Louisiana Voice

At any given time, between 2 percent and 10 percent of convicted persons in U.S. prisons are innocent. With 2.3 million people incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons and jails, that means that anywhere from 46,000 and 230,000 who were wrongfully convicted.

That is why I wrote 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana, a 281-page book about individuals who were convicted and imprisoned (some for several decades) for crimes they did not commit.

I will be holding a book signing for this, my 11th book, at Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs this Saturday at 1:00 p.m. I will be discussing the injustices done to these individuals, the damage wrongful convictions do to our system of justice and the unfairness they do to the victims of crime. I hope to see you there.

Louisiana, which is in head-to-head competition with Oklahoma for the highest incarceration rate in the civilized world, presently has 58,000 persons in prisons and jails. That means that between 1200 and 5800 could have been wrongfully convicted. The costs of these wrongful convictions ae incalculable in terms of the hundreds of years in cumulative time spent behind bars unjustly and the shattered lives and families, but the astronomical financial cost, as well.

The 101 wrongfully convicted individuals profiled in this book received more than $60 million in compensation for sloppy prosecutorial work, shoddy police investigations, mistaken eyewitness identification, uncaring judges and junk science that resulted in their convictions. And that doesn’t even count the cost of housing, feeding and caring for the prisoners, the salaries paid cops and prosecutors for inadequate investigative and prosecutorial work, or the cost of trials to put them away. Add to all that the fact that when the wrong person is convicted, that means the real perpetrator is still out there.