By Sue Strachan The theme for the 17th annual Innocence Project New Orleans Gala was “Together We Persist,” recognizing the persistence over the years of IPNO staff and interns in solving cases, as well as the persistence that its clients and…
By Matt Sledge In the latest skirmish over claims of prosecutorial misconduct in Louisiana, a nonprofit law firm is asking the state Supreme Court to suspend the prosecutor who oversaw what it says was an Avondale man’s wrongful conviction for…
A 59-year-old man who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder he did not commit was released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Gerald Manning was 17 when he was sentenced for the rape and murder of Vonda Harris…
By Heather Nolan A federal appeals court has denied a request by Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office to re-hear the case of John Floyd, who spent 36 years locked up for a murder he says he didn’t commit. Floyd was…
Opinion by Kristin Wenstrom and Jee Park At age 16, Brendan Dassey was aggressively interrogated by police officers in Wisconsin over a 48-hour period. Most of the time, Brendan sat slumped over with a blank look on his face. Officers…
By John Simerman A federal appeals court panel has denied a bid by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office to challenge an April ruling that found ample evidence John Floyd was innocent of the 1980 stabbing murder of a Times-Picayune…
by Grace Toohey For more than four decades in prison, Gerald Manning maintained his innocence — serving time for a brutal murder and rape for which he was convicted as a juvenile — until, only recently, DNA evidence bolstered his…
In 2010, I was a college student at a small public university in North Louisiana. When I was in college, I knew I wanted to go to law school someday to become a criminal defense trial lawyer. I had the opportunity…
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards on Wednesday (May 23) signed into law legislation requiring all police agencies in Louisiana to adopt eyewitness identification procedures aimed at preventing mistaken identifications and wrongful convictions. Read more here.
Standing in the prison yard at Angola, Robert Jones learned a lesson from a fellow inmate, a boxing instructor, about fighting. It was the mid 1990s, and Jones was still reeling from the life sentence he received after a jury…
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