Lawyer Beats False Evidence Rap

 The Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board agreed with a hearing committtee that the Office of Disciplinary Counsel failed to prove that an attorney had knowingly presented false evidence in a criminal trial.

The hearing committee concluded that the attorney had “reason to suspect” that the evidence was false but followed his client’s wish to nonetheless use it.

The criminal case involved five counts of attempted second degree murder in a September 6, 2007 encounter outside a French Quarter club.

The incident was captured on videotape. The video was presented in the prosecution’s case and showed the defendant stabbing one of the victims.

The defense offered its own video. The state countered that this defense video was false evidence. 

The state was correct, as the defense video was a doctored January 2007 tape.

The ODC charged

The second video as offered by the defense proved to be a complete fabrication, as it involved an entirely separate incident which occurred at the same location some nine months earlier. The defense had crafted the second video – Video No. 2 – from cell phone camera footage which a defense investigator had retrieved from the MySpace page of one of the victims – which involved some of the same participants as the September 2007 attack.

Because the defendant professed to have expertise in digital data transfer techniques, the Respondent instructed Mr. Boudreaux to prepare the My Space footage for presentation in court. Boudreaux has admitted that he altered the MySpace footage to make it appear to be identical or similar to the footage appearing in the state’s surveillance video (Video No. 1). Once the trial began, Respondent then successfully convinced the trial judge to allow him to show the video to the jury. He also elicited what was later revealed to be false testimony from a witness, Lionel Rayford, to the effect that the January 2007 video depicted the fight that occurred outside the French Quarter club on September 16, 2007.

The ODC noted that the attorney offered inconsistent stories.

The board gave absolution for the changing accounts

…the Committee made a finding of fact that Respondent did not review the underlying three-year-old trial transcript in advance of his sworn statement and made misstatements about the events in both his sworn statement and in his response to the charges. The Committee found his live testimony before them to be credible, concluding that he did not offer false evidence to the court, did not make a false statement of fact to the court and likewise did not fail to correct a false statement made to the court.

The board dismissed the charges, deferring to the credibility determinations of the hearing committee.  (Mike Frisch)