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By Audrey Sawyer
BATON ROUGE, LA – In a letter to Louisiana Gov. Bel Edwards and Louisiana Board of Pardons, 50 prominent anti-gender violence organizations and individuals from Louisiana and across the U.S. last week urged commuting the sentence of former police officer Antoinette Frank – the only woman on Louisiana’s death row – to life without parole.
But, late Friday, Frank’s bid for a clemency hearing failed on a 2-2 vote of the board after emotional testimony.
Experts on violence against women wrote: “Antoinette Frank is a survivor of child abuse and serial rape by her own father. This kind of violence leads to profound and lasting changes in the way survivors perceive and interact with the world and others.”
Two jurors have admitted via signed statements that having information about Frank’s history of abuse “would have led them to vote for a life sentence,” the letter noted, adding the signatories emphasized that any “fully informed jury would have never sentenced Antoinette Frank to death.”
The letter said Frank has been falsely held for almost three decades due to a lack of research by trial lawyers regarding her history of sexual, physical, and emotional victimization, and the jury and people of Louisiana were misled.
According to the support letter, Frank’s father was a Vietnam veteran left with severe PTSD from serving. He decided to take out his anger on his family, and he was known for violent rages. Some examples are him killing family pets in front of his children, and boobytrapping the home.
He would claim that he was going to kill the family, and would pack them in a car and stop for hours in the middle of the train tracks, or would fill the kitchen with gas, the letter stated, noting the Veterans Administration had issued him antipsychotic medicine for his PTSD, and abuse of Antoinette in particular – her father confessed to choking her and throwing her across the room when she was two years old.
Frank’s father then began to molest her when she was nine, and started raping her at age 11 or 12. Even after Frank had become a police officer at 22, her father had continued to rape her. Antoinette had become pregnant three times (the first being at age 16) from these rapes, with her father forcing her to obtain abortions each time, according to the signees on the letter in her support.
While Frank’s mother had taken three of her four children to escape the violence, Frank was left behind and was raped often, said the letter, noting she had to ask permission to go to the bathroom and was called her father’s “wife.”
Supporters claim although Frank attempted to run away, her father always had located her and she came back to his control…she made multiple suicide attempts and had frequently dissociated during episodes of sexual violation and abuse.
The jury did not hear any evidence of the sexual and physical abuse from Frank’s father, and also did not hear from any mental health experts that have diagnosed Frank with PTSD and Dependent Personality Disorder, which details how Frank’s history of trauma made her vulnerable to men like Rogers LaCaze, said the letter.
Two jurors have submitted sworn statements alleging that they would have voted for a life sentence had they known about Frank’s background and mental illness.
LaCaze was someone who Antoinette had attempted to advise away from crime. As a young police officer aged 23 in 1995, Antoinette had wanted to use her position of power to help victims of abuse and violence. Other officers had described Frank as “one that lacks an aggressive personality needed for law enforcement.”
A former police partner of hers who had written a letter of support explained former officer Frank as being “mild, meek, timid.” The partner also referenced Frank as having an “extremely gentle touch with the public” and “showing genuine concern for people she assisted.”
On March 4, 1995, said Frank’s supporters, LaCaze barged into the Kim Anh restaurant where Frank was speaking with employees after she had told him to wait in the car. He then killed an off-duty police officer and held a gun to Frank’s head, ordering her to help him while he had killed two children of the restaurant owner.
In his 2013 post-conviction proceedings, the State’s own witness had testified to LaCaze’s coercion of Frank. While LaCaze has been given a life sentence, Antoinette Frank remains on death row. Ten years after showing evidence in court, the State has not acted in addressing the inequity in Antoinette’s death sentence.
After spending 25 years on death row, Frank has continued to further her education and is known for being a peacemaker in the prison community, with former head warden Johnnie Jones at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women praising Frank as being “the best person in our institution, noting that while inmates “like to complain, Antoinette never complains.”
Frank, according to supporters, has been “profoundly” remorseful for the three lives lost on that day in the restaurant in 1995. While she had never intended any harm to come to Officer Williams and the Vu siblings, she believes that they never would have come into harm’s way if she “had the mental capacity” to stand up to LaCaze.
