Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans
In a New Orleans supermarket parking lot in the fall of 1984 ,two disparate lives become inextricably bound for the next fourteen years. The first, the life of Delores Dye, a white housewife and grandmother. The second, a young black man with a gun in hand. Moments following their maybe not so chance encounter, Mrs. Dye lay dead on the sunbaked macadam, and the killer had made off with her purse, her groceries, and her car. Four days later, following a tip, authorities arrested a known drug dealer and father of five named Curtis Kyles. Kyles would then be tried for Mrs. Dye’s murder an unprecedented five times, though he maintained his innocence throughout each trial. Convicted and sentenced to death in his second trial, he would spend fourteen years on death row. After a fifth jury was unable to reach a verdict, New Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., finally conceded defeat and dropped the murder charge.
But the case slowly yielded a deeper drama: The crime turned out to have been the side effect of an intricately plotted act of revenge. That police and prosecutors may have been complicit in the vengeance that framed Kyles cuts to the heart of a system of justice for Southern blacks in the era since lynch mobs were shamed into obsolescence. A compellingly written legal drama that has at its heart passionate intrigue and justice gone awry.
“This much is certain and always was. That on a Thursday afternoon in late September 1984, a housewife named Delores Dye… ran afoul of a thief as she loaded a shopping cart of groceries into her car out front of a New Orleans supermarket.” So begins Jed Horne’s brisk, crisply written Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans, which follows the convoluted tale of how a small-time drug dealer and product of the New Orleans housing projects named Curtis Kyles, who was convicted, sentenced to death row, and finally exonerated in Dye’s grisly murder.
Rarely does any murder case appear as straightforward as the one against Curtis Kyles. The murder weapon, a .32-caliber pistol, was found in his apartment; the victim’s purse was discovered in a trash bag in front of his building; and a bag of cat food purchased on the day of Dye’s murder–the exact brand her husband said she always bought–was stashed under Kyles’s sink. The truth, of course, was not so simple. As subsequent trials revealed, Kyles’s conviction was the product of overzealous prosecution, an incompetent court-appointed lawyer, false eyewitness testimony, and, Horne argues, an attempted framing. In the end, after five trials and nearly 14 years, Kyles’s death sentence was overturned, and he was released from New Orleans prison in 1998. Horne, the city editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, doesn’t shy from colorful, sometimes lurid turns of phrase. But if Horne is a crime writer, he is also a journalist, and his detailed account of the unraveling of the case against Curtis Kyles makes a compelling case that a justice system that wrongly convicts men like Kyles and sentences them to death is broken and badly in need of repair. –Erica C. Barnett
In a New Orleans supermarket parking lot in the fall of 1984 ,two disparate lives become inextricably bound for the next fourteen years. The first, the life of Delores Dye, a white housewife and grandmother. The second, a young black man with a gun in hand. Moments following their maybe not so chance encounter, Mrs. Dye lay dead on the sunbaked macadam, and the killer had made off with her purse, her groceries, and her car. Four days later, following a tip, authorities arrested a known drug dealer and father of five named Curtis Kyles. Kyles would then be tried for Mrs. Dye’s murder an unprecedented five times, though he maintained his innocence throughout each trial. Convicted and sentenced to death in his second trial, he would spend fourteen years on death row. After a fifth jury was unable to reach a verdict, New Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., finally conceded defeat and dropped the murder charge.
But the case slowly yielded a deeper drama: The crime turned out to have been the side effect of an intricately plotted act of revenge. That police and prosecutors may have been complicit in the vengeance that framed Kyles cuts to the heart of a system of justice for Southern blacks in the era since lynch mobs were shamed into obsolescence. A compellingly written legal drama that has at its heart passionate intrigue and justice gone awry.
Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans
Introduction to the Drug Abuse as Public Health v. Criminal Justice Value Debate
Introduction to debate lectures. Lincoln-Douglas Debate course taught by Jonathan Wolfson at SciAcademy in New Orleans. In this clip, Jonathan provides background on the resolution being debated by NFL and NCFL students for November and December 2010. The resolution is: Resolved: The abuse of illegal drugs ought to be treated as a matter of public health, not of criminal justice. This is lecture 1 in the series brought to you by TheGreatDebate. Stay tuned for more videos posted every week. Resources used in preparing this topic talk: The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States by Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law, USC Law School available at: www.druglibrary.org Illegal Drugs in America: A Modern History, DEA Museum available at: www.deamuseum.org NFL Resolution Primer
Mr. New Orleans: The Life of a Big Easy Underworld Legend
Meticulously researched and supported by FBI records and official court documents, Mr. New Orleans is the
story of how a shy Cajun altar boy from Marksville, Louisiana, became a championship bodybuilder, an unbeaten pro boxer, and finally a New Orleans criminal kingpin—without ever losing his affable nature. Simultaneously an action-packed true-crime memoir, (with a new twist on the Kennedy assassination) and an authentic street history of The Big Easy, here’s the rags-to-racketeering story that could only have come from America’s most infamous outlaw city.