When the source first told me about the case of Lloid Gray at the end of 2024, I recorded these notes: two black jurors, swasties and governor Jeff Landra. It was a simplified deeply disturbing issue, but it was also the basis A story published this week By Pumublitsa and Verite News, who pursue Louisiana and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Guya was only 19 in 1980, when he was tried in the courtroom of the new Orlean on charges of exacerbation of rape. After one day, the jury returned with a 10-2 split of the sentence. 10 white jurors voted for guilty, but only two black jurors who are not guilty. If you are a regular consumer of dramatic courts, you might think that a broken sentence will mean parsing and today it will be. But then in Louisiana, where the unbearable jurors were legal, it led to a life imprisonment.
Louisian criminal justice lighting often means getting acquainted with things that people in other parts of the country can find shocking. For example, many can be surprised to find out that here, more than 120 years, the state allowed people to be imprisoned for life, though two jurors were not guilty. The only other state that did the same was Oregon.
In 2020, the US Supreme Court ruled that this practice was unconstitutional and is based on its essence racist, intended to maintain the rule of white, but the decision is applied only in cases that go forward; The court left the decision on what to do with the convicts for a long time in the States. Louisiana refused to reconsider the beliefs of more than 1000 mostly black people sent to jail for long terms of the dissolved tumor.
The report here can often be a surreal experience. Even if you think you have reached the level of cynicism that cannot be disturbed, something new is happening that shakes your system. For me it was Swastika.
While the former lawyer Guya explained to me that I was out of his craft, he mentioned that at some point someone drew a Nazi symbol of hatred on the cover of Gray. And I am sure that when Gray’s attorneys sent me the cover page of their files, he was in the upper right corner: a small stunts.
It was difficult to consider how, as recently, as the 1980s, someone would feel comfortable enough to draw such a shameful business on the government document without fear of the offensive. The district prosecutor’s office does not dispute its existence or that the employee can attract him, but does not know who and when.
Credit:
Received Propublica and Verite News. The selection is added propublica.
The Louisiana Public Security and Corrections Department denied our request to interview Gray either by phone or personally, so the only way to communicate with him was through his lawyers. I gave them questions and they gave him answers.
I wanted to know what his life looked up to that life -changing night in 1980 when he was accused of rape. He described a happy childhood, saying, “We loved the beauty of it. Me and my sister, my brother, loved us.” But he also recalled that at a young age to witness the hard treatment of his mother at the gas station. “It opened my eyes to racism at best,” Gray said.
Guy’s lawyers claim that the swastika, along with two black jurors who voted for justification, among other issues, proves that his persecution was spoiled by racial bias and should be sufficient to at least reconsider the Gray sentence.
At one point, it appears that the district prosecutor’s office of the new Orlean agreed and proposed a guilt agreement that allows you to release the Gray. In Oregona, after the Supreme Court ruling in 2020, the state released the sentences of all convicted of unlike jury, after which the prosecutor’s office made acknowledging agreements on reduced sentences that allowed many to go for free.
But again, it’s Louisiana. Unlike Oregon, the state Supreme Court has decided not to release the old criminals on dissolved fever and left it with the legislative body to resolve this issue. In turn, legislators supported by Landra shut down all ways to freedom for such as Gray. Not only did they beat the legislation that allowed to revise the older sentences under the section, they adopted the bill on the possibility of the prosecutor’s office to propose a guilty agreement. (Landra administration did not respond to comment requests.)
The influence of this law is played in the parish district court of Orlean at the end of August, when the district prosecutor’s office declared to Judge Robin Pitman that the new law prevented him from refusing the missing deadline and, as a result, he could not conclude a deal. Pitman put up a new hearing for October 30, at which she decided whether the Gray case, in which he asked to review the sentence, could move forward.
“If you were sent to a lifetime prison, they send you here to die,” Gray said through his lawyers. “After 45 years, I am no closer to freedom than on the day when I went to this place.”
