Jose ‘Lil Joe’ Chapa says one way to make Beauregard Parish ‘great again’ is to stop construction of a new jail and divert resources to services that keep people out of lockup altogether.
Nearly 380 people remain in custody after ICE raids in Mississippi Wednesday. They are likely to be held in immigration detention in Louisiana, far from their families and access to legal counsel.
Gloria Williams was in her 20s when she was sent to prison for her part in a robbery that turned deadly. After serving nearly five decades, including one decade in solitary confinement, Williams now has a chance at freedom.
Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. Nearly 20 million people in the United States are estimated to have felony convictions. This makes up approximately 8 percent of all adults and a full third […]
Spotlights like this one provide original commentary and analysis on pressing criminal justice issues of the day. You can read them each day in our newsletter, The Daily Appeal. This week, The Advocate reported on the case of Gloria Williams, also known as Mama Glo, and her win before the pardon board. Williams has been in […]
James Stewart, Caddo Parish’s DA, continues to defend controversial death sentences that originated with his predecessors.
A lawsuit filed by Kentrell Hurst’s children is the latest against New Orleans Sheriff Marlin Gusman over jail conditions.
‘The bill forces attorneys to choose between violating our ethical mandates or going to jail for following them.’
The bail bonds industry was caught overcharging 50,000 families $6 million over 14 years, according to SPLC.
The Orleans district attorney has said that violent youth are the city’s biggest crime problem.
In 2000, Lamar Burks was convicted of murder and given a 70-year sentence. But the federal indictment of a DEA agent and witnesses who say Burks is innocent have raised new questions about his case.
A judge excluded a confession that exonerated defendants in one trial related to a Delaware prison uprising, but a pair of defendants were nonetheless acquitted, promising further problems for prosecutors.
In 1996, Michele Benjamin was sentenced to life without parole for killing a man who she said solicited her for sex and menaced her with a weapon in New Orleans. A Supreme Court decision led her to be re-sentenced to life with a chance at parole in 2016. Today, a parole hearing brings the possibility of freedom.
With Appeal contributors Clarissa Sosin and Daryl Khan.
Baton Rouge residents say little has changed after Alton Sterling.
Then he ordered another officer to arrest the man.
As in Louisiana, Oregon’s practice is rooted in its own rich history of white supremacy.
With Mercedes Montagnes of the Promise of Justice Initiative.
After the state cut funds for capital defense, there’s a growing wait list of people in jail without a lawyer.
Louisiana is keeping people behind bars long after their sentences have expired, attorneys say.
Attorney General Jeff Landry has taken a number of extreme positions on policing and sentencing in response to reform.
Off-duty law enforcement officers are using state resources to work side jobs for the pipeline company.
Ronald Brooks was helping plan a prison strike when he was abruptly transferred to a new prison hours away.
A new report details the abysmal conditions, lack of medical care, and staff shortages that led to the unusually high death rate in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison.
The criminal court was funneling millions of dollars a year from poor communities.
Catina Curley suffered physical abuse at the hands of her husband for more than a decade. When she turned a revolver on him, she was charged with murder and sentenced to life. Now, thanks to a court ruling, she has a chance at freedom.
But after a spree of commutations, the governor recently put down his clemency pen amid tough-on-crime fear mongering.
Did a Louisiana police chief and a prosecutor cross a line when they issued televised threats to a man who’d just been granted relief by a federal appeals court in a child killing?
When Caddo voters booted their infamous district attorney, some of his toughest prosecutors found a home in Calcasieu.
Years after two landmark Supreme Court rulings, prosecutors in Louisiana are still overwhelmingly seeking life sentences for children.
People incarcerated at Angola want opportunities for education instead of hard labor in the fields.
In the spring of 1983, Donald Mairena witnessed a shooting at New Orleans’ Latin American Club. He chased after the shooter and later told law enforcement what he’d seen. Mairena gave them his address in case they needed any more information from him. He heard nothing about the case until almost two years later, when […]
What I am about to tell you is deeply problematic. And it makes sense that of all states, it’s happening in Louisiana — which, with its sky-high incarceration rate, is the “world’s prison capital.” According to local reports, a staggering “one in 86 adult Louisianians is doing time, nearly double the national average. Among black men from New Orleans, […]
In 2010 Democrats controlled the House, Senate, and presidency. Barack Obama was just heading into his second year in office. Social media was basically brand new. Adele had just won the Grammy for Best New Artist the year before. And millions of people in the United States had a naive hopefulness about the future of […]
When Kevin Daigle was set to be tried in late April on first-degree murder charges for allegedly killing a Louisiana state trooper in August 2015, he faced the steepest of odds: Prosecutors in the case decided to seek the death penalty, and juries are prone to deliver death verdicts when the life of a law enforcement officer is taken. But […]
On April 30, 2015, William Aubin Jr. was at home with his wife in Livingston Parish, Louisiana when a patrol car from the sheriff’s office pulled onto his street. The deputy, William Durkin, was there to investigate a reckless driving complaint. Aubin wasn’t involved in the incident but he knew about it and went outside […]
In 2016, Louisiana Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards made good on a campaign promise to fix his state’s wildly underfunded public defender system by pushing the state legislature to increase funding to public defender offices working on regular felony and misdemeanor cases. But there was a catch: the majority of the increased funding didn’t come from new taxes or […]
By all accounts, 71-year-old Henry Montgomery is not the same man he was when he was 17. In 1963, Montgomery skipped school and encountered Charles H. Hurt, a plainclothes sheriff’s deputy, in the woods. In a panic, he shot and killed Hurt with his grandfather’s gun.
In the early spring of 2013, Yolanda and Jessie Smith, an African American couple, agreed to accept what they believed were packages of cancer medicine for a 58-year-old white man named Alvin Phillips, whom they knew from a pool hall in Waggaman, Louisiana, a tiny town comprised of about 10,000 residents near New Orleans.
The evidence connecting Wilbert Jones to the 1974 rape for which he spent 46 years in prison was always weak. He was freed shortly before Thanksgiving due to the revelation that East Baton Rouge prosecutors hid evidence pointing to a different suspect entirely. But thanks to the efforts of East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore III, […]