Bourbon St. shooting suspect just acquitted

Published 8:33 am Tuesday, November 8, 2011

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The teenager accused of firing into a crowd of Halloween partiers on Bourbon Street had just been acquitted on another charge.

Marvin Carter, the 19-year-old accused of the shooting, was to be tried as an adult in a 2009 carjacking but the case was derailed by a technicality.

Tuesday’s Times-Picayune reported a separate charge against Carter, for allegedly keeping a home-made knife while in jail, brought an acquittal a week before he allegedly shot into the crowded French Quarter street, killing 25-year-old Albert Glover and injuring seven others.

Carter had been free since June on $10,000 bond in the weapons case. Four months earlier, court records show an appeals court panel upheld a criminal district court judge’s ruling that tossed out an armed robbery charge in the carjacking.

As a 16-year-old, Carter and a 15-year-old allegedly robbed a man of his car using a handgun. Carter was deemed incompetent to stand trial in May 2009, and a juvenile court judge remanded him to the state Department of Health and Hospitals.

On April 8, 2010, during a “random shakedown” at the jail, Carter, who is 5 feet, 8 inches tall and weighs 125 pounds, admitted he had a shank, and authorities found a three-inch metal rod wrapped in white tape. By then Carter was nearly 18, and the DA’s office charged him with carrying contraband on state prison grounds, which carries up to a five-year prison term.

According a May 10, 2010, written decision in the carjacking, Criminal District Judge Lynda Van Davis was worried about setting Carter free, saying that “keeping the defendant in custody would allow Carter to receive the psychiatric treatment needed to restore his competency.”

“Moreover, this court believed that releasing an incompetent defendant charged with armed robbery posed a danger to the community, if a criminal prosecution against the defendant was upheld,” she said in her ruling.

But after the appeals court upheld her ruling, last February, Carter was free of the charge, though he remained in jail until posting bond on the shank charge, court records show. The state Supreme Court on Oct. 11 denied a writ from the district attorney’s office asking it to review Davis’ decision.

Carter’s public defender, Scott Sherman, declined to talk about the case.

Carter is scheduled to appear in magistrate court on March 4 on a first-degree murder charge in Glover’s death.