State & Federal
Louisiana
Timeline
1901 - The antebellum plantation property Angola which was later used by former Confederate Major Samuel Lawrence Jones to run a convict leasing system, is converted into Louisiana State Penitentiary. The Louisiana State Penitentiary is now used to house male death row prisoners.
1946 - At 17, Wille Francis survives a botched execution by electric chair. After his appeal failed in the U.S. Supreme Court, Mr. Francis was returned to the electric chair in 1947 and executed.
1990 - Dalton Prejean is executed in Louisiana by the electric chair for a crime he committed at age 17. Mr. Prejean was convicted by an all-white jury and had brain damage, with an IQ of 71.
2001 - Michael Ray Graham Jr. and Albert Ronnie Burrell are exonerated from death row after serious prosecutorial misconduct and the testimony of a jailhouse snitch led to their wrongful convictions.
2008 - In Kennedy v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down an unconstitutional state-statute that allowed death sentencing for the rape of a child, where the victim did not die.
2010 - The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections sues every inmate on Louisiana’s death row in an effort to block them from challenging the state’s lethal injection procedures.
2012 - Damon Thibodeaux is freed from Louisiana’s death row after 15 years at Angola once new DNA evidence was tested.
2013 - A federal magistrate rules that the Louisiana Department of Safety and Corrections must reveal the details of the state’s lethal injection protocol.
2014 - One week in advance of a scheduled execution, Louisiana obtains hydrocodone from a pharmacy at Lake Charles Memorial Hospital after falsely claiming the medication was needed for a “medical patient.” Hydrocodone is one of the drugs used in Louisiana’s lethal-injection protocol.
2015 - A Louisiana federal judge delays five executions until 2016, following state officials’ struggle to determine how to conduct executions using lethal injection. The Department of Safety and Corrections’ supply of lethal injection drugs has now expired.
2016 - Louisiana delays executions until 2018 after a new court order issued with the consent of the parties in federal proceedings challenges the constitutionality of Louisiana’s lethal injection process. Louisiana’s protocol allows for either a one-drug execution using pentobarbital, or a two-drug execution procedure using midazolam and hydromorphone, but the state does not have the drugs necessary for either option.
2017 - Rodricus Crawford is exonerated from Louisiana’s death row amid evidence of racial discrimination, prosecutorial overcharging, and his innocence.
2018 - A Louisiana federal court judge orders another years of stayed executions to allow the proceedings to continue in the death row prisoners’ challenge to the state’s lethal injection protocol.
2019 - Elvis Brooks is freed after 42 years on Louisiana’s death row. Mr. Brooks was arrested at 19 and his capital murder trial lasted less than one day with no physical evidence linking Mr. Brooks to the murder.
2023 - The Louisiana Board of Pardons and Parole sets aside all 56 clemency applications filed by nearly every death-sentenced prisoner in Louisiana without reviewing the merits of any of them. The petitions raise claims of severe mental illness, racial injustice, intellectual disability, prosecutorial misconduct, among many others.
Famous Cases
Connick v. Thompson, 563 U.S. 51 (2011)
John Thompson was convicted of robbery and murder, and spent 18 years in prison, 14 of which were spent on death row, before being exonerated. Shortly before Thompson’s scheduled execution, an investigator discovered that prosecutors had hidden blood evidence that exonerated Thompson.
Mr. Thompson sued the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, the District Attorney, Harry Connick, in his official and individual capacities, and several assistant district attorneys in their official capacities under 42 U.S.C § 1983 in a Louisiana federal district court. The jury awarded Mr. Thompson $14 million against Mr. Connick in his official capacity.
In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court held that a prosecutor’s office could not be held liable for the illegal conduct of one of its prosecutors when there has been only one violation resulting from that deficient training. In dissent Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan argued that the evidence “established persistent, deliberately indifferent conduct for which the District Attorney’s Office bears responsibility under §1983.”
Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 US 407 (2008)
Kennedy v. Louisiana barred the death penalty from being used in non-homicide offenses. In a 5-4 decision the Court held that the Eighth Amendment bars states from imposing the death penalty for the rape of a child where the crime did not result in the child’s death. The majority opinion found that applying the death penalty in such a case would be an exercise of “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of a national consensus on the issue.
Roberts v. Louisiana, 428 U.S. 325 (1976)
Stanislaus Roberts v. Louisiana was one of the five death penalty cases the Supreme Court decided on July 2, 1976 when it ruled in Gregg v. Georgia that the death penalty did not invariably constitute cruel and unusual punishment. However, in a 5-4 vote, the Court declared that Louisiana’s capital punishment statute, which made the death penalty mandatory for certain murders was unconstitutional because it did not allow for consideration of mitigating factors or the exercise of mercy to spare a defendant’s life. The Supreme Court took up another Louisiana case in 1977 to determine whether a mandatory death sentence could be imposed in the limited circumstance of the murder of a law enforcement officer during the performance of his or her official duties. In a 5-4 decision in Harry Roberts v. Louisiana, 431 U.S. 633 (1977), the Court held that the prohibition against mandatory death sentences encompassed murders of police officers.
Notable Exonerations
Curtis Kyles was convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 after his first trial ended in a hung jury. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed his conviction in the case Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419 (1995). The Court cited prosecutorial misconduct: the state had withheld crucial information about a paid informant who may have been the actual murderer. He was retried three times, but each jury deadlocked. After Kyles’ fifth trial, prosecutors dropped the charges against him. He was released from prison in 1998.
Other Interesting Facts
Intellectual disability (formerly known as mental retardation) is determined by the jury in the penalty phase of a capital trial following conviction for first-degree murder: http://www.legis.state.la.us/lss/lss.asp?doc=191015
Sister Helen Prejean began her work against the death penalty in Louisiana when she visited Patrick Sonnier on Death Row at Angola and accompanied him to his execution. Her account is documented in the book and movie Dead Man Walking.
Resources
- Louisiana Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
- Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana – Provides indigent capital defendants with representation in state post-conviction and federal habeas corpus
- Capital Appeals Project – Provides indigent capital defendants with representation on direct appeal
- Louisiana Capital Assistance Center – A resource center for indigent capital defense at the trial level
- Department of Corrections
- Prosecutors
- Victims’ services
Louisiana Execution Totals Since 1976
News & Developments
News
Mar 11, 2024
OP-ED: Journalist Recalls Witnessing an Execution and Describes the Importance of Media Witnesses
In May 1990, Jonathan Eig, then a reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, witnessed the electric-chair-execution of Dalton Prejean at Angola State Penitentiary for the 1977 murder of a Louisiana state trooper. Mr. Eig watched Mr. Prejean’s execution through an observation window, and reported seeing “his chest heave, his fists clench and his right wrist twist outward. A spark and a puff of smoke shot from the electrode attached to his left leg.” In the years following the execution, Mr. Eig regretted his decision to witness Mr. Prejean’s execution, writing…
Read MoreJan 30, 2024
Louisiana Supreme Court Grants New Trial Based on Prosecutorial Misconduct while New Governor Landry Moves to Expand Methods of Execution and Restart Executions
On January 26, 2024, the Louisiana Supreme Court granted a new trial to death-sentenced prisoner Darrell Robinson based on egregious prosecutorial misconduct. The Court held that Mr. Robinson “did not receive a fair trial, or a verdict worthy of confidence.” Mr. Robinson’s quest to prove his innocence advances at the same time that Governor Jeff Landry seeks to expand the state’s methods of execution and restart executions. During a tumultuous 2023 in which outgoing Governor John Bel Edwards supported clemency review for Louisiana’s entire death row, only to be blocked…
Read MoreDec 12, 2023
New Research Finds That Historical News Coverage Reduced Executed Black Men to “Faceless, Interchangeable Public Safety Hazards” While Executed White Men Were Portrayed As “Tragic Heroes”
In a recently published academic article, Emory University History Professor Daniel LaChance writes about an important and underrecognized distinction in the way newspaper editors and journalists covered the executions of Black and white men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Professor LaChance argues that the portrayals of the defendants made legal executions “a high-status punishment that respected the whiteness of those who suffered it.” While the length and detail of articles about the executions of Black men shrank dramatically over time, he notes that journalists consistently highlighted the…
Read MoreNov 21, 2023
Following Series of Denials, Louisiana Board to Hold Administrative Hearings on Clemency for at Least Two Additional Death Row Prisoners
The Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole will consider at least two additional applications for clemency on November 27, following a tumultuous year in which nearly all Louisiana death row prisoners sought clemency in response to outgoing Governor John Bel Edwards voicing his personal opposition to the death penalty. Under the Louisiana Constitution, Governor Edwards cannot grant clemency without a recommendation from the Board; he asked the Board to set hearings so that he could fulfill his “authority and duty to consider these applications.” However, amidst opposition from…
Read MoreOct 16, 2023
Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole Denies Clemency Hearings for Five Death-Sentenced Prisoners
On October 13, 2023, after a brief administrative hearing, the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole denied clemency hearings for five of the 56 death-sentenced prisoners seeking clemency before Governor John Bel Edwards leaves office in January 2024. The four-member panel split its vote on four of the five applications, with a majority denying the fifth application on the grounds that Winthrop Eaton is unlikely to be executed because he is mentally incompetent. Clifford Deruise, Daniel Irish, Emmett Taylor, and Antoinette Frank were denied clemency hearings despite having…
Read MoreSep 14, 2023
Louisiana District Attorney Asks Court to Halt Death Row Clemency Hearings for Three Prisoners
On September 12, 2023, East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore filed a request for injunctive relief, asking the 19th Judicial District Court to vacate hearings scheduled for three East Baton Rouge Parish prisoners who have requested clemency. In June 2023, 51 death-sentenced individuals filed clemency applications with the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, requesting a commutation of their death sentences to life without parole. Five additional applications from death row prisoners have since been submitted to the Board. DA Moore’s motion comes in response to the…
Read MoreAug 29, 2023
Newly Discovered Death Row Exoneration in 1967 Murder Case
Larry Hudson has been added to DPIC’s Descriptions of Innocence page as a newly-discovered death row exoneration. Mr. Hudson was tried and sentenced to death for a robbery-homicide in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1967, when he was 19 years old. He was exonerated in 1993, when he was 46 years old.
Read MoreAug 23, 2023
Louisiana Exoneree, Family Members of Victims and Prisoners, and Criminal Defense Lawyers Support of Clemency for Death-Sentenced Prisoners
At an August 15, 2023 rally organized by The Promise for Justice Initiative, a group opposed to the death penalty and which advocates for greater change in the criminal legal system, family members of victims and prisoners and death row exoneree Shareef Cousin called on the Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole to grant the 56 clemency applications that have been submitted by prisoners on death row. “Part of clemency is really about giving the opportunity to the survivors of these crimes to work on reconciliation, to work on the…
Read MoreAug 11, 2023
After Spending 41 Years in Prison, Former Death Row Prisoner Gary Tyler Debuts First Solo Art Exhibition
Gary Tyler was just 16 years old when he was charged with shooting a white student in 1974 and sentenced to death, a crime that, many witnesses agree, he did not commit. Mr. Tyler, then a sophomore in high school in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, was riding a school bus that was attacked by a segregationist mob. In the chaos, someone fired a shot that killed a 13-year-old white boy, Timothy Weber. After Mr. Tyler, who is Black, spoke to one of the deputies, he was arrested for allegedly disturbing…
Read MoreAug 10, 2023
Governor John Bel Edwards Directs Louisiana Board to Consider Death Row Clemency Petitions and Set Hearings
On August 9th, with the use of his executive authority, Governor John Bel Edwards (pictured) asked the Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole to return the 56 clemency applications filed by death-sentenced prisoners in Louisiana to its docket for consideration and set them for hearings. The Board of Pardons will now have until January 2024, when Gov. Edwards officially leaves office, to decide whether to recommend clemency for nearly all of the state’s death row prisoners. Earlier this year, Gov. Edwards expressed his opposition to capital punishment, stating that…
Read MoreAug 04, 2023
NEW VOICES: Conservative Christian Urges Louisiana Governor to Open the “Door to Redemption” for 56 Death Row Prisoners
In a July 31 Letter to the Editor, Demetrius Minor, the National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty criticizes the Louisiana Pardon Board decision to decline review of clemency petitions filed by nearly every death-sentenced prisoner in Louisiana.
Read More