LA- Death penalty hearing starts for Barry Ferguson

4-20-2009 Louisiana:

Today, Orleans Parish prosecutors will ask a jury to give the death penalty to Barry Ferguson, the Kenner man convicted Saturday night of raping and strangling his 16-year-old daughter during a drunken binge in May 2003.

Ferguson, 45, raped and killed Brandy Ferguson, a special education student left in his care when her mother left in 1990, after they had spent an evening hitching rides with strangers about the suburbs as he downed beers and margaritas to feed his alcoholism, the jury unanimously decided Saturday.

After one day of rest and still sequestered at a local hotel, the jury of eight men and four women returned to the Criminal District Court this morning for a death penalty hearing - the second phase of a capital murder trial.

Orleans Parish hasn't sent a convict to death row since 1997.

Ferguson's guilty-as-charged verdict is the first of its kind since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.

The jury must again return a unanimous decision to render a punishment of death by lethal injection for Ferguson.

If a single juror votes otherwise, Ferguson will receive a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

(eAdvocate Post)
At a death penalty hearing, juries often hear evidence that was barred from the guilt phase of the trial, and defendants like Ferguson, who didn't testify on his own behalf at trial, routinely take the stand to beg for their lives.

The Ferguson jury will hear one fact that was kept out of last week's trial:

In 1994, a 7-year-old Brandy Ferguson told deputies from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office that her father had been molesting her. But investigators also spoke with her father, who was never charged.

Prosecutors plan to argue that Ferguson had sexually abused his daughter for years before police found her naked, bloody body discarded by the roadside, just off the eastbound lanes of Interstate 610 that cross City Park.

On Sunday, prosecutors and the defense team joined Judge Lynda Van Davis for a second trip to a Metairie hospital to record the testimony of Ferguson's mother, Audrey Ferguson, who is recovering from heart surgery and whose doctors wouldn't approve the defense team's request to either bring her to the courthouse or bring the jury to the hospital.

From her hospital bed last week, the victim's grandmother testified that her son could never have hurt her granddaughter. The jury saw a videotaped deposition-style interview with the ailing woman who said she helped raise the girl while running a daycare center out of her Kenner home.

Today, the jury will watch Audrey Ferguson testify for the defense about her son, in an effort to spare him from death row. This time during the videotaped testimony, Barry Ferguson was allowed to sit in the same room as his mother. He has been in jail since his arrest May 24, 2003, at the scene of his daughter's homicide.

Assistant District Attorneys Mary Glass and Kevin Guillory plan to present the victim's own words during the hearing - an audiotaped interview with police from 1994 in which she accuses her dad of sexual abuse.

The prosecutors wanted to call to the stand relatives of Ferguson, now adults, to testify about alleged sexual abuse at his hands when they were younger. But Judge Davis ruled that the state can't present such witnesses due to the fact that another prosecutor in the past, working under then-DA Eddie Jordan, hadn't followed up on the tip that Ferguson had allegedly abused other girls in his family.

Glass and Guillory weren't assigned to the case at the time. Davis ruled that they must accept the mistakes of their predecessors.

The Ferguson jury deliberated for about four hours Saturday evening before convicting Ferguson of first-degree murder. The trial opened last Tuesday with testimony. ..News Source.. by Gwen Filosa, The Times-Picayune