The exonerated prisoner kicked out of office by Republicans

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0:09Today, the man who fought his whole life for justice and the Republicans who took him down.

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1:16I, Calvin Duncan I, Calvin Duncan Do solemnly swear on One April morning earlier this year Calvin Duncan stood on the steps outside the grand old courthouse in New Orleans placed his right hand on a Bible and swore an oath

1:33Olly Laughland:that would elevate him to an elected office serving in the state of Louisiana

1:44The office he'd been elected to was pretty obscure. He'd just become the court's criminal clerk, its chief administrative officer. Yet his race to win that office had electrified the state. Because Calvin was no ordinary state bureaucrat. His journey from growing up as a black child in one of New Orleans' poorest and most violent neighbourhoods to one of Louisiana's most brutal prisons, where he served 28 years for a murder he didn't commit, to this moment, at 64 years old, pledging to serve the people and ensure others didn't suffer the same injustices, was extraordinary. I should leave this building.

2:24It would take me three days to recover. One of the things I had, I envisioned, was that when people come to this office, that we will smile at. It was a remarkable story of resilience, and for many who'd voted for him, also of hope. Our friend, our champion, our leader, our clerk, Calvin Dunn. But it didn't last.

2:59they fight so hard to take the most important thing away from us because they see the people you vote for can't help you and the people that can help you they are not allowed to run for office and if one of y 'all slip and get through the cracks to get in the position to run for office we're gonna abolish the damn seat Just three hours after taking office, Calvin Duncan was stripped of the role he'd fought so hard to win. After Louisiana Republicans, emboldened by the politics of Donald Trump's second presidency, moved against him. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. Calvin Duncan and the brutal battle for voting rights, political power and justice in Trump's America.

3:57Olly Laughland:Oliver Loughlin, you're The Guardian's US Southern Bureau Chief. Thanks for joining us today. I hope you're doing all right. Thanks so much for having me. So you're here to tell us this extraordinary story of Calvin Duncan. I know you've recently spent quite a bit of time with him at his home in Louisiana. So first of all, could you tell us who is he? Perhaps you could take us back to his early life before he was incarcerated. Yeah, so he grew up in a housing project called the Desire Housing Projects. They no longer exist, but they are, you know, by all accounts, and I've interviewed a lot of people who have kind of grown up in that neighbourhood, one of the poorest parts of New Orleans and a high crime area as well.

4:37Lost his mother from a very early age and was really kind of a father figure to his younger sister from the age of 10. He was driven to petty crime, basically to keep him and his sister fed and clothed. It sounds like you had an incredibly tough upbringing then, incredibly tough childhood.

4:56Olly Laughland:Could you give us a bit of the context of how it was that he was arrested and charged with this murder at such a young age at 19? In August of 1981, a 23-year-old white guy named David Yeager was shot during a robbery in the Treme neighbourhood of New Orleans. There was a single eyewitness who was his teenage girlfriend at the time, who basically gave the police a description that didn't really match Calvin's description at all. But when presented with his photograph in a photographic line-up, she identified him. And this basically started the spiral of his life. He basically languished in this county jail in New Orleans for three years before his trial.

5:43Oliver, tell me, what were conditions like there for him? The Orleans Parish Jail is a notorious facility, not just in the state of Louisiana, but across the world. It continually ranks as one of the worst jails in the country. It's extremely violent, inmate on inmate violence. The resources there are scant. The food is awful. During Hurricane Katrina, it flooded and many people were left in there for days without any assistance. So it has this reputation, not just in New Orleans, but around the country as one of the worst jails in the United States, which is really saying something.

6:25And even with all of that, like with all of those awful conditions that you've just described, it's fair to say that Calvin didn't sit around waiting for his trial, did he? What did he tell you about his time in that jail? when i was on the unit and you know they took was telling me i was gonna get the death penalty yeah everybody was telling me that because my lawyers weren't going to come see me they had the same lawyers that i had the same judge same prosecutor and they had the death penalty and he's and so when i asked them how can i help myself they said i had to become a lawyer but it was no legal material he has this kind of amazing archive of all of his belongings and so He showed me some of these motions that he filed while he was in jail.

7:08He showed me the handmade law book that was stuck together with old bits of spent chewing gum that had all these old newspaper clippings in them. I used to get the newspaper and I used to be so excited when wealthy people got arrested for crimes because every time they wrote something about this high profile case, they would put some law in it. And so I would make my own law book. And this is one of my law books. And then he also filed his first ever law motion when he was in his early 20s, where he asked the court for a law book to try and understand the rules of criminal procedure in Louisiana.

7:45Olly Laughland:It's just extraordinary thinking that while he was there sitting in a jail awaiting his trial, he was already almost presuming that he was, that the law was not going to go in his favour or that he wasn't going to get any kind of fair trial. What actually happened when his case did come to court? Well, I think it's important to kind of understand the way in which the criminal justice system in the US and in particular New Orleans worked at that time. You know, this was a hugely overburdened system that basically prioritised speed over people's due process rights, where it was very common to have an attorney who had done little to no research on your case before you went to trial, where you would have trials, you know, for cases like Calvin's murder trial lasting a single day.

8:30And that's what happened to him.

8:31Olly Laughland:Now that's just, I mean, it's mad to think that you have a murder trial that lasts one day. He went to court. He met his lawyer for the first time the day before court. And he told me about how, you know, the meeting was essentially about making sure he had the right clothes to wear in court. And he was found guilty of murder, even though he mounted a defence. You know, he had alibi witnesses who testified on his behalf. But again, you know, this is New Orleans in the 1980s. The victim of this case was a white man. The only eyewitness was a young white woman. and the jury sided with them. So he was convicted.

9:04Olly Laughland:Tell us about what happened then. What was his sentence and where did he get sent? So Calvin was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, which is a very common sentence for murder convictions in Louisiana. And he was sent about a year later. So he spent a bit more time in the parish jail. About a year later, he was sent to Angola Prison, which is a prison I've written a lot about. it is a notorious prison in the deep south set on the grounds of a former slave plantation where inmates still labor those same fields um you know working for in certain instances two cents an hour to harvest crops and that sort of thing calvin's take on being sent there though was pretty extraordinary to me he describes angola as a paradise in comparison to what he endured at the parish jail, which, as I said, was just notoriously violent, notoriously harsh.

9:58And the reason he described it that way is because he would have access to a law library. The prison has one of the largest law libraries in the whole of the United States. And to him, this would be the tool to unpick the locks, basically, to ensure his freedom eventually. He was also helping other fellow inmates. Tell me about what he managed to achieve while he was inside. I would not be able to list all of the extraordinary things that Calvin did over his two decades in prison in a single podcast. So he earned his GED, which is basically a qualification for people who didn't graduate high school to then show that they're now at that level.

10:37He almost immediately then moved into the programme to become an inmate counsel substitute, which to outsiders is essentially a jailhouse lawyer, which is a programme that exists in many prisons across the country that allows people who are incarcerated to be represented by those who they are incarcerated with. So he spent his first few years working on the mental health unit, and then he moved over to the prison's death row, where he spent almost two decades working with people who were facing execution. What struck me about those guys was that they had no clue what was happening to them. You know, it was hard for them to understand what was actually happening because a lot of them had really serious mental things going.

11:30I accepted the job personally as the job is to make sure that they don't harm themselves, that they keep hope alive.

11:49And it was while he was inside that jail that he became interested in this pretty obscure public institution, the county clerk's office, which is basically the place where officials hold, among other administrative things, criminal records. Why did Calvin focus on the role of the county clerk? So one of the things that Calvin kind of quickly came to understand while he was working as a jailhouse lawyer was that access to your own records is such an incredibly important and powerful tool to relitigate your case and in many instances to secure your own freedom. And, you know, in numerous instances, you will speak to people who have spent years, sometimes decades trying to get hold of their old records in order to, you know, reexamine them to potentially relitigate the case.

12:36In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, thousands and thousands of records were destroyed and lost at the criminal courthouse. There's been a recent scandal where, you know, dozens of boxes were sent to landfill accidentally. And so this is an office, in Calvin's opinion, that has been in need of dire reform for many, many decades.

12:56Olly Laughland:He was successful, wasn't he, in helping other inmates do this? What about his own case files? Was he able to get hold of his own records? So it took Calvin a very long time to try and get hold of his own records. You know, the rights that incarcerated people have to file public records requests in Louisiana at the time was extremely restrictive. It also cost a lot of money. One of the highest sort of paying programs in prison was a blood plasma program where inmates would essentially donate their own blood plasma for a fee. And so he signed up for this program and used the money that he raised for that to get hold of his old transcripts from court.

13:34Olly Laughland:God, so he literally sold his own blood to be able to raise the money to get his own court transcripts. That's exactly right, yeah. Calvin tried for years to fight his own case from inside prison. What was the turning point that eventually saw him released? So Calvin eventually, having fought for himself for many years, eventually gets representation through the New Orleans Innocence Project, which he actually helped co-found himself, given all the incredible work he was doing for other inmates at the time. Right. For people who don't know, the Innocence Project is this not-for-profit that works to help free prisoners who they believe have been wrongly convicted.

14:16Yeah. And once the Innocence Project kind of take on his case, they go back and try and find as many of the old records associated with his prosecution and the original police investigation as they possibly can. and they unearthed some pretty extraordinary bombshell documents that show inconsistencies in the way in which he was identified by the sole eyewitness who testified at trial and also allegations of police corruption to do with the arresting officer that were not presented to the jury at the time. And this, lawyers say, should be grounds for a new trial. It should be grounds to bring his case back into court.

14:56and it takes many, many years for that to happen but eventually it does and he takes a plea deal in 2011 to manslaughter an armed robbery. It's a deal he didn't particularly want to take but he did it anyway to essentially ensure his freedom and he walked free at the beginning of 2011.

15:17Olly Laughland:And how many years had he served inside prison at that point? He'd been inside for 28 and a half years. A decade later, through various reforms in the post-conviction process, he was able to be fully exonerated. So his case was able to be refiled in court. The district attorney's office decided not to prosecute him and the case was dropped. He was exonerated.

15:45so ollie i think a lot of people would understand that if you know after nearly three decades in prison calvin got out and you know went back to like a quiet civilian life but he didn't do that did he he went and he got an official law degree at the age of 60 he's also been teaching law in a university in the state. And then a couple of years later, he decided to run for the job that he'd learned so much about in jail, this criminal county clerk role, which is an elected position. Why does he decide to go down that route? To Calvin, if the office is not functioning correctly, if it's harder to get hold of your records, it can make your life hell.

16:29And, you know, Calvin is really a living example of that, as are many of the people that he's represented. And so he told me that it's something that he had been considering for a while, but the decision to run was actually pretty spontaneous. He found out just a few days before the closing window to register for it. And he just went and did it. You know, he told a couple of his friends that's what he was planning to do. And he went and did it.

16:50Olly Laughland:So he announces that he's going to run for this position. And what happens next? It really took the city by storm. You know, this is an incumbent. He was running against an incumbent, an incumbent Democrat, who had been in that position for many years. His candidacy elevated this race from what has previously been a pretty obscure, you know, often uncompetitive race into one of the most talked about elections of that particular cycle. It also instigated a pretty quick and harsh backlash, not just from the state Republican Party, but it also it created a rupture in the local Democratic Party as well.

17:29people who didn't think that it was Calvin's time to run, that were happy with the incumbent. And so he faced a kind of backlash on two fronts, really.

17:38Olly Laughland:And what were some of the attack lines that they were using against him? So the main one, and the one that I think caused the most outrage here, was to essentially try and re-litigate Calvin's past. During the campaign, he was referred to as a convicted killer by his opponent during a live television debate. I want to address Mr. Duncan's comment about being exonerated. First of all, the fact of the matter is, court records show that Mr. Duncan was convicted of murder and armed robbery. He later pled guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery. And also was contacted by the state's Republican Attorney General's office, who threatened to sue him if he continued to refer to himself as an exoneree.

18:25Olly Laughland:I also don't understand how they could do that, because, I mean, surely the law said that he had been exonerated, that he wasn't guilty of those crimes. I, you know, have studied American politics for a long time. I've been here for a long time. I've never really seen anything like that before, particularly in a race that is such a down ballot race that, you know, obviously, as we've discussed, holds power in a particular iteration. But it's not the same as, you know, sending somebody to Congress or whatever it is. to see that level of vitriol and what I described in my piece as kind of gutter politics, you know, pushed onto this role to such an extraordinary man, was extremely confronting and outraged a lot of people here.

19:08That put me back on trial. So now this guy's challenging me. He's doing the same thing that I fought for, what, 28 years to prove my innocence? Then, you know, I got out. Now it's close to, what, 40 years? And I'm still fighting to prove my innocence? In the public arena, right? In the public arena, yeah, that shit, it was crazy. That was like, what the hell?

19:37Olly Laughland:So it was a smear campaign, it was nothing more than that, but did it work? It absolutely didn't work. We won by big numbers, 68.2%. And it was so, this city was so excited that they was now given the opportunity to participate in this democratic process. To me, it's just this kind of extraordinary, almost cinematic story of defiance in the face of incredible odds. But unfortunately, it didn't end there. Coming up, Calvin thought he could finally make meaningful changes to the justice system in Louisiana. but Republicans had other ideas.

20:30So Oliver, Calvin had worked for so long to get into this position where he thought he could help revolutionise prisoner rights. He won the election at the end of 2025. What happened next? So almost immediately after Calvin winning election, the state Republican Party put together some hastily proposed legislation to effectively abolish his position. Orleans Parish is the only parish in Louisiana that has two elected offices for the clerk of court. One is for the civil clerk, one is for the criminal clerk. and the reason for that and it's been in place for many many decades is just because it's the most active court system in the state you know the criminal court system here sends more people to prison than anywhere else in the state and so the argument is they need two different clerks to you know administer the sheer volume of cases the republican state legislature and a particular senator who is not from New Orleans who pushed this legislation argue that this was essentially a way of just streamlining the office making some savings which would have been you know, a few tens of thousands of dollars to many people and myself.

21:42And I think we should be honest as journalists, you know, and call it out when we see it. This was a vitriolic campaign to basically end his run for office to subdue black political power in the city of New Orleans. And just again, another kind of hurdle that Calvin would have to try and overcome again in his life. and then the powers that be say okay you won but calvin you're not gonna take office we couldn't you know we couldn't derail you but guess what i'm about i'm abolished the whole seat some people you know it was the first time they had voted in that election when they found out that their vote basically no longer counted they were absolutely outraged but also kind of felt like it fed into this long historical trajectory of attempting to neuter the power of black voters and black representatives in the South and in New Orleans, in Louisiana.

22:42Olly Laughland:But he did have his moment of going and taking up the mantle of that role that he'd been elected. Can you tell us about that day where he went and he was sworn in? As this law was being passed through the Republican state legislature, Calvin basically, you know, attempted to fight back again, as he always does. He countersued, trying to prove that, you know, this new law was unconstitutional. There were mechanisms that the city set up to try and, you know, redo the election under the consolidated position. And all the while this was happening, Calvin just sort of saw straight through it and went and took what was essentially a symbolic swearing in ceremony in front of the court steps where he had once been tried and sent away to prison for the rest of his life.

23:27While I was being knighted, it really felt, it felt good because I've always considered myself as a protector of the Constitution. and then a few weeks later when there was a lull in this litigation fight that was going on he took office he went into the clerk of court he sat behind the executive desk and he was the clerk of court and unfortunately that window lasted only three hours because an appeals court decision basically you know ended that window and he was forced to leave but he told me about what he did in that office in those three hours he was in power and what it meant to him. Oh, we toured the place.