They tried to expose Louisiana judges who had systematically ignored prisoners’ petitions. No one listened.
20th November 2023 · 0 Comments
By Anat Rubin
ProPublica
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a three-part series.
Prologue
Two years into his 25-year sentence for attempted aggravated rape, Nathan Brown could tell the man sitting across from him — a jailhouse lawyer improbably named Lawyer Winfield — was not going to help him get out of prison. It was astounding to Brown that he was pinning his hopes on a fellow inmate who had an eighth-grade education and whose formal legal training amounted to a prison paralegal course.
“But he knew more than I did,” Brown said.
Brown laid out for Winfield the details of his case. In the summer of 1997, a woman was assaulted in the courtyard of the apartment complex in Jefferson Parish, where Brown was living with his mother. The woman, who was white, fended off the attacker with her high-heeled shoe until he fled on a bicycle. When sheriff’s deputies arrived, a security guard suggested they question Brown — one of the few Black tenants in the complex.
Brown, 23 at the time, was in his pajamas, rocking his baby daughter to sleep. The deputies put him in handcuffs and brought him to the victim. When she couldn’t identify him, the officers allowed her to get close enough to smell him. She had told them her attacker had a foul body odor. Brown, she would later testify, smelled like soap; he must have showered immediately after, she speculated. In a trial that lasted one day, the jury found him guilty. After his appeal was rejected, he no longer had a right to an attorney provided by the state.
Winfield began translating Brown’s grievances into a legal petition. He argued that Brown’s lawyer had provided ineffective counsel: He had overlooked the most basic defense strategies, failing to challenge the discrepancies in the victim’s story and to insist on DNA testing. The two of them worked on the petition for months, so Brown was surprised when the Louisiana 5th Circuit Court of Appeal delivered a rejection just a week later. The denial — a single sentence that didn’t address any of Brown’s claims — bore the names of three judges. But something didn’t feel right. How could they return the ruling so quickly? Why was it so vague?
The answer to those questions would come years later, in the suicide note of a high-level court employee who disclosed that the judges of the 5th Circuit had decided, in secret, to ignore the petitions of prisoners who could not afford an attorney.
It was a shocking revelation. In a state where police and prosecutorial misconduct frequently make national headlines and a stream of exonerations has revealed a criminal justice system still functioning in the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow, a group of white judges had decided that the claims of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of inmates — most of them Black — were not worth taking the time to read.
Among those petitions was Brown’s claim that a DNA test would have proven his innocence.
Part II
Hundreds of petitions
Karla Baker wanted no part of the mess Peterson had left behind. But she had loved him, despite their complicated relationship, and felt partly responsible for his unraveling. She knew that Peterson had gotten into trouble because he had tried to influence the judges in her case. Although she never asked for him to intervene, she said, she worried her own legal career could be in jeopardy.
More than 16 years after Peterson’s suicide, Baker is still hesitant to talk about what happened, and unsure of how to cast herself in the story. Raised in Louisiana, she graduated from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and began her career as a staff attorney for the state Supreme Court.
When she joined the 5th Circuit as a law clerk in 2002, she was taken with Peterson’s intelligence and kindness. He never spoke down to her, she said, despite her lack of experience. He seemed to know everything about the courthouse, and he was always willing to help. As they became closer, she came to see a dark side. He was deeply unhappy, haunted. “He lived on the edge,” Baker said, but felt powerless to change his own circumstances.
Peterson could have taken his documents to the Innocence Project or another nonprofit dedicated to fighting the injustices of the Louisiana criminal justice system, but those were not his people. So, he had left it to Baker, who had never seen herself as an activist, to bring the scandal to light.
Baker anguished about the matter for months. She was engaged to someone by then and was embarrassed about having had a relationship with a married man. She wanted to put the episode behind her. She said she decided to send an anonymous complaint to the Judiciary Commission, laying out some details of the 5th Circuit’s pro se arrangement. She didn’t know about Peterson’s suicide letter or that he had sent the commission a copy. She waited for something to happen, but nothing did, even after she sent the commission a second letter, this time identifying herself as the one who sent the initial complaint.
Finally, Baker took the documents that Peterson had given her and drove to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Roughly 130 miles north of New Orleans, the maximum-security prison sits on a former plantation that covered 18,000 acres and is named for the African country from which many of its enslaved people were taken. That year it housed some 5,200 inmates, most of whom were expected to die at the prison hospice.
Angola was once considered the most violent prison in the United States. Brutal assaults and murders among the inmates were common, and the guards were known for sanctioning a system of inmate rape and sexual slavery. After decades of federal intervention and grudging reforms, the prison has largely shed that reputation. Vocational programs, recreational clubs and a Southern Baptist Bible college that has ordained hundreds of inmates have been credited with reducing the violence. Angola also established one of the best prison law libraries in the United States, a sanctuary of sorts where jailhouse lawyers help other prisoners challenge their convictions and sentences.
After passing through security, Baker asked to see Ted Addison, a former client who could no longer afford her services but with whom she had kept in touch. Addison was halfway through a 20-year sentence for armed robbery. For years he had been petitioning the courts on his own, insisting he had been unfairly convicted.
Baker handed Addison a sheaf of documents, which included the list of canned denials Peterson had developed and the minutes to the 1994 meeting. Addison was stunned. Like many other prisoners, he had spent years trying to get the 5th Circuit to grant him a new hearing. He had filed six pro se petitions, and each had come back almost immediately with a brief rejection.
Addison took the documents to the prison law library. Here, amid the rows of concrete cubicles, they were both a revelation and a confirmation of what the jailhouse lawyers had long suspected. For years inmates had noticed an unusual pattern in denials coming from the 5th Circuit: They would arrive just days after the petitions were filed, a process that usually took months at the state’s other appellate courts, and the perfunctory language never varied, with only the names and dates changing from case to case. Now it all made sense.
The jailhouse lawyers set about alerting the prisoners who had petitioned the 5th Circuit during the relevant years. They believed Peterson’s accusations could revive their cases. Addison felt they were organizing “a movement.” He sent copies of Peterson’s documents to inmate lawyers at the state’s other prisons and introduced Baker to Kerry Myers, editor of Angola’s award-winning prison magazine, The Angolite. Myers had been convicted of killing his wife in 1984 and was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. He had filed five unsuccessful pro se petitions with the 5th Circuit. “I actually had a lot of hope,” Myers told me. “I said, ‘This thing is going to blow up.’”
With Baker representing them, Addison and Myers filed a joint petition to the Louisiana Supreme Court, demanding an investigation into Peterson’s allegations and new hearings for all of the prisoners whose appeals had been ignored. Within three months, the court received 299 petitions from men and women across the Louisiana prison system, most of them drafted from a form that Baker had provided.
Baker also prodded the Times-Picayune to cover the story. The newspaper’s first article, which focused on the prisoners petitioning the state Supreme Court, quoted the suicide note Peterson had sent the paper more than a year earlier. Baker, who hadn’t known about the letter, filed a public records request to obtain a copy from the Gretna police. The Angolite ran a story as well, calling the 5th Circuit’s pro se system a “simple and lucrative process for disposing of the dispossessed.”
The independent review the inmates were asking for presented a threat to the 5th Circuit. If it showed that judgments were unjust, the appeals court could be exposed to civil lawsuits. If the reviews revealed a wrongful conviction, Dufresne and the other judges could face serious discipline, especially since the state’s laws against judicial misconduct take into account the harm the injustice has caused.
The probability that at least some of the 299 petitions had merit was high. More than 90 percent of the prisoners came from Jefferson Parish, where prosecutors were known for striking Black men and women from jury pools in felony trials at a rate more than three times as often as their white counterparts. Because the state had long allowed “split jury” convictions requiring only 10 of the 12 jurors to agree, many of the Black defendants whose petitions Peterson rejected were convicted by what amounted to an all-white jury.
The Jefferson Parish district attorney had also made aggressive use of the state’s “Habitual Offender” law, which can turn a two-year sentence into life without parole; almost all of the cases involved Black defendants. Many of the prisoners asking for a review had been sentenced under the law and were serving life sentences for nonviolent offenses like drug possession and “purse snatching.”
Some of the judges who had sent these men and women to prison had gained notoriety a few years before Peterson’s suicide, when an FBI corruption sting revealed they had accepted cash bribes and campaign contributions in exchange for allowing a bail bonds company to dictate the amounts defendants were required to post. The scandal sent two judges to prison and unseated a third.
More than 85 percent of defendants in the state are considered indigent, meaning they qualify for a public defender when they are prosecuted. Louisiana’s public defender system is widely considered one of the worst in the country. It relies primarily on traffic fines and court fees — an unpredictable source of revenue that has never come close to meeting the need. Offices across the state struggle with caseloads so large that they have no choice but to put defendants on long waitlists, leaving them in jail until an attorney becomes available. Some attorneys have so little time to prepare, they meet their clients for the first time on the day of trial.
The Louisiana Supreme Court did not grant the 299 petitioners an independent review of Peterson’s rulings. Instead, it adopted a plan proposed by Dufresne and the other 5th Circuit judges: Rather than saddle another court, the 5th Circuit offered to reconsider the cases itself.
“We are guided in this request by a desire to avoid imposing financial or other burdens on other judges in this state,” the 5th Circuit judges wrote.
In October 2008, the Louisiana Supreme Court remanded the 299 petitions to the 5th Circuit. (It did the same with another 155 that came later.) As part of the agreement, the 5th Circuit judges whose names had appeared on the Peterson rulings would not be involved in the “reconsideration” of the cases. New three-judge panels would decide whether the rulings, which their colleagues had never read, were nonetheless fair.
With new documents Baker had obtained through public records requests, including Peterson’s suicide letter and the Gretna police report raising questions about Dufresne’s behavior, Addison and Myers challenged the Supreme Court’s decision. The documents, they wrote, “show that all of the judges of the Fifth Circuit … have an apparent or actual conflict of interest in this matter.”
The Louisiana Supreme Court saw it otherwise, stating that it would not be appropriate to task the other appellate courts with the additional work or to spend $200,000 of the public’s money to pay for retired judges to review the cases. Justice Catherine “Kitty” Kimball wrote that the court could not base its decision on the allegations of a depressed court clerk and an “unsubstantiated” police report about his suicide. “While this may be the fodder of news reports and movies,” she wrote, “it is not, in my view, proper evidence for judicial action.”
While the Judiciary Commission inquiry was going nowhere, the state bar launched its own misconduct investigation — into Baker. The 5th Circuit judges had alerted the Louisiana Attorney Disciplinary Board that Peterson had intervened on her behalf. The following year, she left the defense firm and went into practice for herself, representing drug offenders and pursuing damages in personal injury cases. The bar association kept the case against Baker open for almost a decade before sending her a letter saying it found no evidence of wrongdoing and was dropping the investigation.
It took the 5th Circuit three years to review the pro se petitions of 454 prisoners. The Times-Picayune and other local news outlets had by then dropped the story, so no one was paying attention when the judges found that, aside from a dozen procedural mistakes, Peterson’s cut-and-paste denials had been correct. In one case after another, they wrote, “there was no error in the prior rulings of this court.” The court had investigated itself and found it had done nothing wrong.
Myers’ life sentence was commuted in 2013. Addison served out the remainder of his sentence and was released in 2016.
As for the 5th Circuit judges, they prospered in the years after Peterson’s suicide. Some were picked to serve on the state Supreme Court; others enjoyed successful political careers. Dufresne remained the court’s chief judge until he collapsed in the office of one of his businesses on December 7, 2010. His obituary in The Times-Picayune didn’t mention the pro se scheme. In St. Charles Parish, there’s a Judge Edward Dufresne Parkway, a Dufresne Loop and an Edward Dufresne Community Center, where a life-size bronze statue stands. He is wearing a suit with a lobster pin on his lapel and one of Lady Justice on his tie.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
This article originally published in the November 20, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
