Word: cousine
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Family members say that day was the start of Cousin's descent. His grades fell. He developed a bad attitude. His mother began to suspect he was using drugs. A local substance-abuse treatment center, Eastlake clinic, agreed to admit him. There he met James Rowell, a teen who was in Eastlake for depression. After Cousin left Eastlake, he began to run with Rowell, accompanying him on robberies. (Cousin claims he always stayed in the car during Rowell's stickups.) Family members say Cousin was looking for a father figure and settled for a bad influence. "James was on drugs...
...Friday, Jan 25, 1996, at 11 p.m., Clive Stafford-Smith, a British-born defense attorney living in New Orleans, was awakened by a phone call. It was a lawyer named Willard Hill, whose teenage client, Shareef Cousin, had just been convicted of murder by a jury. Hill, a local defense lawyer, hadn't expected to lose, and now he needed help to keep Cousin off death row. Could Stafford-Smith help him organize an "emergency" case for the penalty hearing? Stafford-Smith yawned and signed...
...penalty hearing, three days later, was a disaster. The Cousin family boycotted it to protest the guilty verdict, Robert Epps arrived too late to testify as a character witness, and because Cousin had, a few weeks earlier, accepted a 4-count plea on some robbery charges (an agreement he now claims was coerced), he was effectively portrayed by prosecutors as a hardened criminal and was sentenced to death. Stafford-Smith has been working on Shareef's appeal ever since. "When I was a kid, I read about America's having the death penalty," he says. "I couldn't believe...
...Nearsighted Witness. On the night of the murder, Babin told police that things were so confusing she doubted she could identify the killer. She did say he was "slightly shorter" than Gerardi--but, in fact, Cousin is 4 in. taller than Gerardi. Three days later, in a formal, taped statement, police asked Babin again if she could ID the killer. "I don't know," she said. "It was dark, and I didn't have my contacts or my glasses so I'm coming at this at a disadvantage." That statement was never turned over to the defense. Later...
...Absent Evidence. No physical evidence links Cousin to the crime--no fibers, no blood, no weapon, nothing. Prosecutors say he became a suspect when he was identified by Babin in a "photo lineup." A tourist and a restaurant worker were said to have made, as prosecutors put it, tentative identifications. "A tentative identification is the equivalent of a partial pregnancy," says Stafford-Smith. "There is no such thing." Stafford-Smith charges that Babin and the other "tentative" witnesses were coached by detectives to identify Cousin in the photo lineup...