Anybody know what case this is?

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Let me tell you about how the criminal justice system operates in the state of Louisiana. Forget the Fourteenth Amendment that guarantees everyone the right to due process and equal protection. In this state, a "habitual offender" law allows prosecutors to double the maximum sentence of anyone convicted of a felony if they have a prior felony on their record.

Leon Cannizzaro, who was the District Attorney of Orleans Parish from 2009-2020, invoked it more than 3,000 times, overwhelmingly against Black people, many of them teenagers. As the state’s sole Black justice explained dissenting from one of these decisions, the statute was a modern-day version of the “Pigs Laws” enacted during Reconstruction and “designed to re-enslave African Americans.”

That law re-enslaved my African-American client.

At the age of 19, he was subjected to a pretextual stop. He was wearing a gray hoodie and dark jeans, which to the arresting officers meant he “matched” the description of a suspect in an armed robbery, which had occurred nearby and nearly a full day earlier. The suspect was described as slim-built and dark-complected; my client, at 5’8,” weighed 185 lbs, and he was light-complected with a moustache and beard. None of that mattered. A white man had been robbed at gunpoint of $102 dollars and my client, when the arresting officer tackled him, had a gun.

The trial took less than one afternoon.

The victim was not hurt and the crime itself lasted less than two minutes. Nevertheless, the state invoked the habitual offender law. My client’s sole prior was a drug sales conviction at the age of 17. He was an honors student, a star athlete, a warm and generous person who had survived open heart surgery from cancer. Today, that case would be handled in juvenile court.

The judge gave him 60 years in prison with no possibility of parole.

At the prison, my client was sent out to work in the fields every day picking crops with the other able-bodied prisoners, nearly all of them Black. The guards who oversaw them on horseback formed a gun line. If anyone crossed the line, they got shot.

“Every day I was out there,” my client told me, “I would think about running the gun line before I let these people break me and just get it over with.”

My client was convicted in 2013. But it might as well have been 1813.

When the robbery occurred, my client was eight miles away. A witness would have said so. The hotel surveillance footage would have proved it, along with his cell phone records. In desperate calls from jail, my client pleaded with his lawyers to get this evidence. “It will clear me,” he said. The prosecutors listened to all of those calls—they knew and didn’t care. Neither did his lawyers. The jury never heard his alibi.

My client’s case is not an anomaly. Neither is the system in Louisiana. Our legal system is based on indifference and animus toward Black lives, fueled by cruelty so casual that it is depraved, and white supremacy so systemic that it is foundational.

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