Louisiana Voice

The late comedian Brother Dave Gardner once said (in jest, it’s presumed), “If a man’s down, kick him. If he survives it, he has a chance to rise above it.”

A corollary to that might be the expression no good deed goes unpunished.

And you couldn’t blame Calvin Duncan if he felt a little put upon about now.

Calvin Duncan is one of those featured in my book, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana.

You see, Duncan was convicted in January 1985 of the first-degree murder of David Yeager during an armed robbery more than three years earlier.

The only thing was, he was innocent. Then Assistant District Attorney (later the Orleans Parish district attorney) Leon Cannizzaro suppressed exculpatory evidence (even lied about it), a hostile judge erected obstacles for Duncan’s defense counsel, refusing Duncan permission to examine a supplemental report by an Oregon police officer who’d outright lied to Duncan during questioning following his arrest in that state and six months later pled guilty himself to illegal wiretapping.

On Feb. 2, 1984, assistant prosecutor Bruce Whittaker wrote that there were problems with the Duncan case. He recommended that prosecutors attempt to cut a deal and convince Duncan to plead guilty to second-degree murder. Despite the doubts and because of the withholding of evidence that would’ve proved helpful to him, he was convicted of first-degree murder.

It wasn’t until January 2011, after spending nearly 30 years in prison for a crime he never committed, he was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and attempted armed robbery in order to gain his release for time served. That’s called an Alford, or “best interest” plea and is nothing more than a process by which to protect prosecutors from legal liability because an exonerated defendant is not eligible to collect damages unless he is granted a full declaration of innocence.

But Duncan was that rare individual who, even though incarcerated, worked to better himself and finally, in 2018, he graduated from Tulane University. He then continued with his education, attending the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore.

But there was a hitch. Because of his conviction, he was not allowed to be admitted to the bar after his graduation from law school. Another hitch, this one in his favor: he had been convicted by a non-unanimous vote of the jury. After finally obtaining his freedom and a law degree, he began the fight to clear his name and to help Louisiana become one of the last state abolish non-unanimous jury decisions (Oregon was the only other one that recognized non-unanimous verdicts).

He, along with Southern University law professor Angela A. Allen Bell, played a critical role in assisting attorneys to gather evidence and frame arguments for a challenge to Louisiana’s use of non-unanimous juries. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 barred such verdicts.

So, armed with an exoneration for having lost three decades of his life and with a law degree in hand, he launched the next phase of his life: he ran for and was elected to the office of clerk of the Orleans Parish Criminal Court, vowing to reform the justice system, using his own experience as the basis for his efforts.

He won that race last November with an astounded 68 percent of the vote.

Then came the Louisiana Repugnantcan Party to RIP AWAY any vestige of decency and human kindness, characteristics for which the party, on both the state and national level, is becoming infamous for its dearth.

The Louisiana State Senate on Wednesday VOTED 25-11, with three members taking a walk, to  pass Senate Bill 258 by State Sen. Jay Morris (R-West Monroe), which has the effect of ripping from Duncan his duly-elected office by abolishing the office as part of a proposed streamlining of the New Orleans judiciary.

(It’s somewhat curious as to what a legislator from West Monroe would know about the New Orleans courts, some 300 miles away.)

The senate even defeated an AMENDMENT by Sen. Royce Duplessis (D-New Orleans) by a nearly identical vote (24-12) that would have allowed Duncan to serve his term. You can see that vote HERE.

No one is saying the Orleans judiciary couldn’t use some restructuring, but it’s not just in Orleans Parish. Several stories have been posted by LouisianaVoice about judicial misconduct in Monroe, Shreveport, Alexandria, Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, Covington and Houma, as well as Orleans, and ineptness and corruption literally abound in district attorney offices throughout the state so, to home in on Orleans to the exclusion of every other judicial district in the state is disingenuous at best and outright deceptive at worst.

Duncan hasn’t even been sworn in yet. That ceremony is scheduled for May 4 but the Repugnantcan establishment in Louisiana just could not wait to extract their pound of flesh.

Duncan might be excused for believing that he’s being retaliated against by state officials who having long denied his innocence, are somewhat pissed at being shown the error of their ways.

Repugnantcans sniff that it isn’t personal and that the move is simply a step toward government efficiency.

Seems like we’ve heard that somewhere before—and it didn’t turn out too well then, either.

Gov. Squeaky Toy Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill, aka Hand Puppet, point to Duncan’s having accepted the 2011 plea deal for manslaughter and armed robbery as if any man alive would not grasp at a straw like an Alford Plea that might free him after three decades in prison. Given only the choice of remaining in prison for the rest of your life or walking free in exchange for pleading guilty to a lesser charge, it’s a no-brainer.

“The Attorney General made it clear during the election that if I continued to accurately speak about my innocence and exoneration that I would face consequences from her office,” Duncan told The Associated Press. “We are seeing those consequences today.”

Such is the Repugnantcan take on freedom of speech.