Death Penalty News

After 20 years in prison, Williams is free-but justice has not been served. On the evening of January 4, 1998, in Shreveport, Louisiana, a group of neighborhood friends came up with an idea - they would order a pizza. The deliveryman, 23-year-old Jarvis Griffin, arrived at the house where a group of friends, including 16-year-old Corey Williams and 20-year-old Chris Moore (nicknamed "Rapist"), were hanging out. At the time, according to court filings from Williams' attorneys, Williams was known as someone who would take the fall for anyone, "what one might refer to as a 'chump,'" a family member said. He reportedly had an IQ of 68, had been institutionalized multiple times for intellectual disability, and suffered from a severe case of lead poisoning. After delivering the pizza and collecting his money, Griffin returned to his car. Soon afterwards, he was slumped over the wheel, dead from gunshots. Witnesses, including Williams himself, in...

Rodricus Crawford in Nov. 2016, shortly after his release from death row. Caddo Parish Prosecutors Drop Charges After Medical Evidence Suggests No Crime Occurred At the request of local prosecutors, a Caddo Parish, Louisiana trial court has dismissed all charges against Rodricus Crawford, making him the 158th person exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973 and the second to be exonerated this year.  Mr. Crawford had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 2012 for the murder of his 1-year-old son, Roderius Lott, despite medical evidence that the child actually died of a combination of pneumonia and sepsis. “In many respects, this case may reflect both the past and future of the death penalty in America,” said Robert Dunham, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “A jurisdiction with a history of racial bias, prosecutorial misconduct, and overuse of the death penalty chose to pursue a death sentence against a grieving f...

A.M. "Marty" Stroud The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project will honor a local attorney with its annual Champion of Justice Award this week. When it came to selecting this year's recipient of the award, Shawn Armbrust, executive director of the organization, found the perfect honoree in Shreveport attorney A.M. "Marty" Stroud III, who has become an outspoken advocate against injustices within the legal system. He will be recognized for his achievements at a Tuesday luncheon at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C. "We try each year to bring unusual voices to the event," said Armbrust, who has been with the innocence project for the past 11 years. Armbrust said she looks for honorees who talk about important matters within the legal system, and this year she thought it would be a good idea to honor a prosecutor. "It's really important to give credit to prosecutors who have done the right thing," Armbrust said. ...

Louisiana death row Louisiana, which has led the nation in homicide rates every year since 1989, sentences plenty of murderers to death but rarely executes them, in part because a huge proportion of death verdicts are reversed on appeal, according to a new study slated to come out Thursday. The report, to be published in the Southern University Law Center's "Journal of Race, Gender and Poverty," examined each of the 241 death sentences handed down in Louisiana over the past 30 years. Just 28 of those sentenced to death - less than 12 % - have been executed. Meanwhile, 127 of the death verdicts, more than 1/2 the total, have been reversed, meaning that either a new trial was ordered or the death sentence was rescinded. That number includes 9 exonerations. The "extremely high" reversal rates in parishes throughout Louisiana, combined with what political science professor Frank Baumgartner and statistician Tim Lyman call "shocking" racial...

Glenn Ford State Rep. Cedric Glover has filed a bill that would provide compensation to the family of the late Glenn Ford, who was released from prison after serving 30 years on death row after being wrongly convicted of a Shreveport murder. Ford was released in March 2014, but died last summer after suffering late stage lung cancer. He and his family have so far been denied $330,000 in compensation from the state because the court has ruled Ford didn't meet the burden of proof for "factual innocence." Ironically, Glover's bill seeks to clarify the law he authored in 2005 that provides compensation for those wrongly imprisoned. "I couldn't in good conscience return to this body and not try to address what I believe is a grave injustice and a misinterpretation of the law," said Glover, who returned to the House this year after serving as Shreveport's mayor. "Most reasonable folks find it an injustice that he and his family wouldn...

James Stewart Shreveport, the seat of Caddo Parish, is tucked in Louisiana’s north-west corner, bordering small towns in Texas and Arkansas. It has bayous, weeping willows, shotgun houses, and blues music, but lacks joie de vivre. It is the sober man’s New Orleans. The area distinguishes itself with a grim fact: between 2010 and 2014, it sentenced more people to death than any other place in the US. It is also the home of Dale Cox, Caddo Parish’s former acting district attorney, a man responsible for a third of Louisiana’s death row inmates since 2011. Cox’s reputation came to a head last year, when Rodricus Crawford was sentenced to death for smothering his one-year-old son amid a flurry of doubts and unanswered questions about the case. Cox had been instrumental in getting the death penalty verdict, and features by 60 Minutes and the New Yorker had depicted him as a callous man dismissive of racism, working in an office where a colleague had a Ku Klux Klan leader’s portr...

Glenn Ford I have covered countless wrongful convictions in nearly two decades of work as a legal analyst but I don’t think that any case, any cause, ever touched me the way the Glenn Ford story did . Here was a man, an uneducated black man in the South, who was railroaded into a murder conviction and death sentence. He then was left to languish in solitary confinement for decades in one of the most despicable prisons on Earth , and then upon his belated release denied the compensation he was owed by the state of Louisiana, by some of the very officials who allowed his false conviction and sentence to fester for 30 years in the first place. Here was a man, a petty thief, whose long-ago trial was a travesty upon justice , whose lung cancer likely was left untreated, or mistreated, while he was in confinement, so much so that he lived only a few months as a free man before succumbing to the disease. In the end, adding insult to injury, Louisiana officials decided just to wait him out...

This photo of Glenn Ford was taken by his lawyer on March 11, 2014— Ford's first day of freedom after 30 years in prison—near St. Francisville, LA (Gary Clements) Early on Monday morning in New Orleans, Louisiana, Glenn Ford died of lung cancer. He was 65. A few hours later, his name appeared in an opinion dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision in Glossip v. Gross , a case that challenged Oklahoma’s use of a lethal-injection drug that death-row inmates said risked causing them severe pain. By a vote of 5-4, with the conservative justices in the majority, the court rejected the inmates’ challenge . That was no surprise. More striking was Justice Stephen Breyer’s 46-page dissent , joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, saying it was “highly likely” that the death penalty itself violates the Constitution. One of the reasons Justice Breyer gave for his argument was the “disturbing” rate of exonerations of people sentenced to death — 115 since 2002 alone. ...

Glenn Ford Glenn Ford, who spent nearly 30 years on Angola's death row for a murder that prosecutors eventually conceded he did not commit, died in New Orleans early Monday (June 29), supporters announced. He was 65. Ford learned he had lung cancer shortly after his release from Angola on March 11, 2014 . A news release from Ford's supporters said he died at 2:11 a.m., having been "surrounded by friends, loved ones and family in recent days." Ford, who was born in Shreveport on Oct. 22, 1949, was convicted of the 1983 murder of 56-year-old Isadore Rozeman, a Shreveport jeweler and watchmaker for whom Ford had done occasional yard work. Ford had always denied killing Rozeman, and on March 10, 2014, he was exonerated of the crime when the state vacated his conviction. State District Judge Ramona Emanuel voided Ford's conviction and sentence based on new information corroborating his claim that he was not present or involved in Rozeman's death, ...

California death row However much Americans may disagree about the morality of capital punishment, no one wants to see an innocent person executed. And yet, far too often, people end up on death row after being convicted of horrific crimes they did not commit. The lucky ones are exonerated while they are still alive — a macabre club that  has grown to include 152 members since 1973. The rest remain locked up for life in closet-size cells. Some die there of natural causes; in at least  two documented cases, inmates who were almost certainly innocent were put to death. How many more innocent people have met the same fate, or are awaiting it? That may never be known. But over the past 42 years, someone on death row has been exonerated, on average, every three months. According to one study, at least 4 percent of all death-row inmates in the United States have been wrongfully convicted. That is far more than often enough to conclude that the death penalty — be...

Glenn Ford. Credit Henrietta Wildsmith/The Shreveport Times A few weeks ago, a former prosecutor in Caddo Parish, La., named A. M. Stroud III wrote a letter to the editor of The Shreveport Times that quickly caught fire on the Internet. Over more than 1,400 anguished words , Stroud apologized for his leading role in the 1984 trial of Glenn Ford , a Louisiana man who was convicted of murder and spent nearly 30 years on death row in Angola, the state’s maximum-security prison, until last year, when his conviction was overturned and he was released. “In 1984, I was 33 years old,” Stroud wrote. “I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning.” He apologized at length to Ford, then went on to declare that he now opposed the death penalty as an “abomination” that could not be justly administered. “No one should be given the ability to impose a sentence of death in any criminal proceeding,” Stroud wrote. “We a...

This photo of Glenn Ford was taken by his lawyer on March 11, 2014— Ford's first day of freedom after 30 years in prison— near St. Francisville, Louisiana (Gary Clements) The only thing Glenn Ford has received from the state of Louisiana after spending 30 years on death row as an innocent man is a $20 debit card. After being exonerated of murder last year, he walked out of Angola prison with $20.24; the 24 cents was the money left in his prison account. Ford is now fighting to get compensation. In November 1983, Ford was a young man living in Shreveport, Louisiana. He sometimes did yard work for Isadore Rozeman, who owned a jewelry and watch repair shop. On November 5, Ford went to Rozeman's house to ask him if he had work for him; Rozeman did not. Later that day, an acquaintance found Rozeman face down and shot to death inside his store. In a trial before an all-white jury, defended by 2 inexperienced counsel who had never argued before a jury, let...

Debra Milke: 22 years on Arizona's death row Released after spending 22 years on Arizona's death row, Debra Milke called her exoneration 'bittersweet.' Legal experts say the plight of exonerees such as Milke has played into how juries view the ultimate sanction. Until this week, Debra Milke, who spent 22 years on Arizona's death row, remained a ward of the state. After a Maricopa County judge on Monday dismissed all charges related to the 1989 murder of her son, Christopher, a deputy removed an ankle monitor. At that moment, Ms. Milke became a member of an exclusive club no one would voluntarily attend - one of the few who were walked by the US justice system to the threshold of state-sponsored death only to be fully released after courts found their conviction wrongful. The Milke case, which comes amid a string of death-row exonerations from North Carolina to Louisiana, has put renewed focus on what is for many one of the most troubling parts of t...