A Child On Death Row - The Story of Shareef Cousin

From Resurrection After Exoneration:

“I was a child. Death row didn’t affect me like it would now. Today, I’d go crazy!” On July 3, 1996, when Shareef Cousin was only seventeen years old, he became the youngest inmate on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. As a matter of fact, he was the youngest person in the world to be sentenced to death at that time. 

The thirty-four-year-old man who works with me in the RAE House is Shareef Cousin. I have only known him for a couple of months, but the person I know is ambitious, driven, and eager to change the world. He presents himself as well-educated and hard-working. He refers to himself as an organizer. 

Before I ever met Shareef, I read a synopsis of his story…just a few paragraphs, but enough to peak my curiosity. I had heard little tidbits about him, and wondered how a kid, the same age as the students I’ve been teaching for four decades, could possibly survive the harshness of a death sentence for a crime which he did not commit. 

Last Friday night, I finally heard him tell his story to an audience. I had been told that he makes his listeners angry, that he leaves them wanting to take action, eager to become involved in the solution. I have found that to be absolutely true! Then, today, he sat down and answered my questions. He gave me a few hours of his time, to try to help me to understand where he has been and where is he today. 

Shareef described his childhood, growing up as the seventh of eight children of a single mother who was a minister in New Orleans. “We had the biggest house on our street, the only two-story house, and all of the kids in our neighborhood hung out in our basement.” He went to Catholic elementary school, and then moved to Massachusetts to stay with his older brother, where he attended school for eighth and ninth grades. When he returned to New Orleans for his sophomore year at F.T. Nicholls High School, he was bored and unchallenged. His gifted classes in Massachusetts had prepared him well, but not for the slow pace of public schools in New Orleans. He began cutting classes, and would ultimately find himself a high school dropout, not by choice, but as a result of his arrest for murder in 1995. 

When Shareef was only sixteen years old, he was arrested for the murder of Michael Gerardi, outside of Port of Call, a restaurant on the outskirts of the French Quarter.

Despite video and numerous witnesses providing absolute proof that Shareef was playing in a basketball game at the time of the crime, he was convicted and sentenced to death. Every possible factor was a part of his story: prosecutorial misconduct (The prosecutor actually “kidnapped” the witnesses for the defense during the trial), lack of investigation (His mother lost her home and church paying fees for inadequate legal defense), his age (only seventeen years old, a juvenile), his race (black on white crime), suppressed evidence, police dishonesty (One of the homicide detectives anonymously called in the tip to Crimestoppers, which had Shareef arrested and collected the reward himself!), and of course, the oft-debated issue of capital punishment. The media coverage was enormous…”Geraldo,” Time, Essence, satellite interviews from death row. “They made a website about my case, and I would get large bags of mail every day from strangers.” 

Attorneys convinced Shareef to plead guilty to four unrelated robbery charges, promising him a lesser sentence of ten years, of which he would serve half. He was assured that they would win the murder trial with the overwhelming evidence proving his innocence. None of these promises were brought to fruition. He was sentenced to twenty years for the robberies, death for the murder, and still remains on parole today for the robberies, with which he had no connection whatsoever. 

“It might have been all of those kids hanging out in my basement. They were all robbing people, and the police saw me as their ring-leader. I had been in a little trouble – things like truancy and smoking weed. Once I was arrested for possession of a firearm. That was crazy! I was just carrying it for my image. I never even had any bullets to put in that gun. I was just a bad kid!” 

“Did you ever notice?” he asked me. “The feds build a case. Sometimes it takes years. And then they make an arrest. The state, on the other hand, makes an arrest and then they start to build their case. You see that? That’s what they did to me. I was framed.” 

Yes, I see that, but I must admit that I didn’t “see that” until Shareef pointed it out to me.

When asked about his time on death row, Shareef paused before responding. “As a child on death row…children are immune to it in a sense. I went up there playing a lot. I was a kid. I dealt with it like it was all a joke.” I sense his childish idealism as he continues, “I knew I didn’t do it, so I knew I was going home. I got depressed. I cried because I missed my family and friends, but I never thought I wouldn’t make it home.” 

Shareef never received an execution date while he was on death row. “None! Everybody else was getting them, but not me. I brought life to the guys on death row, by the fact that I was always upbeat, crackin’ jokes, playin’ a lot. I think everybody on death row has hope. 90% think they never will be executed. Even the ones who know they are guilty don’t think it will ever really happen! ” It definitely happens. The cruel reality of the situation is that three men were executed while Shareef was there. 

Education was a top priority for Cousin on death row. “I literally went to school on death row by myself.” Shareef set a schedule for himself. He got up and got dressed for school every morning, and went to school right there in his cell. He set a schedule for his classes and kept to it. He taught himself math from 8:00 until 9:00, English from 9:00 until 10:00, social studies, science, and all the other courses throughout the day….every day! When he left death row and went into general prison population, he had to trick the administration into letting him get into literacy classes, by telling them that he could not read or write. After a few more slick moves, he was able to take the GED and passed it on the first try. His next step was to take correspondence courses from LSU. 

“Release from death row was bittersweet.” Cousin was offered a plea bargain. He could plead guilty to the murder, be released on time served, and it would all be over. “One of the attorneys representing me in my appeals encouraged me to take the offer and go home! I was like NO! Right after that, just about two or three hours after I turned them down, they dropped the murder charges completely. It was a Friday. I was on the tier at Orleans Parish Prison while I awaited trial. It was lunchtime and I was playing spades. We saw it on TV. The murder charges against me had been dropped. I found out about it from the television, because they didn’t allow attorney visits between 11 AM and 1PM."

Cousin says that he wasn’t even happy when he saw that on television. He wanted to go to trial. “I was disappointed. All the shit they did me in my first trial! This time it wouldn’t be me on trial; it would be them on trial. I would take part in my own defense. They were going to be made a spectacle of. That’s why they dropped those murder charges – just to protect themselves.” 

It was the end of death row for him, but Cousin still had to remain in prison. The murder charges were dropped, but those robbery convictions that had been used as a bargaining tool persisted. “I was happy to leave most of those guys on death row. But people like John Thompson and Juan Smith…I didn’t want to be there, but at the same time, I didn’t want to leave them behind either.” 

Shareef Cousin cannot remember the exact date that he came home. When he was finally released from prison in September of 2005, he could not come home, because there was no home to come home to. Katrina had devastated New Orleans only a couple of weeks before his release, so he went to a cousin’s house in Bossier City, in order to have a Louisiana address. “They would have sent me to a shelter if I didn’t have a family member to go to in Louisiana.” He went to visit his mother in Massachusetts for a week. 

Rachel, his attorney, lived in Atlanta, and Shareef went to stay with her to get back on his feet. “I wasn’t thinking about feelings at that point. I was happy to be out, of course, but I was thinking about what I needed to accomplish. I spent a lot of time those first months studying for the ACT and the SAT.” In January, Cousin entered Morehouse with a free ride, and worked fulltime to abolish the death penalty, at Southern Center for Human Rights as a community organizer. He received no compensation from the state or counseling for his mental or emotional needs, and he did not know how to say “NO.” This articulate young man was the perfect person to represent the cause. “People were using me up. My life seemed like it was designed for me. I was doing what everyone expected me to do. I didn’t make any decisions for myself. Life was happening to me. I wasn’t living my own life.” 

“I was doing what everyone expected me to do, but I was lost. I was immature in relationships, finances, decision-making, period! I was also very impressionable. I had a sense of entitlement. They owed me after what they did to me. Now I realize no one owes me anything, but at that time I couldn’t see life like that.” 

The inevitable “relationship” occurred, and Shareef wasn’t prepared for the ready-made family he found himself a part of. She had three kids already and they had another child. Shareef had never lived with a woman and he wasn’t ready for that at all. He was in his third year at Morehouse and working full-time. Since he did not have a father in his life when he was growing up, he wanted the opposite for his family. “Even though I knew she wasn’t the woman for me, I stuck with the relationship, taking over the financial burden of an entire family. I had been comfortable by myself. I bought a five bedroom house in Atlanta to give my child a home. I never thought about the responsibilities of home ownership. Everything started going downhill. She wasn’t working. I was in a financial bind with a $1500 mortgage, car note, utilities, insurance…all that! I had to find more dollars!” 

Shareef began attending real estate seminars, the kind you see advertised on television in those infomercials. Seeking a way to make some easy money, he became involved in fraudulent real estate deals, and found himself back in jail. “I was really unhappy! In a way, I sort of welcomed the jail sentence. It was almost an out for me…out of that bad relationship, that is.” When he was released from the Georgia prison this past summer, he chose to return to New Orleans. He says that Atlanta feels more like home to him, but that there is death penalty work to be done all over the country, and he thought he would give New Orleans a try. Shareef chooses to live in the transitional housing of RAE, the non-profit agency which he co-founded in 2007. He is actively participating in the mission of Voices of Innocence and Resurrection after Exoneration. He says that he is no longer angry, but he continues instilling anger and drive in others through sharing his story. He has developed a business plan for Beacon Industries, a print shop located in the RAE House and has put that plan into action, running a start-up business. “It’s a lot of work. I have a real strong belief in God. I joined church. This is the most peaceful my life has ever been. I know that there is something here I’m connected to! I’m not trippin’ off the material stuff. I’m on the right path and I know it, because God keeps placing people on that path to facilitate my journey.”

"I'm The Miracle": The Story of Exoneree Derrick Jamison

From our friends at Resurrection After Exoneration:

“I’m number 119,” proclaims the man sitting beside my desk. His smile is broad and sincere, gold teeth glistening in the artificial light of the office. “Damon Thibodeaux is number 141, you know, the one who got out of Angola a couple weeks ago. Joe Ambrosia is number 140; we was together on death row in Ohio.” He seems so comfortable with these numbers, actually proud of them. Proud to be number 119!

If I were not aware of what he refers to, I might be shocked by his proud announcement, but it isn’t that way for us. Derrick Jamison is here to share his story with me, the story of how he landed on death row for a crime he did not commit, the story of a young man who spent over seventeen years fighting for his life as he awaited execution, and the story of a man who was finally exonerated, the 119th such person in the United States.

Derrick Jamison, from Cincinnati, Ohio, was twenty-four years old when he was convicted of aggravated murder and robbery on October 16, 1985. He was represented by a public defender in a case where the prosecutor and homicide detective withheld thirty-five pieces of evidence. They knew he was not guilty from the start, but getting the conviction was their goal. Apparently, it did not matter who their “victim” was!

Derrick entered death row at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility on October 25, the very day he was sentenced, and was placed into solitary confinement, behind bars, in a 6’x9’ cell, with no physical human contact for seventeen years. At times the prison would be locked down, and he would not be allowed visits or mail from anyone, even from his lawyer, for extended periods of time. For many years of his confinement, Derrick was allowed only two five-minute phone calls per year, one on Christmas Day.

While on death row, Derrick was granted six stays of execution. One was while he was in lockdown, so he did not even receive the notification. Another stay was granted on the actual scheduled date of his execution. He waited until the last minute, with crowds of protesters and supporters gathered outside the prison. When asked what he wanted for his last meal, he replied ,”A cake with a saw in it! I’m not thinking about no food. I’m thinking about dying.” Six times he went through various stages of this harrowing process, and six times it was halted by an official stay by the governor of Ohio.

For the first fourteen years, until 1999, Ohio had the death penalty as part of its system, and there were many inmates on death row awaiting execution, but the state did not use it. Since 1999, they have executed forty-seven inmates and exonerated six. These statistics do not include the even larger number of death row inmates whose sentences were reduced to life imprisonment during the past thirteen years. At one point, the governor, Richard Celeste, upon leaving office, reduced the sentences of all eight women on death row and of several men who were on their final appeals. One of the women whose sentence he reduced had been sentenced to at least eight death penalties for serial murders. Derrick says that he would not have accepted this condition had it been offered. He knew he was innocent and sought exoneration, not a reduced sentence.

At one point, Derrick was offered the opportunity to go free on time served, if he would admit guilt and stop his appeals. He refused. “People thought I lost my mind. I couldn’t admit to something I didn’t do. I’d rather die.”

“Death Row is the same as Schindler’s List,” Derrick continues. “You’re just watching your friends be murdered time and again.” Derrick watched healthy young men come in “like babies – 18 and 19 years old. I watched them grow into men and then they just killed ‘em. It’s like somebody pointing a gun at you and there ain’t nothin’ you can do. They had nobody to fight for them.” Ohio is second in the nation behind Texas in executions.

In 2002, John Byrd was executed. Another man came forward and admitted to the crime for which John had been convicted, but they still killed him. John and Derrick had become close friends on death row. “I curled up on my bunk watching TV, trying not to deal with it, but when they rolled John out on the gurney to his execution….” He paused and cleared his throat, attempting to regain his composure. “It still haunts me. A healthy young man, my buddy, but he was rebellious on the row.” Derrick, on the other hand, never had any write ups on death row. He was not a rebel. “If I had given in to anger and hostility, I would’ve lost my mind. I seen what it did to those other guys. I’m a miracle. All them men, all them babies were in there, some innocent like me, and I walked out. I’m the miracle.”

On May 23, 2002, Federal Judge Arthur Spiegel granted Derrick a new trial. He was moved to general population for three years while the justice system plodded along the path to his ultimate exoneration and release on October 25, 2005, exactly twenty years to the day from the day he first entered death row. His nephew came to pick him up, and the entire family was waiting for him when he got home…everyone except his two closest and most active supporters. “I didn’t die on death row, but my death penalty killed my parents.”

There were events of celebration for a month straight. It was a busy time, and it was good. “If I could bottle up that feeling and sell it, I’d be a millionaire!” He was enjoying life. “When I first came home, I went to the casinos. I won a lot of money; I lost a lot of money. That’s why they call it gambling. I had been a gambler before I went to prison.” There were parties, media events, and Derrick was in demand to speak at area events, “but my biggest supporters weren’t there. My mom was smiling from heaven.”

Asked about his current situation, Derrick reveals that he is on disability due to post traumatic stress disorder. “We ain’t been to jail; we been to hell and back,” he says. The disability compensation permits him to have a part-time job with limited pay, but he remains unemployed.

He spends a significant amount of time speaking to others, sharing his story. He remembers that he went to Catholic schools as a child and says that God gives him the power to go out and share his message with others. “When I speak to a large crowd, something comes over me. That’s God. God has made me into a teacher. I’m a teacher now.”

Derrick tells kids that he thinks that they are all at risk in today’s society. He urges them to remember him and others like him when they experience bad times. “We need to get rid of the death penalty,” he says. “What are we teaching our young people, when our government says it’s alright to kill?” He compares the death penalty to modernized lynchings, remembering what he learned in history class about families coming out with picnic baskets to watch the hangings in the town square. “That might have been a deterrent then, but this, what we have, doesn’t work!”

Our system will always make mistakes. “To err is human, right? We have to stop executing entirely so we won’t be killing innocent people on those mistakes.”

Derrick tells his audiences that he was never involved in drugs in his life, because he was always against them. “I seen what it did to people in my neighborhood.” He assures them that death row is populated by many different types of people. “A lot of guys on death row were pure evil and dangerous, but that doesn’t give somebody the right to kill them. Some were good guys that made mistakes.”

What does his future look like? “I’ll never heal; none of these guys will ever heal. We can’t be compensated for what’s been done to us. My life will get better, but I’ll never get over it. It will always be there…the nightmares. It’s something no human being should have to experience.”

Fifty years later, Youth and Elders Keep the Spirit of the Freedom Rides Alive, by Rosana Cruz

From our friends at Bridge the Gulf:
In the dim light of a projector, rapt faces took in the solemn image of a bus in flames. On screen, a multiracial group of youth crawled in the grass, coughing and choking from the smoke of the blaze behind them. This was just the first in a series of attacks that the Freedom Riders of 1961 faced as they made their way through the South. Fifty years later, at the RAE house in New Orleans, the lessons and struggles of these youth came alive to a multi-generational, multi-racial audience carrying on the current-day fight for justice.

“Back then they would sick dogs on you and you couldn’t ride on those buses but today we have the school-to-prison pipeline,” says Briana O’Neal after the viewing of Freedom Riders, a new Firelight Media documentary directed by Stanley Nelson. The viewing was co-hosted by Voice Of The Ex-offender (VOTE, where I am Associate Director) and Fyre Youth Squad. VOTE and FYS invited a multigenerational audience to share their reflections after the viewing the powerful documentary. This dialogue was critical for us because we wanted to go beyond remembering history, and explore how lessons from the Freedom Rides inform our work today.

What were the Freedom Rides really?

The Freedom Rides of the Civil Rights Movement is a story that has survived over the decades, but the details have faded with time. Many viewers, even those alive at the time of the original Freedom Rides, said that they did not know the true depth and scope and the extreme terror brought against these brave young Riders.

The film describes the Freedom Rides as “six months in 1961 that changed America forever. From May until November 1961, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives—and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment—for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow laws, the Freedom Riders met with bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism.”

The documentary details the planning and execution of the trips (which were initially designed to last two weeks) and the ensuing campaign of terror that white supremacists like the KuKluxKlan and others, including government officials, waged against the swelling movement of riders. The original group was comprised of a few dozen youth from around the country. The more violence the Freedom Riders faced, thwarting the buses progress, the more young people put themselves in the line of fire. These youth took on a strong leadership role and, by continuing on with the dangerous rides, challenged the Kennedy brothers and even Rev. Dr. King himself, who urged a more moderate strategy. It is a story filled with inspiring moments as well as brilliant strategy.

“I’d heard the Freedom Rider story but never heard the story told this way,” shared Fyre Youth Squad member Debbie Carey. “I appreciate this documentary because I felt like I was told the truth about the movement, about young people’s contributions to the movement. I even experienced for the first time Dr. King being presented as human as the rest of us. Everyone I know made MLK seem like he was a supernatural hero, but in this documentary it revealed his fear and young people’s courage.”

And what now?

Perhaps what resonated most for audience members, young and old alike, was the sense that, especially in current day New Orleans, the need to stand up for justice is still so urgent. “Back at the time of the Civil Rights struggle, we did a lot of stuff in New Orleans. We walked on Canal Street. We boycotted. We went into the white stores. Our teachers, our elders, they encouraged us to see ourselves, even though we were young black men at the time, just high school students, they taught us to see ourselves as full citizens,” remembers Mr. Erroll Lewis a member of VOTE. “Young people are still facing the challenge of discrimination. We have a responsibility to make sure that message to stand up, to demand our rights, is alive today.”

The Freedom Riders event was originally conceived to bring different age groups of activists and community members together to commemorate and discuss the historic rides. But “on a deeper level, we wanted to ask each other, would you have gotten on that bus?” said Norris Henderson, director of VOTE. “We didn’t know where the conversation was going to take us. “

Briana O’Neal responded, “I was asked at the end of the movie, ‘would I have got back on the bus after all that had happened?’ I would have to say that I would have to have been there going through what they did to answer that, but in today’s world, in my city, I can say I’m on the bus and I’m not getting off until we all are free and our children to come are also free.”

Freedom Riders will be rescreened twice this summer, once at the Treme Community Center and once at the Youth Empowerment Village. Watch www.vote-nola.org for the exact date and time. Discussion and refreshments will be included as part of each screening event.

Rosana Cruz is Associate Director of VOTE (Voice Of The Ex-offender). Previously Rosana worked with Safe Streets/Strong Communities and the National Immigration Law Center. Prior to joining NILC, she worked with SEIU1991 in Miami, after having been displaced from New Orleans by Katrina. Before the storm, Rosana worked for a diverse range of community organizations, including the Latin American Library, Hispanic Apostolate, the Lesbian and Gay Community Center of New Orleans, and People's Youth Freedom School. Rosana came to New Orleans through her work with the Southern Regional Office of Amnesty International in Atlanta.

Wrongfully Convicted Urge Action in Wake of Supreme Court Decision Expanding Immunity for Prosecutors

From our friends at Innocence Project New Orleans:
After Tuesday's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Thompson v. Connick granting prosecutors' even greater immunity for their misconduct, the Innocence Network released a letter signed by 19 innocent people who were wrongfully convicted in part because of the bad acts of prosecutors demanding greater accountability for prosecutorial misconduct. The letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder and the Presidents of the National District Attorney's Association and the National Associations of Attorneys Generals, demands to know what systems they intend to put in place to ensure that innocent people don't fall victim to overzealous prosecutors.

In its 5-4 decision, the Court ruled that the Thompson did not meet the burden of proving that the New Orleans District Attorney's office was deliberately indifferent in failing to turn over information pointing to Thompson's innocence and the need for training and supervision to safeguard those rights. The Court reasoned that because prosecutors are required to attend law school and/or pass the bar exam and are required to meet certain professional standards, "recurring constitutional violations are not the 'obvious consequence' of failing to provide prosecutors with formal inhouse training about how to obey the law."

"Basically what the Court is saying is that because they are lawyers, there was no reason for the District Attorney to believe that his prosecutors might need training to be sure they are fulfilling their constitutional obligations to disclose information that might be useful to their defense," said Keith Findley, President of the Innocence Network. "This logic completely ignores the reality of what happened to John Thompson who was sentenced to death by prosecutors who repeatedly failed in their obligation to disclose exculpatory information. No other profession is shielded from this complete lack of accountability."

The dissent by Justice Ginsberg notes, ". . . the Brady violations in Thompson's prosecutions were not singular and they were not aberrational. They were just what one would expect given the attitude toward Brady pervasive in the District Attorney's Office. Thompson demonstrated that no fewer than five prosecutors - the four trial prosecutors and Riehlmann - disregarded his Brady rights. He established that they kept from him, year upon year, evidence vital to his defense. Their conduct, he showed with equal force, was a foreseeable consequence of lax training in, and absence of monitoring of, a legal requirement fundamental to a fair trial.

"Prosecutors posses enormous power over our all over our lives, yet today the Supreme Court took away one of the few remaining vehicles that we have for holding them accountable for their actions. It is virtually impossible for the wrongfully convicted to meet the standard endorsed by the Court today," said Kathleen Ridolfi of the Northern California Innocence Project. "If prosecutors don't quickly enact systems to stem misconduct, we are sure to see an increase in innocent people's lives being destroyed by prosecutors who too often put securing convictions above their obligations to seek the truth."

In recent Supreme Court cases dealing with the issue of prosecutorial misconduct, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Association of Assistant United States Attorney's Attorney Generals and the Solicitor General have filed friend-of-the-court briefs arguing that there are already plenty of systems in place to cure the problems of misconduct, including internal disciplinary systems, state bar disciplinary systems, monitoring by the courts, and in extreme cases, criminal prosecution.

Yet, as the letter released on Tuesday notes, prosecutors are rarely disciplined for their misdeeds. The letter sites a recent landmark report by the Northern California Innocence Project, Preventable Error: A Report on Prosecutorial Misconduct in California 1997-2009, that found prosecutors were guilty of misconduct in California 707 times from 1997 to 2009, yet were disciplined only 7 times. The letter also points to a USA Today investigation by Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy that was published on Sept. 23, 2010, that documented 201 instances where federal prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules since 1997, yet only one of those prosecutors was suspended from practicing law - and that was only for one year.

"Misconduct was found in the cases of all the innocent people who signed onto this letter, yet none of the prosecutors involved were disciplined in any way," said Barry Scheck, Co-director of the Innocence Project. "How many lives are going to be destroyed before we realize that prosecutors are no different than any other professionals? There are good ones and there are bad ones, and we need systems in place to stop the bad ones."

"Our condolences go out to John Thompson and his family, who endured his nightmare with him. He spent 18 years in prison -- 14 on death row -- because of the bad acts of prosecutors," said Emily Maw, Executive Director of the Innocence Project of New Orleans. "While nothing could bring back the years he lost to this misconduct, a jury and an appellate court felt he should at least be compensated for his wrong. But the Supreme Court in a poorly reasoned decision, that failed to recognize the reality of the New Orleans prosecutors office in 1984, has stripped him of that compensation today."

A copy of the letter, which was also sent to the district attorney offices in the counties where the signors were originally prosecuted, is available at this link .

New Paralegal Training Provides Ray of Hope for Formerly Incarcerated People in New Orleans, By Rosana Cruz

From our friends at Bridge The Gulf:
Drive down this short stretch of St. Bernard Avenue, and you will see signs of a struggling neighborhood in despair. Bars, blighted homes, metal-grated storefronts, and the still-shuttered Circle Food Store tell the story of this strip. Here in New Orleans’ 7th ward, hope and sustenance have been drained by Katrina’s floodwaters, and by decades of racism’s insidious trend of sapping vital resources from a community.

But there is vitality too. Fresh vegetables are sold on the sidewalk outside Circle Foods. A few new, small businesses are slowly gaining a foothold. The surviving barrooms, central institutions to the music and culture of New Orleans for generations, are gathering places for local politicians, community advocates and neighbors from diverse class backgrounds.

This ironic mix of vitality and despair isn’t unique in New Orleans, but the small beacon of hope in the middle of the 1200 block is. Within the walls of a small storefront, The RAE House (pronounced “ray”) hosts an innovative new class that’s beginning to resurrect hope.

 Resurrection After Exoneration’s (RAE’s) brother organization, VOTE (Voice of the Ex-offender) holds its Paralegal Training Class here twice a week. The class is unique in that it trains Formerly Incarcerated Persons (FIPs) and their loved ones about the law and legal system. The hope is to create a new team of paralegals, legal secretaries and community legal advocates, made up of the people most impacted by Louisiana’s failing criminal justice system. The charter class began in November.

Seeds for legal training planted in Angola

The vision for the Paralegal Training Class began more than 20 years ago in the Louisiana State Penitentiary (better known as Angola). Two men serving life sentences, Norris Henderson and Kenneth “Biggy” Johnston, became legal scholars in the prison’s law library, logging long hours studying rows and rows of case law and reviewing the individual cases of their fellow prisoners. It was through the knowledge they gained by reading, exploring, and working on other prisoners’ cases that they were able to eventually win their own freedom through the courts.


Their knowledge and experience helped make them respected leaders in the prison. Mr. Henderson and Mr. Johnston became inmate counsels, representing prisoners who went up before the disciplinary board. They then founded the Angola Special Civics Project, to activate a politically engaged block among the prisoners. This block was able to change prison policy and lobby legislators. Ultimately they even changed laws. Their efforts helped passed the so-called “old timer’s act.” Also know as the 20-45 law, this law created parole eligibility for prisoners sentenced to life for heroin distribution who were over 45 and had served 20 years or more. Middle-aged men who had gone into prison as mere youth were now gaining freedom, thanks to the advocacy and knowledge of the law of these “jailhouse lawyers.”

Now, Voice of the Ex-Offender (VOTE), the organization founded by Mr. Henderson years after he left Angola, is trying to accomplish the same thing on the outside. The Paralegal Training Class equips Formerly Incarcerated Persons and their loved ones with enough legal knowledge to serve their broader community. Students attend the free classes two evenings per week, three hours per class. They are instructed by Mr. Henderson, Mr. Johnston and Calvin Duncan, who was exonerated recently from serving over 28 years for a crime he did not commit. Together these three have over 60 years of legal studies and practice. They teach constitutional law, criminal procedure, legal research and basic analytical skills to the eager students, who deftly apply the lessons to their own lives and experiences.

Lessons hit students close to home

Vernon went to prison when he was 17 years old. Laverne's husband spent 18 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, 14 of those years on death row. Ms. Betty's son has been in prison for over 20 years. Mr. Chopin volunteers as a Muslim Chaplin to hundreds of inmates and detainees in Orleans Parish Prison. Their motivation to study law and participate in the training programs stems not only from their personal experience, but also from the countless people that they know are in need of support. “I know that with what I learn in this class, I might be able to do something meaningful for all the people I left back there [in Angola],” says Eugene Dean, a student and long time member of VOTE.

Ms. Elois Reed takes an even broader view. “The class is energetic. We love to be in class, we love to learn all this. It is like this because it is bottled up inside the people…. Things are hard, people are struggling. They have our backs up against the wall. But this knowledge can make a difference…. I really believe we are a sleeping giant. And this class, this knowledge, this is what it is taking to wake us up.”

The intense interest from the students has already had an impact: the class is being extended from the originally envisioned 10 weeks to 14. A new term for incoming students is projected to begin this summer. The current students are beginning to discuss next steps. Some want to pursue careers as paralegals, to work on their loved ones’ cases, and to become legal resources to community members who can scarce afford access to most legal advice. But they also want to do more. The long term vision is to create a policy think tank that can study, change and make policy, with the ultimate goal of creating a public safety system that works and that focuses on the root causes of crime.

This is the beacon of hope shining across the dim stretch of St. Bernard Avenue. Every week, it gets a little bit brighter.



Rosana Cruz is Associate Director of VOTE (Voice Of The Ex-offender). Previously Rosana worked with Safe Streets/Strong Communities and the National Immigration Law Center. Prior to joining NILC, she worked with SEIU1991 in Miami, after having been displaced from New Orleans by Katrina. Before the storm, Rosana worked for a diverse range of community organizations, including the Latin American Library, Hispanic Apostolate, the Lesbian and Gay Community Center of New Orleans, and People's Youth Freedom School. Rosana came to New Orleans through her work with the Southern Regional Office of Amnesty International in Atlanta.

A Small, Good Week, By Tom Lowenstein

From Innocence Project New Orleans Policy Director Tom Lowenstein, via Friends of Justice:

The strangest thing about the work we do at Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) is how our greatest accomplishments seem at once enormous and tiny: enormous in the lives of the innocent men we are able to free from prison, and tiny in the context of the criminal justice system as a whole. Enormous in the good that is done when an innocent person is set free; tiny in the fact that the “good” resolution of the legal case has taken far too long, the innocent man has lost 10 or 20 or 30 years of his life and now has been set free without a dime to his name or a job or anything that might help him rebuild his life. It’s hard to imagine there is anything more important, or “bigger,” than saving an innocent life. Until you look at our criminal justice system as a whole, and think about how many lives stuck in it need to be saved. Then you can’t help but feel very small.

This week, IPNO got good news in seven cases: three men were exonerated by DNA evidence, and four other men who had been set free years ago were officially told, once and for all, that they would not be re-prosecuted. Seven exonerations. What a week.

But one of the men newly proven innocent won’t get a chance to enjoy it: he died eight years ago, in prison, having proclaimed his innocence at every opportunity over his 22 years of incarceration. And another of those men has very advanced cancer; he made it out of prison and will, it seems, at least have the chance to die with his family. The third man has no family around to help him, no money to his name, nowhere to stay. So he came to New Orleans with us, and is being helped by Resurrection After Exoneration, a group founded by an exoneree precisely to help other exonerees. Thank god for RAE—otherwise, who knows what would happen to that man. Thirty years in prison for something he didn’t do, then released with a laundry bag holding all his things—the judge even had to order the sheriff’s department to give him some new clothes because all he had was his prison jumpsuit.

The other four men have been out for a while, proven innocent years ago and released, only to have the authorities hang the threat of re-trying them over their heads for years. Now they are, finally, free.

This morning, at staff meeting, we were back to work: every case is a fight, every case takes years, every good ending is really just a slight correction to a decades-long injustice that the wrongfully convicted will live with until they die.

But seven exonerations in a week is a lot. Seven exonerations in a week will hopefully make people who never think about our justice system think about it. Maybe a few more people will realize that, with 2 million or so people incarcerated in our country, even if our error rate is 1% or .5%, that’s a lot of innocent people in prison. And maybe then they’ll realize that our justice system isn’t as good as it could or should be. That there are lots of ways to make it better, which is to say, lots of ways to create a safer, more just society.

Seven exonerations in a week. Our work can feel like pushing and pushing against a big boulder that never moves—but it just moved a tiny bit. So it’s time to push harder.