Article Image

IPFS News Link • Criminal Justice System

Former prosecutor offers a terrifying explanation for why he helped convict...

• http://www.businessinsider.com, CHRISTINA STERBE

In 1984, Glenn Ford was sentenced to death for the murder of a Shreveport, Louisiana, jeweler after an all-white jury convicted him. Thirty years later, evidence emerged that proved he wasn't the killer.

Ford, suffering from lung cancer he said went untreated, was released from Louisiana's notorious Angola Prison last year.

In a shockingly candid article for the Shreveport Times, the lead prosecutor on Ford's case explained why he helped convict an innocent man: "Winning became everything."

At first, attorney A.M. "Marty" Stroud III was proud of securing a death sentence for Ford.

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," he writes, "was alive and well in Caddo Parish," the Louisiana county that includes Shreveport.

Caddo Parish sentences more people to death per capita than anywhere else in the US, according to The New York Times. (Caddo also had the second-highest number of lynchings between 1877 and 1950, according to data compiled by the Equal Justice Initiative.)


 


Home Grown Food