Of the half dozen or so wrongly imprisoned Louisianians I’ve met, Calvin Duncan always stood out. Not because his 28-year-long ordeal at the Louisiana State Penitentiary was necessarily more tragic than other wrongful incarcerations, but because he has the quiet, scholarly demeanor and style of a professor or librarian.
Twelve years ago, I invited Duncan and Gregory Bright, who’d been wrongly imprisoned for 27.5 years, to join me at a New Orleans theater to watch a matinee of the Nelson Mandela biopic “A Long Walk to Freedom.” Bright, who was 59, wore a hoodie; the bespectacled Duncan, who was 50, wore an open-collared dress shirt and a sport coat.
He has the quiet, scholarly demeanor and style of a professor or librarian.
On Saturday, 14 years after Duncan was released from prison, New Orleans voters elected him as Orleans Parish’s next Clerk of Criminal District Court. His story — that of a murder convict turned jailhouse lawyer turned free man and bona fide juris doctorate — has always left me wondering how much genius is moldering behind bars. Though Louisiana has long had one of the highest rates of incarceration on Earth — second now only to Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador — its problems are America’s problems. You can’t be as aggressive as America is about locking people up without locking some of the wrong people up. And you can’t have a penal system as merciless as ours and not rob the outside world of people as talented as Duncan.
On top of (or maybe because of) its extraordinary incarceration rate, Louisiana has had the second-highest rate of exonerations of any state — and New Orleans has the highest rate of exonerations of any U.S. city. The combination of shoddy police work, unprincipled prosecutors and overworked public defenders that has wrongly imprisoned people in Louisiana has led to travesties of justice in other parts of the country, too.
When Duncan arrived at Angola, as Louisiana State Penitentiary is more commonly known, the state expected him to spend his life at the 18,000-acre plantation-cum-prison doing farm labor at $0.02 an hour. And then expected him to die there old and broken. Instead, Duncan so effectively taught himself law in prison that he helped himself and other wrongly convicted men get out.
It’s no small miracle that New Orleans voters chose Duncan as the next clerk of the city’s criminal district court. It’s also remarkable that Duncan, a first-time political candidate, won in a rout. He won 68% of the vote against incumbent Clerk Darren Lombard — a fellow Black man and Democrat — who will probably forever regret attacking Duncan as a killer falsely claiming to be innocent.
Those attacks seemed to hurt only Lombard, not Duncan. The two were virtually tied in October’s primary election, with Duncan finishing at 47% and Lombard at 46%. Because Lombard’s share of the vote plummeted to 32% in the runoff, there’s reason to think his attack even disgusted people who’d initially voted for him.
“Morally, I wouldn’t be able to stomach making an attack like this,” a campaign operative not involved in the race told The Times-Picayune. That’s a remarkable statement given the typically no-holds-barred nature of Louisiana politics.
The state of Louisiana agreed he could go — but only if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery.
Duncan has always said he was wrongly identified as the man who shot dead 23-year-old David Yeager during an Aug. 7, 1981, robbery attempt. In 2011, after Duncan and his attorneys had pointed out multiple ways his trial had been unfair, the state of Louisiana agreed that he could go — but only if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery.
Ironically, that’s the same kind of pressure that leads some pretrial defendants to confess to crimes they didn’t commit: Plea deals are a driver of false confessions and wrongful convictions. Duncan, who saw the deal as his only hope, pleaded to manslaughter and armed robbery.
But even after he was out, he didn’t stop fighting to clear his name. In 2021, a judge declared him “factually innocent,” and the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office dismissed its case against him. In attacking Duncan as a murderer in a race in a majority-Black and overwhelmingly Democratic New Orleans, Lombard had a particularly toxic ally: Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a white Republican who claims Duncan shouldn’t have been declared innocent and warned him in a letter to “cease representing to the public that you were ‘exonerated’ to avoid further action from this office.” In that way, Murrill was embodying the kind of stubborn and vindictive prosecutorial spirit that every exonerated man I’ve met had to wrestle against. For example, as Duncan’s fellow jailhouse lawyer, Robert Jones, triumphantly walked out of the courthouse in 2017, the district attorney harrumphed that Jones wasn’t really exonerated; it was just too hard to retry a 25-year-old murder case. But Louisiana has put too many of the wrong people in prison — including at least 11 of the wrong people on Death Row — for the state’s attorney general to have a chance convincing New Orleans voters that a man declared innocent by a court is really guilty. It’s easy for most of us to cheer Duncan’s story: An innocent man sentenced to a lifetime of misery learns the law, helps frees himself and others and then wins public office. It’s more important to contemplate how we’d react if somebody every bit as disciplined and talented as Duncan were guilty. Would we still want him locked up forever? What about people not so talented? Should they be doomed to work fields at two cents an hour? The Brennan Center for Justice published a 2021 report decrying what it calls our country’s “punisher’s brain.” Our system is the opposite of those in many European countries that “emphasize rehabilitation and resocialization.” Duncan is the face of a particular problem in the U.S. — the difficulty innocent people have prevailing against prosecutors who are determined to put them away — but the America penal system has bigger problems still. And one of them is believing that the guilty deserve everything they get.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MSNBC Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
