The all-white judges of Louisiana’s 5th Circuit Court of Appeal systematically ignored thousands of claims from prisoners, most of them Black, who said they had been wrongly convicted. Efforts to expose the decadelong injustice went unheard.
PrologueTwo years into his 25-year sentence for attempted aggravated rape, Nathan Brown could tell the man sitting across from him a jailhouse lawyer improbably named Lawyer Winfield was not going to help him get out of prison. It was astounding to Brown that he was pinning his hopes on a fellow.