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Louisiana has a long legacy of violating rights to secure convictions and putting innocent people in prison. A new law effectively shuts the door on their ability to seek relief.
Piper French
July 2, 2025
Malcolm Alexander had been incarcerated at Angola prison 14 years already when he learned about DNA testing, the thing that would ultimately free him, while watching television coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial.
In November 1980, Alexander, a Black man from Shreveport, Louisiana, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for raping a white woman at gunpoint. The case against him involved a handful of factors that are hallmarks of wrongful convictions: The victim never got a good look at her assailant, and her initial I.D. of Alexander was shaky (cross-racial identifications are much more likely to be incorrect) but police recorded her confidence in the choice as 98 percent certain. Alexander’s lawyer, who was later disbarred, failed to call any defense witnesses, and the entire trial lasted less than eight hours. “It wasn’t even a full workday,” Alexander told Bolts. Critical evidence in his case was destroyed after his conviction.
Still, it took him 38 years to win his freedom. He began making hobbycraft, and rode horses and wrestled bulls at the Angola rodeo, to fund his legal case. In 1996, the Innocence Project took him on as a client. Eventually, they uncovered new hair evidence from the crime scene. DNA testing showed it didn’t belong to Alexander or the victim, and in 2018, he was finally exonerated. “I lived 38 years of my life in the institution for something I didn’t do. And believe me, that’s a nightmare,” he told Bolts. “It could be an enemy of mine, I wouldn’t even want him to go through that.”
Every step of Alexander’s fight for justice happened under the process laid out in the state’s criminal code of procedure that governs the rights of prisoners to challenge their conviction in court. But under a brand-new Louisiana law, he would very likely still be in prison today.
https://boltsmag.org/louisiana-limiting-post-conviction-relief-murrill-landry/
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Louisiana Is Bulldozing the Right of Prisoners to Prove Their Innocence After a Conviction
