Glenn Ford has been freed from the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana having lived under the shadow of the death sentence for 30 years. He becomes one of the longest-serving death row inmates in US history to be exonerated.
Ford was released on the order of a judge in Shreveport after Louisiana state prosecutors indicated they could no longer stand by his conviction. In late 2013 the state notified Ford’s lawyers that a confidential informant had come forward with new information implicating another man who had been among four co-defendants originally charged in the case.
Odd-job man
Ford was sentenced to death in 1984 for the murder the previous November of Isadore Rozeman, an older white man who ran a Shreveport jewellery and watch repair shop. The defendant had worked as an odd-job man for Rozeman. In interviews with police Ford said that he had been asked to pawn a .38 revolver and some jewellery similar to that taken from Rozeman's shop at the time of the murder by another man who was among the initial suspects.
Asked as he walked away from the prison gates about his release, Ford told WAFB-TV, “It feels good; my mind is going in all kind of directions. It feels good.”
Ford said he did harbour some resentment at being wrongly jailed: “Yeah, cause I’ve been locked up almost 30 years for something I didn’t do. I can’t go back and do anything I should have been doing when I was 35, 38, 40 – stuff like that.”
Ford’s conviction bears all the hallmarks of the glaring inadequacies of the US justice system that are repeatedly found in cases of exoneration. The fact that despite serious qualms among top judges about his conviction this innocent man was kept on death row for so long is certain to be seized upon by anti-death penalty campaigners.
All-white jury
Among the many all too typical problems with his prosecution was the composition of the jury. An African American, Ford was sentenced to death by a jury that had been carefully selected by prosecutors to be exclusively white.
His legal representation at trial was woefully inexperienced. The lead defence counsel was a specialist in the law relating to oil and gas exploration and had never tried a case in front of a jury; the second attorney was two years out of law school and working on small automobile accident insurance cases.
At the trial the state was unable to call any eyewitnesses to the crime, nor was it able to produce a murder weapon. – ( Guardian service)