Mary Ann Malone in 1996. The family of a woman has been fighting for years to block the execution of the man who killed her, but now they say that local officials are refusing to give them answers. Executing Jeremiah Manning would be an offense against Mary Ann Shaver Malone's legacy as she was strongly opposed to capital punishment, said her son Brett Malone, the family's spokesperson.
Manning killed Malone after breaking into the family home and abducting her in a crime that stunned the north Bossier town's tight-knit community. After years of grief, the Malones came together in an understanding that executing the man would only bring more suffering. Brett and Mary Ann Malone in 1997.
Courtesy of Brett Malone. "We're all able to recognize that killing him isn't going to make us feel better, it's not going to change anything that's happened in the past," Malone told The Shreveport-Bossier City Advocate in an interview in February. "His death at the hands of the state and in our family's name, will it bring any relief to our family or to the community that we come from or will it simply add more pain, add more loss, add more grief, add more suffering? That's what we're hoping to avoid.
" As Louisiana's legislature moved to expand legal methods of execution to include nitrogen gas and electrocution during this year's special legislative session, the Malones felt they had to adopt a new sense of urgency working to get Manning off of death row. The Bossier Parish District Attorney's office has not matched that urgency, Malone said. After a promising start to a dialogue with District Attorney J.
Schuyler Marvin on how the family could get Manning off of death row, Malone said the office abruptly stopped communicating with the family. One email from Marvin's secretary referencing difficulties obtaining medical documents for Manning is all they've received back from the DA's office since that conversation, Malone said. "We've been left in the dark," Malone said.
"I keep going back to what our family was promised two days after my mom's death, which was they wanted to honor our family's wishes and here we are 23-and-a-half years later and they don't seem to want to know what our wishes are, much less to honor them." Multiple attempts to reach District Attorney Marvin, officials were unanswered. Manning's attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
Malone had testified before the state legislature during the special session in February arguing against the expansion of methods of execution. He also authored a letter to Gov. Jeff Landry pleading with him to reconsider Malone said that the Governor's office never responded to his letter.
The bill legalizing nitrogen gas and electrocution executions passed alongside a suite of conservative criminal justice reforms approved during the special session, many of which had been championed by Landry on the campaign trail in 2023. Louisiana last executed someone in 2010. Unsuccessful in their appeals to lawmakers, the Malone family turned to the local District Attorney's office.
Malone said that in February, Marvin gave him his word that the office would work to organize a resentencing hearing where the Malone family could speak in favor of reducing Manning's sentence from the death penalty to life without parole. "(DA Marvin) had brought up the possibilities of looking into getting a judge, a state level judge, to call a resentencing hearing so that they could listen to the family members, listen to Jeremiah's lawyer, bring forth different issues and, and requests so that we could move forward in a direction that led more towards life rather than death," Malone said. "He had promised me at the time that he would get on that and make contact with the judge and see what was possible.
But I've not really gotten much feedback, even though I've requested it from him." Half-a-year later, Malone said that none of his follow up messages or direct phone calls to Marvin have received any responses to his questions on how a resentencing hearing in the case would work. Malone said his family has now seemingly hit dead ends with all three branches of government, underscoring the inherit challenges to getting someone off death row in Louisiana.
Those challenges made national news throughout the last year of Governor John Bel Edwards term in office, in which he supported clemency review for all of the state's death row inmates. None of the inmates who sought that review were granted relief from their sentences. In September of 2023, the Louisiana Supreme Court a law passed by the legislature in 2021 that gave local district attorney's offices the ability to revisit sentences doled out in the past that they now deemed as excessive.
The law was killed by a challenge filed by then-Attorney General Landry against the 22nd Judicial District Attorney's Office's move to reduce William Lee's sentence of life without parole for second degree murder to a sentence of 35 years at hard labor after more evidence was discovered in the case. Landry successfully argued that the law gave DA's the ability to unconstitutionally usurp the governor's sole power to grant pardons, according to the Louisiana Supreme Court's decision. Without a clear path forward, Malone said his family has been left deeply frustrated.
Salt in the wound, Malone said, is how it feels when supporters of pro-death penalty legislation say it's to ensure that victim's families' wishes are honored -- while his family's pleas for mercy have been ignored again and again. "The politicians would say over and over again 'we just want to honor the wishes of the family, we want to respect the family the victims' families,' but the reality has been that they've turned a deaf ear to what we've been asking," Malone said..
