First inmate released from prison under Louisiana's informant law ...

"He put his neck out, I have to give him that." Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick

A widely used state law prosecutors reserve for chronic criminals sent John Ballay to prison for life. A little-known law prosecutors now have in their toolbox has set him free.

Ballay, 53, a former Mandeville resident, is the first person in the state to have his prison sentence modified under a year-old Louisiana law that was born in Jefferson Parish, modeled after a federal statute and designed to encourage inmates to become informants in criminal investigations.

In exchange for providing "substantial assistance," as the law requires, Louisiana prosecutors can ask judges to reduce inmates' sentences. The trade-off, however, is to be labeled a snitch. For Ballay, whose life sentence was reduced to 15 years, looking over his shoulder will be a way of life when word of his deeds gets out with the publication of his story.

"Nobody at the prison knows," said Ballay, who declined to have his photograph taken for this story. "They're going to know. They're going to figure it out. It's going to hit the newspaper. It's going to be all over the state. The Angolite (prison magazine) is going to print it.

"And you know what? I just don't care," he said. "Because, for me, it's my way of not slipping back. See, I can never go back to being a gangster. I'm stuck. I got to be an honest man.''

After amassing some 120 arrests for petty, non-violent offenses such as theft and forgery, Ballay was sentenced to life in prison in 1999, after then-24th Judicial District Judge Susan Chehardy ruled he was a career criminal under Louisiana's habitual offender law.

He walked out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary a free man Sept. 23, after Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick Jr. urged a judge to resentence him because of the help he provided in several investigations, ranging from helping prosecutors convict a suspected serial killer to breaking up a drug ring in the Angola prison.

But at the request of prosecutors, retired Judge A.J. Kling, who ordered Ballay's release Aug. 13, kept documents detailing Ballay's assistance sealed from public view until Ballay was safely out of Angola.

"He put his neck out, I have to give him that," Connick said.

Louisiana's law, backed by the Louisiana District Attorney's Association and enacted in August 2011, is modeled after Rule 35 of the federal rules of criminal procedure. In fact, the Louisiana law was largely crafted by Jefferson Parish Assistant District Attorney Al Winters, who is a former federal prosecutor, Connick said.

Dane Ciolino, a Loyola Law School professor, said the federal Rule 35 said is "invaluable to prosecutors."

Deals likely would not be offered to inmates with violence in their pasts, Connick said. The decision to reduce the sentence rests with judges, who weigh requests from prosecutors and defense attorneys after the lawyers' negotiations.

"It's not something we take lightly," Connick said. "And it has to be serious help."

In exchange for seeing his sentence reduced, Ballay had to give up his post-conviction rights to his last conviction -- theft of goods from a Metairie Kmart -- that led to his being ruled a career criminal. Ballay says he's confident he would have prevailed eventually in challenging that conviction.

"We're not condoning his actions or minimizing his activities at all," Connick said. "The law is there for a purpose. He did provide us the information we needed to solve these cases, when in the past we may not have been able to do anything."

Angola Warden Burl Cain backs the law. "If he can help solve a lot of crimes, then it's a good thing," he said of Ballay.

Angola's chief investigator, Col. Bobby Achord, who declined to comment for this story, wrote his first-ever letter in support of an inmate when he outlined the help Ballay provided, according to court documents in which prosecutors asked for Ballay's sentence reduction.

Ballay, Achord wrote, provided information to help the New Orleans Police Department in its ongoing investigation of the 2004 murder of John MacLellan, 38, a bartender who was shot during an armed robbery attempt near his home in Lakeview.

MacLellan's father, Dave MacLellan of Massachusetts, has for years visited Louisiana to keep the investigation active, including speaking to inmates. Achord said within days of Dave MacLellan visiting Angola, Ballay provided the name of a lifer at the prison who claimed to know the killer. Louisiana State Police investigators interviewed that inmate, who passed a polygraph test and provided the names of three suspects, Achord wrote.

Ballay also provided information on Ricky Wedgeworth and Darian Pierce, two Louisiana trustees who escaped from a work detail last year and allegedly killed David Cupps, a U.S. Energy Department employee from Ohio who was kidnapped in Vicksburg, Miss., and found dead in Alabama, Achord wrote.

Wedgeworth confessed in part because of Ballay's urging, and he and Pierce are awaiting their trials in Mississippi.

"I spent long nights with Ricky Wedgeworth, (with him) describing how he killed that man," Ballay said. "Ultimately he confessed. I mean, he strangled and he killed a man. If you can just believe, 12 nights of just sitting there with him, (with me) saying 'Ricky, there's no way out.'"

Perhaps most notable among the cases is Ballay's help leading to the 1999 conviction of Russell Elwood, the LaPlace cab driver suspected of killing as many as 33 women and dumping their bodies from the New Orleans area to Gonzalez. Elwood is serving life in prison for killing Cheryl Lewis of Bridge City and dumping her body near Hahnville in 1993.

Ballay, who in his youth was well-versed in the seedy side of Airline Highway, convinced two prostitutes he knew to come forward and tell authorities that Elwood had beaten them and left them to die.

Their speaking up led two other former prostitutes to come forward, and combined, the four women played an instrumental role in convicting Elwood in what otherwise was a circumstantial case, said Jefferson Parish Assistant District Attorney Doug Freese, who prosecuted Elwood as an assistant attorney general.

"Was he a good intelligence source?" Freese said of Ballay. "The answer in my case was a resounding 'Yes.'"

Ballay had already begun serving his life prison sentence when he alerted his attorney Jim Williams of Gretna to the women in the Elwood case. Williams, a former prosecutor, met with the women and then with Freese, who could do nothing in return for Ballay.

Until this year, the only thing Ballay received for his help in the Elwood case was a ride from Angola to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office investigations bureau, Williams said.

"He got a couple of slices of pizza and a Coke," said Williams. "That's what he got for coming in, for meeting with (detectives) and telling them about these women that he knew from being out on the street on Airline Highway who had gotten in trouble. ... That blew the case up. That's what took it from a tough case to a good case for the state."

In affirming Elwood's conviction, the state 5th Circuit Court of Appeal noted the testimony the women provided.

Ballay said he learned details of many Angola inmates' crimes while discussing their cases with them when he worked in the prison's law library. There was no ethical obligation for him to keep mum about the information inmates confided, he said.

He claims he knows thousands of details of crimes, but he was "selective" about who he exposed. Does he feel he betrayed their confidence?

"No," Ballay said. "In most of the cases I felt more of a responsibility to the dead people's family than the inmate, that some daddy's little girl got killed. I mean, it went beyond the inmate. It was more of a feeling for their family, that they got somebody missing in the world and these guys are in here laughing about it or using it as a reputation getter or something like that, and you know, I'm like, 'That's somebody's little girl.'"

He said he would either pass information to Williams or to Angola authorities, never expecting anything in return.

"There's a lot of people up there (at Angola) that will do the right thing, especially if they knew they could do the right thing and get a second chance at life," Ballay said. "They would most certainly do it."

Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/11/first_inmate_released_from_pri.html

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