We shouldn't make innocent prisoners wait decades to be free
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Version 0 of 1. Kia Stewart’s trial lasted only a few hours before he was sent away to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the former slave plantation known as Angola, for the rest of his life. He was wrongfully convicted of murder, but it would take 10 years of imprisonment before he was freed on 13 April 2015 in New Orleans. By the standards of most wrongful conviction cases, he got out quickly. In these respects his case was normal: of the 26 men my office has freed or exonerated from Louisiana and Mississippi’s prisons, all were young, poor, black men. All except two were sentenced to life without parole and none of them had a trial where the presentation of evidence lasted more than a day. All were innocent of the crimes they were then convicted of. But Kia’s case differs from those that have preceded it because it “only” took us two years after getting on the case to win his exoneration. A pioneering collaboration between the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office and my office, Innocence Project New Orleans, made this otherwise run-of-the-mill wrongful conviction a potential model for addressing past injustices nationwide. Kia Stewart was 17 years old when he was arrested for the murder of BJ Craig in 2005. The investigation lasted only a few hours and consisted almost exclusively of the police getting an eyewitness to identify Kia’s photograph from a “sixpack” of other photographs. The state prosecuted him using that single eyewitness’s testimony (single eyewitness prosecutions are still shockingly common in New Orleans). The defense presented no witnesses. He was convicted and sentenced to life without parole, probation or suspension of sentence. The traditional model of solving wrongful convictions is for a lawyer to find a case of potential wrongful conviction, investigate it and bring it to the attention of the courts in a process known in most states as post-conviction. The problem is that our adversarial system is ill-suited to answer the question, after a conviction, of whether the person actually committed the crime. The adversarial system is where each side puts on its best case, hides its weaknesses and tries to win. That is exactly what should not be happening when there is a chance that someone has been wrongfully convicted. And it is why an average innocence case with no DNA evidence takes about seven years to litigate through this process. However, in the last eight years, some prosecutors have begun establishing “conviction integrity units” within their offices to review old convictions. While a couple of these have been resounding successes, most have little accountability to anyone and minimal input from either advocates or agencies accustomed to reviewing cases independently. So in New Orleans we’re trying to combine the best practices from the conviction integrity units with a funded mandate for our offices – the prosecutors and Innocence Project New Orleans – to work together on reviewing cases. It involves the District Attorney’s Office revisiting convictions it has successfully fought to uphold and voluntarily abandoning problematic convictions. And it involves our office, an office of defense lawyers, trusting our traditional adversaries. We must bring them to talk to witnesses whose testimony we would otherwise use in court to prove our case. In short, it requires us to behave in completely counter-intuitive ways. Both of us must step outside of our adversarial roles, the very roles that caused the wrongful conviction in the first place and then keep it from being reviewed, often for decades. It is what we did in Kia Stewart’s case; investigated the case together. And it worked. We agreed that 18 witnesses had evidence proving his innocence and that he should be cleared. Here in New Orleans, the problems with our criminal justice system are legendary: we incarcerate more people per capita than anywhere else in the entire world, and have had more proven wrongful convictions per capita since 1990 than any jurisdiction in the United States. Something bold is needed in response. The collaborative mission of our project makes it likely the first of its kind in the country, certainly the first in the deep south. It is too early to tell how successful it will be but Kia’s case gives us hope that it will bring other innocent prisoners home sooner. The eyes of the country have often been on the New Orleans criminal justice system and they’re not usually looking for ideas to replicate at home. Maybe if we keep shaving years off every wrongful imprisonment - if we stop these ordeals sooner - for the first time ever they will be. |