Wrongfully convicted victim speaks at ‘Global Dialogues for Incarceration’ lecture

7th December 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Kaelin Maloid
Contributing Writer

After being wrongfully convicted of a second-degree murder charge and receiving a life sentence in 1974, Norris Henderson, a Central City native, spent 27 years, 10 months and 18 days in prison before being released in 2003.

“One of the most important things in prison is finding out how to get out,” Henderson said.

And Henderson worked hard to find a way out.

During his stay in Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as “Angola,” Henderson became very efficient at the law and criminal justice system. He once worked the fields in Angola, but eventually was moved into the position of clerk in the law library. Here, Henderson took advantage of his position to teach himself the laws and to persuade other prisoners to learn the laws as well.

The Innocence Project, which advocates for wrongfully accused inmates nationwide, estimates that 2.3 percent to five percent of all prisoners are wrongly convicted. Louisiana, according to Henderson, is leading the nation in having the most unlawful convictions.

Henderson shared the reality of the state’s incarceration rates and his journey from being a victim of the justice system to a student of the system at the “Global Dialogues for Incarceration” public lecture at the University of New Orleans on Dec. 3. The university’s Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies and its History Department wrapped up a series of events on incarceration with Henderson’s public lecture.

“We wanted him to end the series of public events. It’s really important to have people who have had experience with the criminal justice system,” said Ben Weber, a Harvard University Ph.D. candidate and adjunct professor at UNO who organized the event.

Henderson said he agreed to speak publicly in the series after reviewing the line-up of speakers UNO had set into place and realizing that none of them had been “directly impacted by the prison system.”

The public lecture also fit his new mission. After finding that the criminal justice system was unjust and flawed, he set about finding a way to change it.

“It was either change our conditions or change our circumstances. We were more concerned with our circumstances,” Henderson said.

He began his activism while incarcerated, forming a legal team to study and challenge laws that impact those affected by the criminal justice system. Early on, the group successfully worked to get the Louisiana state legislature to offer the chance of parole to every prisoner except those serving a life sentence. Those early victories led to the forming of the Angola Special Project in 1987. Since then the group’s work hasn’t stopped. This year alone they have advocated for changes in Congress, with the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Louisiana state legislature ranging on matters from housing rules to job applications to voting rights.

One of the group’s victories in early November, supported by President Barack Obama and U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans, has been the so-called “ban the box.” The box in question is the check box that asks for criminal history on federal job applications. While Richmond had been pushing for the Fair Chance Act legislation in a gridlocked Congress, President Obama issued an executive order on the matter with regards to federal job applications, citing that several states and major companies have already removed that question from applications.

“Something I learned about the change you bring about,” said Henderson, “is that sometimes you don’t benefit from it.”

Henderson still considered all victories a personal win, even if it didn’t alter his own incarceration. Even though he had won a battle, he still had a war to win, he told the audience. So during the time before his release, Henderson said he used his legal knowledge to help his fellow prisoners secure their rights.

“Everybody used to say, you’re helping other people get out of prison, but not yourself,” Henderson said. “I knew that when the time comes, the opportunity will present itself.”

It took 14 years after he found something wrong with his conviction for Henderson to walk out of Angola. After his release, Henderson said he is continuing the work he did in prison. “The work hasn’t changed,” Henderson said. “It’s just a bigger playing field.”

Since 2007, Henderson said his team has helped 29 inmates get exonerated in Louisiana. “That’s not a lot, but it’s 29 people that shouldn’t have been in jail,” he told the audience.

He currently works as an executive director for Voice of the Ex-Offender, an organization that was originally focused on voter registration for pre-trial detainees and those convicted of misdemeanors in Louisiana. It has now expanded and focuses on educating formerly incarcerated persons on their voting rights and registering them to vote.

Henderson also wants to raise awareness at how the “intersecting lines in our lives contribute to prison.” He believes that people should skip over the “stuff” that sounds “nice over dinner” and focus on the hard-hitting “stuff,” such as education and drugs.

“The failing school system in Louisiana is one,” Henderson said. “Uneducated people make uneducated decisions and end up in jail.”

“The prison population is the easiest population to dismiss,” Henderson said. “It’s the easiest to marginalize. The first thing people would say is, ‘Oh well, he did something.’ And even though they might have done something, we still have to ask ourselves, ‘Do we have bad boys, or do we have a bad system?’”

Even though his work is hard and sometimes seeing results is a long struggle, Henderson told the audience he was far from quitting what he has made his life’s work.

This article originally published in the December 7, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.