PUBLISHER'S NOTE: My introduction to Louisiana justice: The Rodricus Crawford case. (The subject of numerous posts on this log): A few years ago, I was asked to give some help, because of my experience with the Charles Smith cases) to a young black man charged with murdering his young son. (Happily he was ultimately removed from Louisiana's death row and exonerated.) Prosecutors argued, based on a spurious medical report, that Rodricus (a loving father) and smothered his 1-year-old son Roderius to death. Roderius actually died because his family was too poor to afford all of the shot's baby's normally must receive in order to avoid illness, and therefore succumbed to pneumonia aggravated by sepsis. This was quite an eye-opener for me. Here's one of my editorial comments - which may provide just a glimmer of this mind-boggling experience:
'PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The Rodricus Crawford case was my introduction to Louisiana justice. Unbelievable. Prosecutor Dale Cox invoked Jesus Christ in his address to the jurors - and brought Jesus back into the courtroom for the inevitable death penalty hearing. Now I return to Louisiana with the Corey Williams case - which has certainly along with Rodricus,won a place in this Blog's 'enough to make one weep' department. Truly an extraordinary case. As Ian Millhauser says in ThinkProgress: " "Indeed, the facts of Williams v. Louisiana are so extraordinary that they sound like they were invented by a failed fiction writer. The prosecution’s star witness was a man whose street name was “Rapist,” and who was almost certainly involved in the murder itself. One witness told police that it “don’t make any sense” to conclude that Williams was the murderer, but prosecutors never shared this testimony with Williams’ attorneys. Another said that he’d seen Rapist with the murder weapon, but this information wasn’t shared with Williams’ lawyers either. During the investigation, police repeatedly stated that they thought that Rapist and two other men were responsible for the murder, and that these three men had agreed among themselves to “blame it on Corey.” Again, this information was never shared with Williams’ lawyers." To make matters worse - if at all possible - ""Shortly before he was convicted of murdering a pizza delivery man, according to his attorneys, Corey Dewayne Williams was “an intellectual disabled 16 year-old child” who “still sucked his thumb, urinated himself on an ordinary basis, and regularly ate dirt and paper.” As a child, he was known to eat lead paint chips — one expert witness said that Williams had “the most extreme case of lead poisoning I have ever seen.” In his neighborhood, “he was known to be a ‘duck’ or what one might refer to as a ‘chump,’’ always willing to take the blame for things he did not do.” Read this and weep - and let's hope that Corey Williams makes it to the Supreme Court - and that the court puts an end to this travesty. Read this and weep!'
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
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https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/7866015630768128281
(March 17, 2018);
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Back in April, Alexander testified against the bill. “It’s wrong to execute an innocent man just because of the fact that you’re trying to limit the opportunity of someone guilty to file,” he told Bolts. “It’s a question of life and death.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "As HB 675 advanced through the legislature this spring, the foundations of one longstanding death sentence were splintering. In April, a judge vacated the conviction of Jimmie Christian Duncan, who has been on death row since 1998 and has proclaimed his innocence in the drowning death of his girlfriend’s toddler daughter from the beginning. Boren, who testified at Duncan’s evidentiary hearing about the ineffective defense he received at trial, said that his case exemplifies the dangers of the new law. “Here’s a man who, by all accounts, at least in my view of it, is completely innocent of the charges—and he’d be dead if the attorney general had their way,” he said. “What this bill would like to do is to keep any more innocent people on death row from having adequate hearings and trials post-conviction to determine if their trial was fair—or based on fraud like Jimmie Duncan"
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STORY: "Louisiana Is Bulldozing the Right of Prisoners to Prove Their Innocence After a Conviction," by Piper French, published by Bolts Magazine, on July 2, 2025. (Piper French is a staff writer for Bolts. She lives in Los Angeles. Her freelance work can be found in publications like New York Review of Books, New York magazine, The Drift, and The Nation)…(Bolts covers the nuts and bolts of power and political change, from the local up. We report on the local elections and obscure institutions that greatly shape public policies but are overlooked in the U.S., and the grassroots movements that surround them. We focus on two areas where local governments play a key role: criminal justice and policing, and voting rights and democracy.")
SUB-HEADING: ""Louisiana has a long legacy of violating rights to secure convictions and putting innocent people in prison. A new law effectively shuts the door on their ability to seek relief."
GIST: "Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill speaks to reporters in January in New Orleans.
A new law which dramatically restricts the ability of prisoners to seek post-conviction relief, has been a centerpiece of her legislative agenda this session.
(Malcolm Alexander had been incarcerated at Angola prison 14 years already when he learned about DNA testing, the thing that would ultimately free him, while watching television coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial.
In November 1980, Alexander, a Black man from Shreveport, Louisiana, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for raping a white woman at gunpoint.
The case against him involved a handful of factors that are hallmarks of wrongful convictions: The victim never got a good look at her assailant, and her initial I.D. of Alexander was shaky (cross-racial identifications are much more likely to be incorrect) but police recorded her confidence in the choice as 98 percent certain.
Alexander’s lawyer, who was later disbarred, failed to call any defense witnesses, and the entire trial lasted less than eight hours. “It wasn’t even a full workday,” Alexander told Bolts. Critical evidence in his case was destroyed after his conviction.
Still, it took him 38 years to win his freedom.
He began making hobbycraft, and rode horses and wrestled bulls at the Angola rodeo, to fund his legal case. In 1996, the Innocence Project took him on as a client.
Eventually, they uncovered new hair evidence from the crime scene.
DNA testing showed it didn’t belong to Alexander or the victim, and in 2018, he was finally exonerated. “I lived 38 years of my life in the institution for something I didn’t do. And believe me, that’s a nightmare,” he told Bolts. “It could be an enemy of mine, I wouldn’t even want him to go through that.”
Every step of Alexander’s fight for justice happened under the process laid out in the state’s criminal code of procedure that governs the rights of prisoners to challenge their conviction in court.
But under a brand-new Louisiana law, he would very likely still be in prison today.
On June 20, Louisiana’s ultra-conservative governor, Jeff Landry, signed House Bill 675, which dramatically restricts the ability of prisoners to seek post-conviction relief.
Attorney General Liz Murrill, Landry’s close ally, had made the bill a centerpiece of her legislative agenda this session.
Its passage represents a dramatic step forward in Landry and state Republicans’ broader effort to send Louisiana’s criminal legal system back to a harsher past: speeding up executions, treating more young people as adults, and nearly eliminating parole.
A critical aspect of this agenda has been closing off nearly every avenue available to prisoners seeking to challenge their convictions—despite ample evidence that some of these convictions are flawed.
Louisiana has a long and troubling history of violating the constitution to secure guilty verdicts and allowing non-unanimous juries to convict people.
The state has put scores of innocent people in prison, including on death row—grave miscarriages of justice that can take decades to undo.
Murrill is currently petitioning Louisiana’s supreme court to hasten the executions of five people who have been on death row for decades as they move through their state- and constitutionally-mandated appeals process.
She and Landry have framed HB 675, which was sponsored by Republican Representative Brian Glorioso, as a policy corrective to this dilemma. “For decades, families and the victims of the most heinous crimes imaginable have been denied the justice that was promised to them by the State,” Murrill told Bolts in a statement. “HB 675 makes it clear that murderers, tried by a jury of their peers and sentence[sic] to death by a judge, no longer have the right to delay their appeals indefinitely. With clear timetables and deadlines, these cases will now move forward to finality!”
Attorneys who represent incarcerated people in Louisiana say that HB 675, which goes into effect Aug. 1, will not actually serve to speed up executions—but it will make it much harder for people to get back into court to raise potential issues.
The new law requires petitioners file a complete application for post-conviction relief within one year of their direct appeal decision or forfeit their right to ever do so, with no exceptions for new evidence. If at any point during the relief process they take more than two years to file anything, they will be considered to have abandoned their case.
And despite Murrill’s focus on the 55 people on death row, the new law applies to every prisoner in the state, including nearly 5,000 people currently serving a life sentence.
“It is actually going to have all these unintended consequences, like impacting 99.99% of imprisoned people with post-conviction claims,” Jee Park, executive director of the Innocence Project New Orleans, told Bolts. In April, she told lawmakers: “This bill is a rewrite of the [post-conviction relief] law that will prevent innocent people from coming home.”
Back in April, Alexander testified against the bill. “It’s wrong to execute an innocent man just because of the fact that you’re trying to limit the opportunity of someone guilty to file,” he told Bolts. “It’s a question of life and death.”
Just a few years ago, Louisiana’s elected leaders were going in the opposite direction on criminal justice reform, seeking ways to address past injustices encoded into the state’s criminal legal system.
In 2017, under the previous governor John Bel Edwards, lawmakers crafted a bipartisan, omnibus criminal justice reform package aimed at shrinking the state’s prison population.
In 2021, they unanimously passed a bill, Act 104, that created new avenues for prisoners to challenge their convictions. It established a new factual innocence statute and codified an informal practice in some parishes where prosecutors and defense attorneys could work together to lighten a prisoner’s sentence after the fact.
The year prior, New Orleans voters had elected a district attorney, Jason Williams, who promised a clean break with his predecessor, a traditional “tough on crime” prosecutor.
Williams stood up a civil rights division to examine past convictions for prosecutorial misconduct or overreach.
He has framed its work as “correcting the sins of the past.” Like other conviction integrity units, the division reviewed potential innocence cases, but they also focused on people sentenced under an earlier and harsher version of Louisiana’s “habitual offender” law, which mandated life in prison for a third offense.
And they took on cases where people were convicted by a non-unanimous jury, a relic of Jim Crow law that the U.S. Supreme Court found unconstitutional in 2020.
The Supreme Court had not ruled on whether their decision applied to cases that had already been adjudicated, and Louisiana’s highest court chose not to apply it retroactively, leaving anyone already convicted a non-unanimous jury stuck in prison.
Meanwhile, the backlash to these changes was already brewing.
Even before he became governor, Landry began seeking to restrict the post-conviction relief process.
As the state’s attorney general, he sued to stop Williams and other prosecutors from resentencing people via post-conviction plea deals under 2021’s Act 104, arguing it encroached on the executive branch’s unique power to grant clemency.
In late 2023, the state supreme court sided with Landry in a 4-3 ruling, though it did make clear that prosecutors enjoy “absolute discretion” to seek post-conviction relief.
In his dissent, the chief justice wrote that the decision “could have the disastrous effect of undermining, and further limiting, the post-conviction relief procedure that has operated to correct the evils of the past.”
This left Williams and his colleagues with fewer options to pursue resentencing, though they could, and did, still choose to waive the many procedural objections—time limits, for instance—that can hinder someone’s post-conviction relief application before it ever gets heard on the merits.
But Landry wasn’t done.
After he took office in January 2024, he immediately called a special session on crime where lawmakers modified Act 104 just three years after unanimously passing it.
The new law, which went into effect Aug. 1, 2024, stopped DAs from waiving those procedural objections, and mostly halted the Orleans Parish civil rights division’s work in its tracks.
At the same time, the new attorney general, Murrill, began investigating the division.
At an extraordinarily tense hearing in the fall, lawmakers accused Williams of politicizing his office and being pro-criminal. “The DA usually fights to defend convictions …[but now] an inordinate number of cases the DA’s saying ‘we’re on the side of the criminal defendant,’” Senator Mark Abraham said.
“Judges had to support everything that we did,” a former staffer for the division who spoke on condition of anonymity told Bolts in response. “If we were behaving recklessly or jamming things through, the courts wouldn’t have gone along with us.”
Bolts reached out to the Orleans Parish DA to inquire about what, if any, work the civil rights division is still able to perform following this latest rollback of the relief process.
A representative didn’t ultimately respond. The webpage for the civil rights division no longer exists. It was taken down at some point in the last three months.
At the fall hearing on the investigation into the New Orleans DA, after Murrill referred to post-conviction relief as “a matter of legislative grace,” another senator, Jay Morris from northern Louisiana, mused: “We could repeal post-conviction relief totally.”
With HB 675, the legislature has come close to making good on that promise. The bill that passed is less extreme than its initial iteration, but it still allows the attorney general more control over the relief process, allowing them to file procedural objections to prisoners’ claims and move to have the court dismiss a claim altogether—all responsibilities that are normally the domain of the DA.
Park also emphasizes that the new time limits and rules around abandonment are highly unrealistic given the existing barriers to filing a petition for post-conviction relief, especially for the tens of thousands of Louisiana prisoners who are not on death row, none of whom have a right to post-conviction legal representation. “It takes so much time to uncover new evidence,” she said—months to get your own court file, months or even years to get the DA and investigating agency’s files, which are often prohibitively expensive for prisoners. If they still exist.
The Orleans Parish civil rights division found that a quarter of the DA’s files were missing from the cases they took on.
Then there’s the question of getting legal help. The Innocence Project New Orleans, which provides pro bono representation in factual innocence cases, has a queue of some 7,000 people awaiting aid, according to Jee.
The last person they helped exonerate was in his 35th year of incarceration by the time they could take his case on.
“It’s incredibly harsh, given the consequences at stake,” Park told Bolts. Under the new law, she said, Malcolm Alexander would be seen to have “‘abandoned his claim’ a decade before the technology that allowed him to be exonerated could exist.”
In that alternate reality, Alexander’s discovery of DNA testing while watching the O.J. trial would have amounted to little more than a cruel joke.
While Murrill has framed HB 675 as a response to delays in carrying out executions, Bolts reached out to her office inquiring about the 27,000 or so prisoners who are, like Alexander, serving non-capital sentences but who may also be blocked from seeking post-conviction relief.
Murrill’s spokesperson responded by referring once again to the death row population: “Family members of the victims of these heinous crimes committed by those on Death Row have waited decades for justice to be served. They deserve finality. The AG will always put them first before criminals.”
When asked again about whether the AG’s office had considered how this new law might affect prisoners serving lesser sentences, the spokesperson had nothing further to add.
Restarting executions after a decade-plus hiatus has been one of Landry’s central promises since he came into office in early 2024.
But early on, he found himself thwarted by the post-conviction relief process: Though the majority of the state’s death row population has been there since the ‘90s, all but two of them hadn’t yet exhausted their appeals and weren’t eligible to be put to death. Of the two men eligible, one died while awaiting his execution. Louisiana killed the other, Jessie Hoffman, via nitrogen gas in March. Afterwards, Murrill said, “We’re going to start working our way through motions and begin to clear the underbrush and move these cases forward.”
To that end, HB 675 forces anyone with an open post-conviction relief application that was filed before July 1, 2023 to move it forward toward a final ruling within the next year. It sets out the same timeline for anyone with an incomplete, or “shell” petition, to file a full briefing.
In a parallel effort, Murrill has appealed directly to the state supreme court to expedite executions.
And as she and Landry have vocally expressed their desire to move capital cases toward the death chamber, some DAs have taken note.
The top prosecutors of Orleans, East Baton Rouge, and Caddo parishes have all transferred capital cases to the attorney general’s office, giving Murrill control of their post-conviction relief proceedings.
This spring, after initially saying he wouldn’t seek death warrants because none of his cases had exhausted their appeals, the DA of Caddo Parish, a Democrat named James Stewart, switched course and argued that two people with open but inactive cases had effectively abandoned them
(It was a notable shift for Stewart, who drew national interest and funding when he first ran for office back in 2015 on a reform platform against a notoriously pro-death penalty incumbent, a match-up that underscored the links between capital punishment, racism, and wrongful convictions in Caddo Parish.)
Thus far, this strategy has proved ineffective in court—the state supreme court stepped in and overturned the two Caddo Parish death warrants, ruling that the two men had not finished post-conviction proceedings.
Murrill responded to the decision by citing HB 675, which encodes the concept of “abandonment” into statutory law, as a necessary corrective.
The attorney general’s defense of the bill hinges on the notion that people on death row are taking advantage of the lengthy capital appeals process, at great cost to their victims’ families. “This process has been so abused for so long,” she told lawmakers during the April hearing. A former DA who testified in support of HB 675 criticized the post-conviction relief requirements for allowing a defendant he secured a death sentence against to “sit there eating microwaved popcorn and watching color tv … for the last 18 years.”
Capital cases always take a long time because of the protections afforded people by the U.S. Constitution before the state puts them to death.
Lawyers who represent people post-conviction argue this law will do nothing to change that reality. “We have been through this process many times,” Jim Boren, a longtime capital defense attorney in Louisiana, told Bolts. “Every time some governor comes in and says, I can kill people quicker, and changes the rule—what that does is spawn five years of litigation about that rule.”
And delays come from the DA’s side, too.
During the April hearing, Katherine Jacubak, a New Orleans-based attorney who represents people with non-capital cases, asked: “What happens when the state fails to reply timely, as they do frequently …are they the parties that are responsible for dragging this on?”
As HB 675 advanced through the legislature this spring, the foundations of one longstanding death sentence were splintering.
In April, a judge vacated the conviction of Jimmie Christian Duncan, who has been on death row since 1998 and has proclaimed his innocence in the drowning death of his girlfriend’s toddler daughter from the beginning.
Boren, who testified at Duncan’s evidentiary hearing about the ineffective defense he received at trial, said that his case exemplifies the dangers of the new law.
“Here’s a man who, by all accounts, at least in my view of it, is completely innocent of the charges—and he’d be dead if the attorney general had their way,” he said. “What this bill would like to do is to keep any more innocent people on death row from having adequate hearings and trials post-conviction to determine if their trial was fair—or based on fraud like Jimmie Duncan""
The entire story can be read at:
https://boltsmag.org/louisiana-limiting-post-conviction-relief-murrill-landry/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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