The Human Cost of Jeff Landry’s Drive to Resume Executions
March 26, 2025 at 04:30PMChris Duncan has spent over 25 years on Louisiana’s death row for a crime that may not have even happened. His 1998 conviction was built on now-discredited bite mark forensics, a jailhouse informant’s faulty testimony, and prosecutorial misconduct. With new evidence, Duncan now has a chance to prove his innocence in court. Over the decades, Louisiana has shifted its stance on executions, but current governor Jeff Landry, an ardent death penalty supporter, has moved swiftly since he took office on his “tough on crime” agenda, “determined to craft a future for Louisiana in which people condemned by the state to die remain trapped, with little to no chance at relief.” Piper French writes a deeply reported story for Bolts and Mother Jones on Louisiana’s death penalty system.
With Landry in office, the prospect of mass clemency was all but dead. But the same issues as before—shoddy lawyering, prosecutorial misconduct, bogus forensics—were still cropping up and undermining convictions. In May 2024, Chris was granted a new evidentiary hearing. A judge would evaluate whether the factual innocence petition his lawyers had presented possessed enough evidence to merit a new trial. It would be the first real momentum his case had in more than 13 years.
The hearing was set for late September. It would coincide with a grim milestone: For the first time in decades, five executions were being carried out around the country in a seven-day span. In Missouri,Marcellus Williams would be executed for crimes that he always maintained he did not commit. Alabama would put Alan Miller to death using nitrogen gas—an omen of Louisiana’s future now that Landry was in charge.
Last spring, a longtime lawyer who volunteers at Angola told me that watching the men he worked with weekly go to the execution chamber would be too much to bear. But he harbored no illusions about Landry. “This man we have right now, you’re gonna need a freight train to stop him,” he said.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/26/the-human-cost-of-jeff-landrys-drive-to-resume-executions/
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