Arthur “Archie” Kaufman may have organized the cover-up of the Danziger Bridge shootings in 2005, but New Orleans prosecutors insist he conducted a solid investigation into the killing of a teenager six years earlier outside the Superdome.

A prosecutor for the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office said in a recent court filing that Kaufman, a former New Orleans Police Department officer, is “vastly more credible” than the “career criminal” who now claims that Kaufman coached him into framing a man for murder.

Assistant District Attorney Kyle Daly repeated that argument at a hearing Aug. 4 on the fate of Duvander “Chevy” Hurst, who was convicted 17 years ago of gunning down 19-year-old Allen Delatte as a crowd left the Super Fair at the Dome in 1999. Kaufman had no reason to coerce the witness, Daly argued, because the detective had already cracked the case.

“Even if we assume that Archie Kaufman was a corrupt cop and he was going to be corrupt in this case, it doesn’t make sense why he would do this,” Daly said.

Criminal District Court Judge Camille Buras is set to rule Friday on whether to overturn Hurst’s conviction. She will also decide whether the state can move forward with trying the sole eyewitness at Hurst's trial, William Varnado, on a perjury charge.

Buras delayed her ruling for more than a month as Varnado underwent treatment for substance abuse, the same problem that landed him in a room with Kaufman in the first place, his lawyer says.

The case against Varnado is at least the second in which District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office has charged a witness with lying for recanting a pivotal identification of a murder suspect. A judge in January acquitted two men on similar perjury counts after they changed their testimony in the case of Jerome Morgan, who spent nearly two decades in prison for a 1993 murder before the two men returned to the witness stand with claims of police coercion.

Thanks in large part to Varnado's testimony, Hurst, 46, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Delatte on June 7, 1999. And his bid for freedom rests largely on Varnado’s changing his story.

In 2013, Varnado signed an affidavit claiming that Kaufman coached him into placing Hurst at the scene of the crime in a red Oldsmobile Cutlass. Other witnesses had told police that the shooter killed Delatte from such a car.

Varnado claims he was recovering from the effects of heroin when Kaufman interviewed him soon after the killing. He recounted the scene at an April 2016 court hearing.

“I told him that man I was getting sick off of heroin … like, ‘What y’all need me to do? I just wanna get out of here,’ " Varnado said.

“And he was like, ‘Well, this is what’s gonna happen,’ and he basically told me a story,” Varnado said.

Kaufman forced him to repeat the story into a tape recorder, Varnado said. The detective kept rewinding and restarting the tape until he got the story straight, he said.

Varnado said that the day before the trial, he met with prosecutor Lynda Van Davis and tried to back out. Varnado claims that Davis, a top lieutenant to District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. who went on to become a criminal court judge, threatened him with 20 years in prison on an unrelated charge if he failed to testify at Hurst's trial.

“I didn’t want to do it. I know I had got myself in too deep, and I told her that,” Varnado said.

Davis now lives in Kuwait. She denies Varnado's allegations, calling them completely false in a recent written statement.

Justin Harrell, the defense attorney representing both Hurst and Varnado, claims the perjury charge is retaliatory. It is only because Varnado dared to speak out against the prosecution that he now faces a potential five to 40 years in prison, Harrell says.

Hurst’s appeals were shot down one after the other until Kaufman was convicted in 2011 of covering up the Danziger Bridge shootings. A jury concluded that Kaufman, then a homicide sergeant, concocted a story to deflect blame from a group of New Orleans police officers who shot civilians on the bridge a few days after Hurricane Katrina.

A federal judge later tossed out Kaufman's conviction, along with those of four other former NOPD officers, based on allegations of misconduct by prosecutors. To avoid a retrial, all five agreed to plead guilty last year in exchange for sharply reduced sentences. Kaufman is serving out the final months of a three-year sentence.

Hurst claims Kaufman’s conviction in federal court proves that he was willing to obstruct justice in homicide cases.

But prosecutors paint the recent claims about Kaufman as an act of opportunism by a man desperate to leave prison. Kaufman also denied the claims in a June 2016 hearing.

"Varnado alleged that I coerced him and coached him into saying what he did, which is absolutely false," Kaufman testified. "He alleged that he was strung out on heroin. ... I would not have talked to him if he was in that condition."

On Aug. 4, Daly repeated his objections to Hurst’s motion for a new trial. He cited informants who had already led Kaufman to Hurst as a suspect in the murder before the detective interviewed Varnado.

None of those informants testified at the trial, but Daly said that was because of a code of silence between rival groups from the 17th Ward and the 3rd Ward. Police said a 12-year-old from the 17th Ward was killed in retaliation for Delatte’s death.

Daly said Varnado’s taped statement to Kaufman was patchy and inconsistent, which is further proof that it was not coached out of him.

“When you listen to the tape, it sounds anything but rehearsed. The story of the tape being rewound over and over again, they know that’s something that we can’t disprove,” Daly said.

Harrell said in court that Kaufmann has pleaded guilty to “precisely the allegations that have been made against him here.”

Daly lodged new allegations about coordination between Hurst and Varnado by introducing a series of Hurst’s prison calls since January 2016.

Varnado moved from the 17th Ward to Texas after the original 2000 trial. But Daly said evacuees from the neighborhood moved into his apartment complex after Katrina and began pressuring him to switch his story.