Thanks to prosecutors Glen Woods and Wendy Baldwin Vitter, “the Orleans Parish jury that sent Booker Diggins off to prison for the rest of his life on Jan. 25, 1988, didn’t hear much about the rape he supposedly committed during a robbery,” according to the Times Picayune’s story Lifer at Angola unearths DNA evidence that might help him fight 1988 rape, robbery conviction:
The examining doctor wasn’t called to the stand, and no blood evidence turned up at court.
Instead, prosecutors relied solely on testimony of the alleged victim, a 23-year-old woman who picked Diggins out of a photographic line-up and then pointed him out in court as the one who raped her while she was handcuffed to a post in the storeroom of the restaurant she managed.
Diggins was convicted of aggravated rape, which carries mandatory life without parole, plus 30 years for armed robbery and five years for conspiracy to commit armed robbery.
The judge ordered him to serve the three sentences in consecutive order. But 22 years after Diggins was shipped to the state penitentiary, he and his attorneys have unearthed the fact that prosecutors kept quiet the medical evidence that could have helped him at trial.
Well before January 1988, then-District Attorney Harry Connick’s prosecutors — Glen Woods and Wendy Baldwin Vitter — knew that blood and semen had been collected from the victim, along with a blood type that didn’t match the woman’s.
Vitter, wife of Louisiana Senator (“Diaper”) David Vitter and “home-schooled” in “closed-eye experiences”, knows Chet Traylor faces an uphill fight in getting the Senator to man-up to anything. However, the question at hand is will she [wo]man-up and do right by Booker Diggins: Continue reading ““Lifer at Angola unearths DNA evidence…” and Wendy Vitter surfaces!”