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“It was a long journey of conscience for a former Louisiana prosecutor,” stated the Huffington Post.
“He went from celebrating a death sentence with rounds of drinks three decades ago to writing an anguished, open letter of apology after the convicted man was recently declared innocent and set free.”
“I apologize to Glenn Ford for all the misery I have caused him and his family,” A.M. Stroud III wrote in a letter published in The Times of Shreveport. “I apologize to the family of Mr. Rozeman for giving them the false hope of some closure.”
Ford is an exonerated prisoner released earlier this month from the Louisiana State Penitentiary after serving nearly 30 years on death row. Isadore Rozeman was the elderly victim who was killed in a 1983 robbery.
Stroud’s letter was more than just an apology. It was a condemnation of the state’s decision to oppose compensating the now cancer-stricken Ford for three decades lost. It was also a firm statement against capital punishment.
Unfortunately, a Caddo Parish, Louisiana judge ruled on Friday, March 27th, that Ford will not receive state-mandated compensation, states nola.com.
Ford, 65, petitioned the state for wrongful conviction and imprisonment compensation roughly nine months after Louisiana prosecutors filed a motion to vacate his 1984 conviction.
However, First Judicial District Court Judge Katherine Clark Dorroh sided with a challenge to that petition made by the Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell’s office. It alleged that Ford failed to meet the law’s “factually innocent” clause. That provision requires petitioners to have not committed the crime for which they were originally convicted as well as “any crime based upon the same set of facts” used in the original conviction.
(Updated article)
OK, Fine. 