The grand old criminal courthouse in New Orleans, encased by towering neoclassical columns, is a building that has altered the course of Calvin Duncan’s life at many junctures. First, in 1985, when he was sentenced to life without parole for a murder he did not commit. Then, over decades, as he fought to access his vital case records and was denied by judges the chance to relitigate his case. Later, in January 2011, he appeared here and accepted a deal that finally secured his freedom.
And then, in April of this year, on the steps outside, he placed his hand on a Bible and swore an oath that would elevate him to elected office, having won the race to become the court’s clerk – its chief administrative officer.
At his inauguration Duncan said he would prevent the numerous injustices he faced within these walls from ever happening again. He was dressed in a tan suit and tinted glasses, beaming as a throng of supporters chanted his name. “I have always considered myself as a protector of the constitution,” he said, his hands clasped. It was a moment of deep, resonant catharsis.
Duncan, now 64, left school with a ninth-grade education, but taught himself the law while in prison. He had become one of the country’s most prolific jailhouse lawyers, helping to secure the release of hundreds of people from within the system. Freely elected in the state with the highest rate of incarceration in the US, he had pledged to help reform it.
But this is Louisiana, where a hard-right Republican party, empowered by the second presidency of Donald Trump, holds significant control amid faltering and divided political opposition. A few months after Duncan’s victory in November 2025, the state found another way to knock him down. It moved to eliminate his office entirely, and disenfranchise the thousands of New Orleanians who had just voted him in.
A largely obscure, down-ballot local election transformed into a metaphor for this era of competitive authoritarianism, where the desire for power at all costs seemingly snuffs out even the most exceptional and historic achievements.
Duncan held office for only three hours before a court cleared the way for a hastily passed law that abolished his position.
“Everything I was believing in had been crushed,” he recalls, as we sit in a neatly kept living room at his modest home in the city’s seventh ward, a month after it happened. “I believed in the democratic process. I was out there saying ‘times have changed,’ but this [running for office] has told me ain’t nothing changed. It’s still Reconstruction. They will take your seat just like they did during Reconstruction.”
While his experience resonates with that period in history, when the promise of change in the aftermath of the civil war was met with legalized white supremacy in the south, it comes at a pointed moment in the present, as Black political power in the same region faces a wave of new threats after the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act earlier in April.
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Duncan grew up in the city’s Desire housing projects, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in New Orleans. He lost his mother to cancer as a child and was raised by a succession of relatives. He cared for his younger sister like a father, and in order to pay for their food and clothes was driven to petty crime at the age of 10.
He was just 19 when police arrested him and charged him with the murder of a white man named David Yeager, which occurred during a robbery in 1981. The case relied heavily on the testimony of a single, teenage eyewitness who provided police with a description that did not match Duncan’s. He languished in the city’s brutally violent jail for three years before trial.
It was there that he began to understand the intricacies of a legal system that weighed heavily against him. He met his defence attorneys only once while in jail before trial, and so endeavored to teach himself the law to help fight his own case. With scant resources he created improvised law books, using cuttings from newspaper pieces on local criminal prosecutions, binding them together using spent chewing gum.
He pulls these makeshift books out and shows them to me with pride, their corners worn and browning. I ask where he believes this ingenuity and drive came from, against such steep prospects and at such a dark time in his youth.
“I’m always in a situation where no help is coming,” he says. “And who you going to cry to? That was just life. Ain’t nobody coming to save your ass. None of that. As a matter of fact, the same people that you think are supposed to protect you are the ones that’s going to dog you out.”
He filed his first legal motion in 1984, requesting the court provide him a law book to help prepare his case. He won. Numerous civil suits followed, decrying conditions in jail on behalf of other prisoners. But Duncan was not successful at his own trial, which lasted a single day, and saw him wrongly sentenced to life without parole. It would take more than three decades to correct the miscarriage of justice.
For outsiders, the elected position of clerk of court might seem like a minor bureaucratic role with limited political capital. But for Duncan it represented a life’s ambition. “It’s all I wanted to be,” he says, “because that’s the office that destroyed so many of us.”
He would come to realise the court’s power and dysfunction after he was sent to serve his sentence at Angola prison, the sprawling, 18,000-acre (7,300-hectare) penitentiary on the grounds of a former slave plantation where prisoners continue to toil on the same fields.
Within a year of his time there he earned a GED and then qualified as an “inmate counsel substitute”, first working in the prison’s recently created mental health wing and then, for almost two decades, on death row. Among his main tasks, both for himself and the countless others he helped, was procuring records – from trial transcripts to police reports – searching for evidence of malfeasance or procedural error. Prohibitive fees, administrative chaos and discriminatory laws often made obtaining these basic documents a years-long or futile quest. The issue is particularly acute in New Orleans where thousands of court documents were destroyed during Hurricane Katrina and just last year hundreds of files, including some capital cases, were mistakenly sent to landfill.
Between 1991 and 2002 during his time working on the row, eight of Duncan’s clients and friends were executed by lethal injection.
“Only those living and working near the death chamber could fully grasp the haunting and surreal nature of these state killings: the decades long friendships they tore apart, the terror and grief they instilled in the men waiting their turn,” he recalls in his vivid memoir, the Jailhouse Lawyer, co-written by the justice reform advocate Sophie Cull.
He describes the work as a mixture of legal representation and personal counselling, with most of those on the row suffering from psychological disorders and acute mental health issues. “I accepted that the job was to try and make sure they don’t harm themselves, that they keep hope alive,” he says.
In many ways Duncan’s candidacy for clerk this year represented a continuance of that hope. Families of incarcerated men would contact him throughout the campaign imploring him to help them once elected, as he pledged to modernize the office. “He’s holding on for one reason only, for you to get into that office and find his damn records,” the uncle of one elderly prisoner told Duncan during the campaign.
His removal from the position has left Duncan with a profound sense of guilt. “I felt as though I let these people down,” he says.
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The breakthrough in Duncan’s own case came around 2004 after the Innocence Project of New Orleans uncovered new records. These included revelations that one of the arresting police officers who carried out an initial interrogation had later pleaded guilty to illegal wiretapping in a separate case – information that was withheld at Duncan’s original trial. Further deficiencies in the eyewitness’s identification were also uncovered.
A winding legal journey continued to unfold, but Duncan was eventually released in 2011 after a plea deal. He was later fully exonerated in 2021. He dedicated his life on the outside to prison and legal reform, continuing to advocate for those still incarcerated. He helped lead a successful campaign to abolish non-unanimous jury convictions, an arcane legal practice designed to neuter the power of Black jurors in the era of segregation. He co-founded a pioneering re-entry programme in the city. He led a narrative video project giving voice to those in Angola still serving life sentences. And, in 2023, graduated from law school at the age of 60.
The decision to run for clerk was a last-minute one, having found out with a few days to spare that nominations were still open. It quickly turned into a bitter fight, divided not only by political parties but factionalism within the local Democrats. Duncan was taken off guard. And his ability to remain optimistic in the face of outstanding adversity was tested in ways he had never experienced.
“I didn’t expect any of it,” he recalls.
Duncan’s quashed murder conviction became a political attack line. Before the election, Louisiana’s far-right attorney general threatened legal action against him if he continued to refer to himself as an exoneree. (Duncan’s status as an exoneree is not a matter of legal dispute. His convictions were vacated in 2021 and the district attorney’s office declined to reprosecute him. His case is included in the national registry of exonerations.) During a live local television debate his principal opponent named Darren Lombard, an incumbent Democrat with support from the city’s establishment, described him as a convicted killer.
It was mindless, gutter politics. It felt to Duncan that after three decades of fighting to clear his name in the courts, he was now being forced to do it again in public.
“It was crushing to my spirit,” he recalls of the moment Lombard, who is Black, rebuked him this way on live television. The attacks, levelled by both the Republican party and factions of his own party, were acts of weaponized white supremacy, he believes. “White supremacy, to me, is a spirit,” he says, recalling his time shortly after release from Angola when he campaigned for the removal of old Confederate monuments across the state. “These statues were erected right after the civil war to remind people that spirit still exists. And it looks for a host. And the host is generally us, whether it’s a white person or a Black person.”
The assaults did not work. Duncan won in a landslide with 68% of the vote. Almost immediately the Republican-dominated state legislature moved to abolish his elected office by merging it with a separate position within the local court system.
Further legal battles followed, in which Duncan accused the state’s attorney general and its far-right governor, Jeff Landry, of specifically targeting him in a “coordinated conspiracy” due to his lifelong pursuit of racial justice in the criminal legal system. The state, which had argued the abolition of Duncan’s office was driven by efficiency measures, responded by threatening eight city politicians for supporting local efforts to keep Duncan’s position. The attorney general, Liz Murrill, pointedly invoked a Reconstruction-era “usurper” law as she threatened to remove some of them, including the state’s first elected Black judge, from office. Earlier this month Murrill was indicted by a grand jury in New Orleans over the threats, adding another chapter to the saga.
It all falls against a broader backdrop of political regression in Louisiana. Criminal justice reforms from the past decade have been rapidly undone leading to increasing rates of imprisonment as the Republican governor’s office has sought greater influence in the affairs of New Orleans, an overwhelmingly Democratic city.
But perhaps on a personal level it highlights a particular vindictiveness about this political era. A state that cannot abide the extraordinary achievements of a Black man who had spent a lifetime overcoming the extraordinary and unfair punishment inflicted on him by that same state.
“To me,” says Duncan. “Fighting against a system that is intended to oppress you, that is the American dream.”
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In early May, as these court battles raged on, Duncan entered the courthouse as elected clerk for those three hours. He took a seat at the wooden executive desk and smiled for a photograph. The image now sits in his living room on a small coffee table inside a gold frame. He toured the archives, some in the old parish jail, and saw scattered boxes of records collecting dust and covered in cobwebs. He thought of those he knew still in Angola.
Word eventually came down from the fifth circuit of appeals, the most conservative federal appeals court in the country. It had stayed an earlier ruling, which had allowed Duncan to take office. His time was up. He left through the back door, the course of his life once again decided by a ruling out of his control.
Duncan’s role has subsequently been subsumed, with little legal recourse now left to reverse the outcome. While the shock still lingers he tells me he will run for the modified position of clerk when it is next available in four years.
His first run for office became a lesson in how elected officials, from both political parties, “have no clue about any of the stuff that actually affects us”.
“My hope is that we’re going to take this moment and realise: ‘Damn, nobody is coming to save us. We’ve got to save ourselves.’”
He smiles now, declaring those minutes in power were still a form of victory.
“God gave me those three hours,” he says. “I was the clerk. That’s what I wanted to be. And nobody could take that away from me.”
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The Jailhouse Lawyer by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull is published by Penguin Random House and now available in paperback
