Antoinette Frank

Explore about the Famous Police Officer Antoinette Frank, who was born in United States on April 30, 1971. Analyze Antoinette Frank’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Antoinette Frank dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Antoinette Frank?

Antoinette Frank Biography

Antoinette Renee Frank (born April 30, 1971) is a former New Orleans police officer who, on March 4, 1995, committed a violent armed robbery at a restaurant which resulted in the killing of two members of the family who ran the establishment, and fellow New Orleans Police Department officer Ronald A. Williams II. She was aided by an accomplice, a drug dealer and probable lover, Rogers Lacaze. Frank is the only woman on death row in Louisiana, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana.

In 1993, a year and a half before the murders at the Kim Anh, Frank’s father had stayed at her home for a time before she then reported him missing. In November 1995, a month after she received her first death sentence, a dog led police to find a human skull with a bullet hole buried under Frank’s house. In a 2005 retrospective, Chuck Hustmyre said, “As for those human bones unearthed beneath Frank’s house, so far, authorities have made no serious effort to identify them. The 10-year-old case, they say, remains under investigation.”

Although Frank graduated near the top of her academy class, her tenure with the NOPD was mostly undistinguished. Her fellow officers thought she was rather shy, had no idea what police work really entailed, and lacked the decisiveness to be a good officer. At times, they thought she veered into irrational behavior. As early as August 1993, Frank’s superiors wanted to send her back to the academy for further training. She frequently had to go through supervisory review. On occasion, though, she did distinguish herself, winning “Officer of the Month” awards from the local Kiwanis Club for her work in the community.

Additionally, Frank was a black female, and police officials thought having more African-Americans on the force would ease longstanding racial tensions in the majority-black city. Frank was hired on February 7, 1993, and graduated from the Police Academy on February 28.

Antoinette Frank applied to the New Orleans Police Department in early 1993. According to author Chuck Hustmyre, a former federal agent and author of the book Killer with a Badge, Frank was caught lying on several sections of her employment application, and failed two standard psychiatric evaluations. Psychiatrist Philip Scurria examined her and advised in no uncertain terms that she should not be hired, saying she was “shallow and superficial”.

On November 25, 1994, Frank handled an incident in which Rogers Lacaze, a known drug dealer, had been shot. An investigator with the Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC) believed this was the first contact between the two, although in her statement, she claims that they met some eight months before the murders. Frank had taken a statement from Lacaze after he was shot on the street, and initially got closer to him in hopes of turning his life around. However, she was smitten by Lacaze’s “bad boy” persona, and their relationship soon turned sexual. She kept up her relationship even though she was well aware she was jeopardizing her career.

Officer Williams was interred in Lake Lawn Metairie Cemetery on March 7, 1995. His name was inscribed on the Memorial Wall at The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington D.C.

Frank’s trial began on September 5, 1995, also before Marullo. Although Frank’s attorneys had subpoenaed 39 witnesses, they didn’t call a single one. On September 12, 1995, the jury needed only 22 minutes to return a guilty verdict on all counts—at the time, a record for a capital murder case in New Orleans. The next day, it needed only 45 minutes to recommend the death penalty. She was formally sentenced to death on October 20, 1995, and sent to Death Row at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW) in St. Gabriel, near Baton Rouge.

Frank and Lacaze were indicted by an Orleans Parish grand jury on April 28, 1995. Their trials were severed, and Lacaze was tried first on July 17–21, 1995 before Judge Frank Marullo. He was found guilty as charged, and sentenced to death. His main error had been using Williams’ Chevron credit card at a Chevron station in Gretna just minutes after the robbery and murder.

After midnight on March 4, 1995, Frank and Lacaze visited Kim Anh, a Vietnamese restaurant run by the Vu family in New Orleans East. Frank had sometimes worked there off-duty as a security guard. As the employees cleaned the closed restaurant, Chau Vu went into the kitchen to count money and entered the dining room of the restaurant to pay Ronald A. Williams II. Williams was a colleague of Frank who had been working as the security guard that night to supplement his policeman’s salary. He joined the New Orleans Police Department in 1992 and was a married father of two. When Chau went to pay Williams, Chau noticed Frank approaching the restaurant.

Irvin Bryant, a civil sheriff in 1995, testified that on the evening of February 4, he observed a stopped police vehicle with its lights flashing. Bryant thought that the officer was making a traffic stop, but as he got closer he saw the officer and two black men fighting on the side of the road. At that time Wallace broke away, ran and picked up a TEC-9 semi-automatic weapon off the grass. Bryant ordered Wallace to drop the gun, which he did immediately and was restrained; Lacaze then lunged towards Wallace but Bryant grabbed him. Frank informed him that Lacaze was with her and ordered him released. Despite his involvement in the altercation, Bryant was never questioned by police and he never gave a formal statement.

Two men who claimed they met Lacaze at a party on February 4, 1995, John Stevens and Anthony Wallace, testified in court. As the two were leaving the party, a verbal altercation between Stevens and Lacaze ensued, but Wallace suggested that they leave. The two men got in a car and drove several blocks until a police vehicle pulled the car over. Frank, in police uniform, exited the squad car and told both Wallace and Stevens to get out and go to the back of the car. At that point Wallace saw Lacaze, and noticed that he was holding a gun. According to Stevens, Wallace then rushed Lacaze and the two men began fighting, then both Stevens and Frank also jumped in the fray and the weapon discharged. Stevens began running, but another man appeared and grabbed both Lacaze and Wallace. Frank then told the man that “Lacaze was the good guy” and that Wallace was the one causing the problems. Wallace was restrained until a back-up unit arrived on the scene, when he was subsequently arrested and charged with attempted murder and armed robbery.

Initially, the Vu family kept the restaurant open at the site of the tragedy in New Orleans East for a decade, until suffering flood damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and post-storm looters stealing jewelry which Ha and Cuong had been wearing when they were killed. After that, Quoc Vu and his mother Nguyet sold the location, re-opening the restaurant in Harahan, and moving their residence to Metairie, where they said they felt safer.

On October 18, 2006, Frank’s lawyers argued before the Louisiana Supreme Court that her death sentence should be overturned because she was denied state-funded experts to help prepare for the sentencing phase of the trial. They argued that the defense needed to conduct “an investigation into the defendant’s background for possible mitigating evidence.” Frank’s attorneys introduced the testimony of psychiatrists who said that possible traumatic events in Frank’s childhood could have affected her behavior at the time of the murders and she may have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A psychiatrist retained by the state disagreed that Frank showed symptoms of trauma; he agreed with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder with antisocial tendencies given to Frank by doctors at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. On May 22, 2007, the state Louisiana Supreme Court ruled 5–2 that the death penalty should be upheld.

On September 11, 2008 the day that the state supreme court stay was to end, a new death warrant was signed by the same judge. According to this second warrant, Frank was scheduled for execution by lethal injection on December 8, 2008. In a new round of appeals, defense attorneys argued they had had too little time to review the voluminous record before the deadline for filing appeals. The state supreme court ruled on the case again. Their decision, made public November 25, 2008 effectively voided the death warrant signed by Judge Marullo in September.

On April 22, 2008, District Judge Frank Marullo signed the death warrant for Antoinette Frank. According to the warrant, Frank was scheduled for execution by lethal injection on July 15, 2008. In May, however, the Louisiana Supreme Court issued a 90-day stay of execution effective June 10 pending ongoing appeals.

Frank was profiled in an episode of Deadly Women in 2009, Snapped: Killer Couples in 2015, and I’d Kill For You in 2016.

In September 2009, Frank’s lawyers moved to have Judge Marullo removed from her ongoing post-conviction appeals on grounds of bias, given that he had already signed two death warrants for her. Louisiana state Judge Laurie White heard the motion in September 2009 and, on January 3, 2010 ruled that Marullo should not be taken off the case. Frank’s attorney stated she would appeal the ruling to the state’s supreme court, which had already overruled both of Marullo’s death warrants. However, yet another lower court state judge, ruled in October 2010 that Marullo had to be recused from the Frank and Lacaze cases because it was unclear if he had been open with the defense teams about his own surprising connection to the gun used in the restaurant murders. Marullo’s signature appeared on an order authorizing Frank to take the murder weapon from the evidence room; Marullo has long maintained the signature was forged. No female has been executed by the State of Louisiana since 1942.

Despite this, Frank got a second chance to apply. The NOPD was chronically short-handed; at the time, its officers were paid lower than in similarly-sized cities, and it was losing officers faster than they could be replaced. Its ranks had been decimated by several arrests for murder and drug activity. Many potential applicants were shut out due to a requirement that all officers be residents of New Orleans – a requirement that was only changed in 2014.

On July 23, 2015, retired district judge Michael Kirby threw out Rogers Lacaze’s conviction and sentence and ordered a new trial. Kirby said that Lacaze deserved a new trial because one of the jurors had hidden the fact that he was a Louisiana state trooper and had previously worked as a railroad policeman. At the time, commissioned law enforcement officers were legally barred from sitting on a jury. Kirby wrote that while he felt the evidence of Lacaze’s guilt was “overwhelming”, the juror misconduct amounted to a “structural defect” and a “violation of a constitutional right so basic to a fair trial” that the only remedy was a new trial. Kirby’s ruling has no effect on Frank’s conviction. An appellate court later overturned the new trial order for Lacaze. 4th Circuit appellate judges Edwin Lombard, Paul Bonin and Madeleine Landrieu ruled “After review of the state’s writ application in light of the applicable law and arguments of the parties, we find that the trial court erred in finding that the seating of Mr. Settle on the defendant’s jury was a structural error entitling him to a new trial”.

LCIW was damaged by 2016 flooding, so its prisoners, including Frank, were moved to other prisons.

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