Free Republic

Saying the interest of justice would be served by granting a new trial, a state judge has tossed out a Metairie's woman conviction of murdering her newborn girl two years ago by placing the baby in Lake Pontchartrain in Kenner.Ciara Craig, 23, faced a mandatory life sentence in prison after a jury convicted her of second-degree murder, based largely on a forensic pathologist's opinion that the child was born alive and drowned in the lake on Feb. 10, 2009.Craig, who hid the pregnancy, has said she secretly gave birth in her grandmother's Bunche Village home and the child was stillborn...

A border patrol officer and his mother, both from Metairie, were indicted today on federal charges of conspiracy and transporting and harboring undocumented foreigners. Customs and border agent Merlin Mireles, 39, and Gloria Mireles, 66, allegedly harbored a Mexican woman who was in the United States illegally and her two children from June 2004 to February 2005. Merlin Mireles, who was assigned to the Port of Progreso in Texas, drove the woman and children from Texas to Metairie, according to the indictment. Mireles and his mother provided housing for them in exchange for housekeeping work by the woman. An announcement...

Fleeing from St. Charles Parish authorities, a River Ridge man drove a stolen Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office squad car into the Mississippi River early Sunday, according to both law enforcement agencies. David Mitchell Jr., 22, of River Ridge managed to get out of the car as it started to sink about 30 yards from the river bank, said Capt. Patrick Yoes of the St. Charles Parish Sheriff's Office. A towboat operator dragged Mitchell aboard after he struggled in the current for some time. The incident started in Metairie at about 6:10 a.m., when a Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputy, after investigating...

New Orleans is a sea of darkness, at night in New Orleans on Friday, Nov. 18, 2005.

The 2200 block of North Sibley Street is a typical suburban street, a row of mostly three-bedroom brick houses built in the 1960s and 1970s where the lawns are well kept and many of the residents have lived for two decades.

Demos pounce on Vitter's house deed Front-runner calls wording abhorrent Friday, October 22, 2004 By Bill Walsh Staff writer U.S. Senate race front-runner David Vitter is under attack from Democrats for buying a house in Old Metairie in 1996 with a deed that specified it could only be sold "to people of the white race," a decades-old provision Vitter said he didn't know about. Vitter said he never saw the exclusion. He condemned the use of such covenants, once relatively common on residential properties in the New Orleans area, and said they would be illegal anyway. "As we speak, I...

<p>BATON ROUGE -- President Bush is making his third trip to the state this year, traveling to Baton Rouge today to deliver the commencement address at Louisiana State University in the morning, followed by a midday private fund-raiser in Metairie. The events are further indication of the state's status as a potential battleground in Bush's campaign against presumptive Democratic challenger John Kerry.</p>

<p>A poll by the Republican polling firm Basswood Research shows state Sen. Ken Hollis gained momentum in southeastern Louisiana last week.</p> <p>The poll, conducted in the New Orleans metropolitan area media market, indicated Hollis leads 11 other gubernatorial candidates with 27 percent of the vote. Hollis, R-Metairie, said the second-closest candidate in the poll was at 16 percent.</p>

Note: Links show how the facts of the case this article describes correspond to patterns uncovered in San Francisco's stadium election investigation. Earlier this year in an office building in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, witnesses were still talking about the 1996 election for the U.S. Senate in which Democrat Mary Landrieu defeated Republican Louis "Woody" Jenkins. "This nice person drove up and asked whether I was registered," one woman said to the lawyers and investigators for Jenkins. "I told him I was but I didn't feel like going. He said, 'If I paid you, would you go?' I...

Note: Links show how the facts of the case this article describes correspond to patterns uncovered in San Francisco's stadium election investigation. Earlier this year in an office building in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, witnesses were still talking about the 1996 election for the U.S. Senate in which Democrat Mary Landrieu defeated Republican Louis "Woody" Jenkins. "This nice person drove up and asked whether I was registered," one woman said to the lawyers and investigators for Jenkins. "I told him I was but I didn't feel like going. He said, 'If I paid you, would you go?' I...