Louisiana Voice

Last year my book about wrongful convictions, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana, was published. It was a work I had been considering for several years and I finally was able to write about an issue I felt passionately about.

One of the exonerees I profiled in that work, a chapter that began on page 172 and continued for three full pages was about a man named Calvin Duncan who stands out as possibly pulling off the single greatest turnaround of one’s life and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.

Duncan was that rare individual who made the most of his opportunities once freed from years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Accused of a 1981 murder, he was convicted because of the perfect trifecta of injustice. Orleans Parish then-Assistant District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro withheld exculpatory evidence and because a hostile judge threw up obstacles for Duncan’s defense counsel and to top it all off, a corrupt Oregon police officer lied to Duncan during questioning following his arrest in that state (the officer, Clackamas County sheriff’s deputy Roy Reed, would, six months following Duncan’s August 1982 arrest, plead guilty in federal court to a single count of wiretapping in an unrelated case).

The short version of Duncan’s story is he was convicted of first-degree murder in 1985 and affirmed in affirmed in 1987. You can read the longer version HERE:

Appeal after appeal was routinely denied and in order to hire an investigator, he sold his plasma. The investigator, after taking his month, then failed to perform any work on his case.

In 2004 the Innocence Project New Orleans (author John Grisham sits on the national organization’s board) took up Duncan’s case and began filing public records requests for documents from police and prosecutors, eventually forcing the release of exculpatory evidence and false police reports.

On Jan. 7, 2011, after serving 26 years in prison, he was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter and attempted armed robbery and was released on time served. It’s called an Alford Plea. This tactic is a favorite ploy by prosecutors since the guilty plea prohibits the defendant from collecting damages for his wrongful conviction. It’s a cruel, underhanded deal: trade your freedom for any future claim of damages.

Duncan, though, played a critical role in assisting attorneys to gather evidence and frame arguments for a successful challenge to Louisiana’s use of non-unanimous juries. Louisiana and Oregan were the only states that had continued to recognize such verdicts until 2020, when the U.S. Supreme Court barred such verdicts.

Meanwhile, Duncan had enrolled and graduated from Tulane University and then attended Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore. despite knowing that if his conviction for manslaughter and attempted armed robbery were allowed to stand, he could not be admitted to the bar following his graduation from law school.

Fortunately, Judge Nandi Campbell in August 2021 said in her ruling, “Given the state’s prior suppression of evidence relating to the Oregon officers’ possible criminal activity, the inconsistencies of the …eyewitness identification and Mr. Duncan’s extensive service and numerous contributions to the community post-release, the sentence imposed on Jan. 7, 2011, is unconstitutionally excessive.” Following her ruling, the state dismissed all charges against Duncan.

Fast forward to this past Saturday. Duncan, 62, who worked at Loyola University’s Jesuit Social Research Institute, won his race for Orleans Parish Criminal Clerk of Court in an astounding upset of an established political opponent, pulling 68 percent of the vote.

He attributed his win partly to his opponent’s attack on his “claimed” exoneration. “That (the election result) was a message by New Orleans people for sure, that we’re not goin to tolerate politics being an institution where people display their meanness,” he said, perhaps a bit more optimistically than the political realities as they currently exist.

Duncan pledged to protect the rights of all citizens “like I would protect mine.”

If I ever write an update to my book, I know where I’ll begin.