[ad_1]
He found his sudden downfall all the more disconcerting because, for years, he had been one of the city’s main local power brokers. He was elected five times to six-year terms, mostly without difficulty, and powerful New Orleans politicians, black and white, eagerly sought his endorsement.
However, his hands-off attitude in the district attorney’s office had become proverbial. Even before beginning a weekly stint at a French Quarter club, in imitation of his son’s burgeoning international career, “Connick left the work in the courts to his assistants, a hard-working and low-paid group, mostly men, mostly. white,” journalist Jed Horne wrote in “Desire Street” (2005), a book about the case of Curtis Kyles, whose 1984 murder conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1995 because Connick’s aides withheld evidence .
“The office locked up mostly black men, mostly poor people, in a way that forced them to hide the evidence they were supposed to reveal,” Denise LeBoeuf, a New Orleans attorney, said in an interview. “It was under her supervision. That will always be in him.”
Joseph Harry Fowler Connick was born on March 27, 1926, in Mobile, Alabama, son of James Connick, lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Jessie (Fowler) Connick, a nurse. He grew up in New Orleans, where he attended parochial school.
After serving in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in World War II, he returned to New Orleans to attend Loyola University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, and Tulane University, where he earned a law degree.