These twin PAWGs are GUARANTEED to get you mad

Pull Up the Roots

Pull Up the Roots

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This story is fukked up. Not only did the prosecutors hide the lack of evidence, it turns out the 18 year old cousin had sex with one of the 14 year old twins and they concocted a lie to frame an innocent Black man. They stole 44 years of his life on the words of racist cousin-fukkers.

Vincent Simmons - National Registry of Exonerations

www.law.umich.edu www.law.umich.edu

In 2020, attorney Justin Bonus of New York began representing Simmons, working with attorney Ed Larvadain Jr., from Alexandria, Louisiana. (Larvadain died in 2021, and his son, Malcolm Larvadain then stepped in.) On October 16, 2020, they filed a motion for a new trial that drew from the 2004 motion, evidence uncovered in Shadow of Doubt, and his team’s own investigation into the conviction.

Along with the claims of undisclosed evidence, the motion also contained an affidavit from a woman named Dana Brouillette, a first cousin to the Sanders sisters and Laborde. Brouillette said that she was at home when her cousins drove up after the alleged crimes took place. It wasn’t May 9, Brouillette said. She would have remembered the date, because May 9 was her mother’s birthday. Brouillette said Laborde had scratches on his neck. When asked what happened, Laborde said he got in a fight with a Black man who threw him in the trunk of his car. At this point, Brouillette said, Karen and Sharon began to cry, although neither said anything about a rape. Brouillette said her mother told Laborde to report the crime. He refused.

“Long after the trial, Keith admitted to me that Vincent Simmons did not rape Sharon and Karen and did not put him in the trunk of his car,” Brouillette said. “He told me that he had consensual sex with one of the girls and locked the other in the trunk while he was on Little California Road.” (Karen Sanders told CBS News that she and Laborde did have sex prior to May 9, but it was much earlier, when she was 9 or 10. “We were kids … We experimented. So yes, if that's consensual, that's whatever word you want to put to it.”)

A private investigator also spoke briefly with Karen Sanders on August 10, 2020. According to the investigator’s report, “She was asked if it was possible, she chose the wrong person in the lineup. She informed [me] that she was fairly sure she picked the right person, but mistakes do happen.”

The motion suggested that prosecutors used the Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty to amend the indictment without drawing attention to the lack of evidence supporting Sharon Sanders’s statement to investigators and the grand jury that Simmons had raped her.

“It can hardly be disputed that the inconsistent statements made by the Sanders sisters and Laborde could be used to cross-examine them,” the motion said. “There is no doubt that evidence about the conduct of a lineup can be offered to impeach the identification; and the medical report would be admissible as evidence in chief on the defense case to show that Sharon Sanders was never raped. Moreover, the Brouillette declaration is also admissible on whether the crime of which Simmons was accused – or, given the medical evidence that there was no rape, some kind of sexual assault of Karen and Sharon Sanders – was in fact committed by Keith Laborde, giving all of them a motivation to frame a Black man in order to keep the guilt out of the family.”
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Sharon Sanders described the man as husky, with maroon pants and a black hat. She said he asked for a ride to a party. She didn’t know his name. She also said that all Black people “looked alike to her.” In addition, she told deputies that she was a virgin and that she had bled after the attack.

Sheriff’s deputies interviewed Karen Sanders separately, also on May 22. Like her sister, she gave a vague description of the assailant and said she didn’t know the man or his name. She said the man asked for a ride home. She said the man had short hair, maybe a tattoo on his right arm, and was wearing a diamond-shaped ring. She also said that the man and his friends hung out around the 7-Eleven.

At 9 a.m. on May 23, 1977, for reasons that are not explained in any court documents, deputies arrested 24-year-old Vincent Simmons of nearby Mansara, Louisiana, and placed him in a lineup with seven other men. One of the persons in the lineup was white. Simmons was visibly in handcuffs. Sharon and Karen Sanders and Laborde each identified Simmons as the assailant. Simmons was charged with two counts of aggravated rape and was later shot in the shoulder during the booking process; deputies said he tried to escape and grabbed an officer’s weapon.

A grand jury indicted Simmons on June 10, 1977. That day, investigators received a report from Dr. F. P. Bordelon Jr., the coroner for Avoyelles Parish, who had examined both girls on May 24, 1977. He said neither girl had any bruising, and that Sharon Sanders’s hymen was still intact. Bordelon’s report on Karen Sanders contained no specific mention that he examined her for signs of anal rape.
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