According to a report in today’s
edition of The Times-Picayune, Corey “C-Murder”
Miller will in fact still stand trial for the shooting death of 16-year-old
Steve Thomas on January 12, 2002.
Yesterday, the judge presiding
over the 36-year-old rapper’s case denied a request made by Miller’s
lawyer, Ron Rakosky, to throw out the charge. The defense’s motion,
filed in December of 2006, stated that the prosecution presented witnesses
to the grand jury (who indicted Miller in February 2002 for second-degree
murder) who knew nothing about Thomas’ murder, and whose testimony
was in the defense’s opinion presented “for no purpose other
than to poison the deliberations of the grand jury.”
In a brief hearing on Monday
24th Judicial District Court Judge Martha Sassone quickly dismissed
that suggestion by denying the motion.
“What are we doing
today?” Sassone asked the attorneys in the case. Assistant
District Attorney David Wolff named the three defense motions, to toss
out the indictment and to suppress evidence and witness identifications
of Miller.
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“All those will be
denied,” Sassone said bluntly, offering no elaboration. “What’s
next?”
Rakosky objected, but Jefferson
Parrish prosecutors defended their indictment of his client by arguing
that Rakosky’s claims of jury poisoning were not grounded in Louisiana’s
code of criminal procedure. Rakosky alleged in his motion to quash the
indictment that the five witnesses presented to the grand jury testified
about the August 2001 incident at Club Raggs in Baton Rouge (in which
Miller is awaiting trial on charges of trying to shoot a nightclub owner
and a security officer), and not the shooting of Thomas. Rakosky also
argued that prosecutors failed to share information with the grand jury
that would have been favorable to Miller, including the inconsistency
of some of the witnesses’ testimony.
In one of the three defense
motions that was denied yesterday, Rakosky unsuccessfully attempted
to bar from trial items seized in April 2002 from Miller’s jail cell
at the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center, along with clothing recovered
from an apartment in Harvey, Louisiana that is believed to have been
worn by
Miller the night Thomas was murdered.
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In another one of the three
failed defense motions, Rakosky challenged the means by which detectives
got witnesses to identify Miller in photographs.
Miller was originally convicted
in September 2003 for the slaying of Thomas, but Sassone granted a defense
request for a new trial months later on grounds that prosecutors at
the time improperly withheld from the defense attorneys criminal background
information on three state witnesses. The Louisiana State Supreme Court
upheld that ruling in March 2006, allowing for this retrial.
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C-Murder’s new trial is set
to begin June 9th. If convicted he faces a mandatory life
sentence. He is currently under house arrest as a condition of his half-a-million
dollar bond.
