District attorneys prosecuting the killing of 14-year-old boy outside a Baton Rouge convenience store will be able to use interrogation videos in which the accused shooter admits to firing bullets at another teen at the scene.
A split Louisiana Supreme Court this week ruled the evidence admissible in the case against Cleveland Joseph Ely, whose second-degree murder trial is set to begin Sept. 30.
Ely, 37, was indicted in the Jan. 9, 2022, killing of seventh grader Dion Williams, who was shot and killed outside a Save More Food Mart on Lobdell Boulevard. Ely argues self-defense and claims, in court records, that he shot the teen because he believed Williams was armed and about to ambush his 13-year-old son.
Prosecutors say Ely sprayed 10 bullets at Williams from an AK assault rifle and also shot at three teens who were with Williams as they fled the gas station’s parking lot.
One of those teens, 18-year-old Shawn George, was gunned down less than a mile away shortly after he escaped Ely’s barrage of bullets. Authorities indicate a masked gunman stalked George and shot him five times in the back a little more than two hours later as he walked along the 1900 block of Dallas Drive. Ely is not a suspect in that homicide, which remains unsolved.
Yet when Ely was questioned by detectives three weeks after the gas station shooting, he told them he shot George and seemed surprised when investigators revealed that the teen was gunned down on Dallas Drive.
“I thought he got shot at the store and then made it down there,” Ely told police, according to court records. “My thought process in my mind this whole time … the news was sayin’ he was shot two hours later and I was like [expletive] … he might have made it (there) because the distance from the store to there wasn’t far.”
Ely faces a mandatory life sentence if he is convicted of the second-degree murder count. The state has also indicted Ely on an illegal use of dangerous weapons charge and convinced the state Supreme Court that his confession should be allowed at trial to help prosecutors prove his guilt on that count.
In the court's ruling Tuesday, four of the judges granted the state’s writ to reverse lower court rulings on the matter. District Judge Louise Hines Myers, who is presiding over the case in the 19th Judicial District Court, determined last October that Ely's statements to police could “muddy the waters” and imply to jurors that he had something to do with George’s death.
She ruled out those portions of Ely’s interrogation video and limited prosecutors at trial to saying only that George “passed away after the incident, but prior to detectives being able to interview him.”
The First Circuit Court of Appeal upheld Judge Hines Myers' ruling in March. But the state Supreme Court determined the statements are relevant to Ely’s weapons charge and gave prosecutors leeway to introduce his interrogation video “limited to that portion of the interview concerning the death of Shawn George,” according to Tuesday’s judgment.
It was a divided decision by the court. Justices Jefferson Hughes, James Genovese and Piper Griffin felt the writ should have been denied, but none of them penned dissenting opinions.