Orleans Parish DA extracted 2019 guilty plea from Elvis Brooks despite knowing it had withheld exculpatory fingerprint evidence

On October 15, 2019, the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office, then led by District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, secured a guilty plea from Elvis Brooks to manslaughter and armed robbery charges, reducing his 1977 life sentence to 42 years and making him immediately eligible for release from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Brooks, then 19, had been convicted in September 1977 of first-degree murder and armed robbery in the shooting death of Cecil Lloyd at the Welcome Inn bar in New Orleans's Lower 9th Ward, based on cross-racial eyewitness identifications; no physical evidence tied him to the crime, and a dozen alibi witnesses testified he was elsewhere. Fingerprints lifted from beer cans handled by the actual robbers did not match Brooks and were never disclosed to the jury at that 1977 trial.

Brooks's legal team later uncovered a memo documenting an internal meeting, roughly two weeks before the October 15 plea deal, in which a prosecutor from Brooks's original trial admitted that the fingerprint evidence had not been turned over to the defense and would have helped his case. The District Attorney's Office proceeded to negotiate and finalize the plea anyway, without disclosing that admission to Brooks or the court -- extending, rather than correcting, the original 1977 withholding at the moment the office had the clearest opportunity, and the most direct internal knowledge, to correct it.

Brooks spent 42 years in custody or under the coerced plea stemming from the withheld evidence before his full exoneration in 2022 (see Updates below). Orleans Parish has the highest exoneration rate of any large U.S. county, and prosecutorial misconduct -- withholding exculpatory evidence and misleading jurors -- undermines the fairness a criminal trial is constitutionally required to provide.

Updates

2022-04-28 — Court vacated the 1977 conviction and 2019 plea after finding the withholding [1, 2]

An Orleans Parish Criminal District Court judge vacated both Brooks's 2019 guilty plea and his underlying 1977 conviction after finding that the District Attorney's Office had withheld the fingerprint evidence. Current District Attorney Jason Williams's office declined to retry Brooks, ending the case's 45-year run through the courts.

2024-09-30 — Louisiana AG moved to vacate Brooks's exoneration, reinstate charge [1, 2]

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill's office intervened, seeking to vacate the April 2022 judgment and reinstate the manslaughter charge against Brooks -- days after he filed a wrongful-conviction compensation claim -- and has continued to argue in court that Brooks is guilty while opposing his compensation claim.

2025-10-10 — District court ruled AG's challenge to Brooks's exoneration untimely [2]

An Orleans Parish district court judge ruled that the Louisiana Attorney General's motion to intervene and vacate Brooks's exoneration was filed too late under the 30-day appellate deadline.

2025-12-22 — Court of appeal reversed timeliness ruling, remanded AG's challenge for merits review [2]

The Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal reversed the district court, holding the Attorney General's legal interest in the case did not arise until Brooks filed his 2024 wrongful-conviction compensation claim and so the 30-day deadline did not bar the challenge. The court left the original April 2022 vacatur undisturbed and remanded the case to the district court so the merits of the Attorney General's challenge could be heard.