Thousands of criminal cases on COVID hold as victims, defendants await justice
Neither the defendants who sit in jail nor the victims who await justice are being served by the pandemic-induced wait for a trial. Author: David Hammer / Eyewitness Investigator Published: 10:25 PM CST February 17, 2021 Updated: 10:50 PM CST February 17, 2021
NEW ORLEANS Bob Arthur hasn’t been waiting passively for justice in the four years since his 40-year-old son, Shawn, turned up dead in his Metairie apartment.
Bob Arthur hired private investigators and worked with a Huffington Post reporter for more than a year to gather evidence that finally convinced the Jefferson Parish coroner and the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office that Shawn’s death wasn’t an accident.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Dall Kammer and his team will have until March 2 to present their own list of potential witnesses to testify at sentencing, at a date that’s not yet been set.
The U.S. Probation Office has already filed a draft sentencing report. Sentencing guidelines depend on several factors, including the amount of money involved. It’s not unusual for people to write letters to judges vouching for defendants’ character before they are sentenced, but hearing testimony from both sides before sentencing is less common.
Mayfield “will probably want to bring forth people to say he was of good character and maybe this was just a simple mistake,” said WWL-TV Legal Analyst Keva Landrum, a former state criminal court judge and district attorney. “And then the prosecution may want to bring people who they thought would have been their witnesses in the trial to say otherwise.”