John,
Today, on Juneteenth, we commemorate Emancipation Day in the United States. It’s the day in which Union soldiers finally reached Galveston, Texas — two months after the Civil War actually ended — to spread the news that the war was over and all enslaved people were now free. Six months later, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the form of one person owning another as property, but allowed enslavement “as punishment for crime.”
We know that because of these words, the legacy of slavery has persisted in our criminal legal system, allowing incarcerated people to be exploited and used as free and forced labor — and a disproportionate number of people behind bars are Black, including wrongfully convicted people. In fact, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, more than half of the 3,528 people who were exonerated between 1989 and 2023 are Black. At the Innocence Project, two-thirds of the 250 people whose release or exoneration we have helped secure to date are people of color, and 58% of them are Black.
That’s why we are working to tackle the racial injustice ingrained in the criminal legal system and the modern policing methods that perpetuate the inequity. Today and every day, we must all recommit to fighting back against racism and biases — please take some time to read through the articles we’ve compiled that discuss everything from the history of our criminal legal system to how to be a better ally.
A prison guard oversees incarcerated people as they return to the dorms from farm work detail at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La., on Aug. 18, 2011. The guard rides atop a horse that was broken in and trained by incarcerated people. (Image: AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
How the 13th Amendment Kept Slavery Alive: Perspectives From the Prison Where Slavery Never Ended
The 13th Amendment only abolished chattel slavery — the form of slavery in which a person is considered the property of another. But our clients, especially those wrongly imprisoned in the South, know all too well that slavery just continued in the form of mass incarceration. Nowhere is the evolution of slavery into mass incarceration more clearly seen than in places like Parchman Farm in Mississippi and Louisiana’s Angola farm, from which eight Innocence Project clients have been freed so far. Please take a moment today to read the stories of three wrongly convicted people — Innocence Project clients Malcolm Alexander and Henry James, and Innocence Project New Orleans client Calvin Duncan — as they share their stories of survival and strength across decades of incarceration in “America’s bloodiest prison.”
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Cornelius Dupree. Photo by Lacy Atkins.
Book an Innocence Project Speaker This Month
On Juneteenth, we wanted to take this opportunity to invite you to book Innocence Project’s experts or exonerees to speak about advancing racial justice and equality at events you might be planning. Both exonerees and staff members can speak about their work or experiences with the criminal legal system. Everything we do at the Innocence Project is rooted in equality and anti-racism and creating fair, equitable, and compassionate systems of justice for everyone. So if you’re planning an event this month or in the future, consider booking one of the Innocence Project’s speakers.
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Yusef Salaam (c) and Korey Wise (l) on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2019, in New York. (Larry Busacca/AP Images for the Innocence Project)
On Juneteenth, Here Are 5 Ways to Be a Better Ally
Here at the Innocence Project, liberation is the core of our mission. In that spirit and in commemoration of Juneteenth, we offer five ideas for being a better ally in the struggle for racial justice and criminal justice reform, drawn from our five pillars of work: Exonerate, Improve, Reform, Support, and Educate. Please read more about how you can work to strengthen your allyship in the fight for racial justice and criminal justice reform.
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Innocence Project Co-founder Barry Scheck (left) with John Nolley (right) at Mr. Nolley's hearing on May 17, 2016 in Forth Worth, Texas. (Image: Ron Jenkins)
Race and Wrongful Conviction
The disproportionate incarceration of Black people today is borne directly out of this country’s history of slavery and the brutality of the Jim Crow era. Black people account for 40% of the approximately 2.3 million incarcerated people in the U.S. and nearly 50% of all exonerees — despite making up just 13.6% of the U.S. population. At the Innocence Project, we’ve seen that the majority of wrongly convicted people are those who are already among the most vulnerable in our society — people of color and people experiencing poverty. Read more about the connection between race and wrongful conviction and what we’re doing to address it.
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Calvin Duncan the day he was freed. (Image: Courtesy of Calvin Duncan)
How a Wrongly Incarcerated Person Became the ‘Most Brilliant Legal Mind’ in ‘America’s Bloodiest Prison’
Calvin Duncan spent 28.5 years at Angola, a slave-plantation-turned-prison, for a crime he didn't commit based on a mistaken cross-racial eyewitness identification. While he was awaiting trial after his arrest, he studied the law and fought to prove his innocence. Sadly, he was still wrongfully convicted and sent to Angola. When he arrived, he was taken aback by the sight around him in the field — endless prisoners, mostly Black men, forced to work the same land slaves had worked 120 years before, while white men with guns looked on from atop horses. To Calvin, the parallels between being processed through the criminal legal systems and being sold into slavery could not be clearer. But Calvin never lost hope. While incarcerated, he earned his GED and continued studying the law, and eventually began working as “inmate counsel”. For 23 years, he helped people with their appeals and represented people who were mistreated by guards. Read more about Calvin’s story and
journey to exoneration and then share it with your friends and family.
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Malcolm Alexander. (Image: Lacy Atkins/Innocence Project)Malcolm Alexander. (Image: Lacy Atkins/Innocence Project)
A Mistaken Identification Sent Him to Prison for 38 Years, But He Never Gave Up Fighting for Freedom
Malcolm Alexander was sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn't commit and spent decades trying to get back to his family and sweetheart. He was just 20 years old when he was taken from his family and sent to pick cotton in the fields of Angola. On his first morning there, as Malcolm marched to the cotton field in a row of other mostly Black men, bookended by armed men on horseback, he thought, “This is slavery.” But in Louisiana, the State called it prison. Today, about 75% of the people incarcerated there, like Malcolm, are Black, while most of the “free men” on horseback remain white. Over his three years in the fields, Malcolm personally harvested and moved thousands of pounds of cotton and produce, but only ever received a maximum of 4 cents an hour. In 2018, Malcolm was finally exonerated and freed after spending nearly 38 years in prison — but he grapples still with the impact of his wrongful conviction and the decades he spent in what many refer to
as modern-day slavery. Learn more about Malcolm’s case and then share his story with your friends and family online.
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Founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, the Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Our work is guided by science and grounded in anti-racism.
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