The Atlantic this morning posts, "After 30 Years on Death Row, an Innocent Man In Louisiana is About to Go Free," by Andrew Cohen. It's a detailed look at a troubling case.Here's the beginning:
Glenn Ford, a black man wrongfully convicted of murder by an all-white jury in Louisiana in 1984, a man who has spent the last 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit following a trial filled with constitutional violations, is on the verge of being set free. Once that happens (and it could happen as soon as tomorrow after a hearing in the case) he will become one of the longest-serving death row inmates in modern American history to be exonerated and released.
Ford's dogged lawyers and enlightened parish prosecutors in Shreveport both filed motions late last week informing a state trial judge that the time has come now to vacate Ford's murder conviction and death sentence. Why? Because prosecutors now say that they learned, late last year, of "credible evidence" that Ford "was neither present at, nor a participant in, the robbery and murder" of the victim in his case, a man named Isadore Rozeman.
And:
Any exoneration is remarkable, of course. Any act of justice after decades of injustice is laudable. It is never too late to put to right a wrong. But what also is striking about this case is how weak it always was, how frequently Ford's constitutional rights were denied, and yet how determined Louisiana's judges were over decades to defend an indefensible result.
Related posts are in the exoneration and innocence category indexes.
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