Louisiana Is Bulldozing the Right of Prisoners to Prove Their Innocence After a Conviction

Oh boy that's fascism

On June 20, Louisiana’s ultra-conservative governor, Jeff Landry, signed House Bill 675, which dramatically restricts the ability of prisoners to seek post-conviction relief. Attorney General Liz Murrill, Landry’s close ally, had made the bill a centerpiece of her legislative agenda this session. Its passage represents a dramatic step forward in Landry and state Republicans’ broader effort to sendLouisiana’s criminal legal system back to a harsher past: speeding up executions, treating more young people as adults, and nearly eliminating parole.

A critical aspect of this agenda has been closing off nearly every avenue available to prisoners seeking to challenge their convictions—despite ample evidence that some of these convictions are flawed. Louisiana has a long and troubling history of violating the constitution to secure guilty verdicts and allowing non-unanimous juries to convict people. The state has put scores of innocent people in prison, including on death row—grave miscarriages of justice that can take decades to undo.

How else are they gonna keep labor costs down? Gotta keep the legal slave system going.