenges in a racial­ly biased manner. 

Thompson said he believes the office has approached the use of the death penal­ty in a thought­ful way, adding, ​“What we do is seek jus­tice based on the facts and mer­its of the case.” He also said he does not believe that Glenn Ford was inno­cent and that the 30 years Ford spent in prison was appropriate.

In 2014, after secur­ing a death sen­tence against Rodricus Crawford for alleged­ly suf­fo­cat­ing his infant son, Cox wrote a memo say­ing that Crawford ​“deserves as much phys­i­cal suf­fer­ing as it is human­ly pos­si­ble to endure before he dies.” The Innocence Network has filed a brief in the case say­ing that the med­ical evi­dence shows the boy was not mur­dered, but died from pneu­mo­nia. More than 100 Louisiana reli­gious lead­ers also filed a brief on Crawford’s behalf say­ing that Cox had made improp­er bib­li­cal argu­ment in the case. Stewart said he would con­duct his own eval­u­a­tion of the Crawford case to see if the ver­dict was defen­si­ble. Thompson said he was con­fi­dent the state courts would fair­ly decide Crawford’s case. (Pictured: Caddo Parish Courthouse, 2010.)