NEW ORLEANS — Despite spending most of his adult life behind bars, the 28-year-old convicted felon now booked with murder in Thursday’s mass shooting in the French Quarter was repeatedly granted leniency that allowed him to remain on the street, according to court records.
Nicholas Miorana had already served a seven-year prison sentence for armed robbery when he was arrested in 2023 and booked on charges of domestic battery, child endangerment and a series of gun charges, including being a felon with a firearm.
The breaks Miorana received by the criminal justice system began almost immediately upon his guilty plea to most of those charges in January 2024, from his generous plea deal to his sentence of probation and culminating with near-daily violations of his probation while on an electronic ankle monitor and house arrest.
Miorana was wearing the ankle bracelet, police say, when he and two accomplices jumped out of a car and gunned down four people on Iberville Street at about 12:20 p.m.
With the help of the monitor, Miorana was arrested within hours of the shooting.
One of the first breaks Miorana received was the terms of his plea in January 2024, which included a decision by the district attorney’s office to allow him to plead guilty to attempted possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. While felon in possession of a firearm carries a minimum five-year sentence, dropping the charge to an “attempt” makes a defendant eligible for probation.
“Either you're in possession or you're not in possession,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a non-profit watchdog group. “You still had the ace in the hole of the convicted felon in possession of a firearm. The DA's office essentially threw that ace away.”
And with the plea deal, Criminal Court Judge Leon Roche granted Miorana probation, court records show.
The next court activity by Miorana came eight months later when his probation officer filed to revoke his probation, although court records don’t reveal the nature of his alleged violations.
Less than a month later, Miorana was again booked with domestic abuse battery. That could have been the grounds for an immediate revocation of his probation, but instead Roche ordered Miorana to remain on house arrest and be fitted with an ankle monitor.
That was in September 2024. Despite logging violations of his court-ordered home confinement starting in October, Roche loosened Miorana’s conditions to allow him to go to work at a car wash from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., court records show.
From that point, Miorana logged violations of the judge’s orders nearly every day starting on October 8, according to violation reports sent to Roche by the monitoring company, Applied Supervision Accountability Program, or ASAP.
“Neither the district attorney's office or the judge did their duty and those failures put into motion the chain of events that resulted in the mass shooting in the French Quarter,” Goyeneche said. “It's just a classic case of a system failure, both on the part of the district attorney's office and the sentencing judge.”
WWL Louisiana reached out to Judge Roche, but he has not responded.
Meanwhile, District Attorney Jason’s Williams criticized the court for not taking action on Miorana’s repeated violations of his house arrest, but his office has not responded to questions about the plea bargain that allowed Miorana to be released on probation in the first place.
In addition to one count of second-degree murder and three counts of attempted second-degree murder, Miorana still faces the domestic abuse battery charge from September.
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