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.








