A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
New Orleans is ready to welcome a new clerk of court. Calvin Duncan, who won in a landslide last week, served nearly three decades in Louisiana's notorious Angola Penitentiary for a crime he did not commit. Now he has what he calls his dream job. Reporter Eve Abrams has the story.
EVE ABRAMS: Calvin Duncan wears wire-frame glasses. He looks like a lawyer, which, as of 2023, he is. You can hear the reverence in his voice when Duncan describes the job he was just elected to.
CALVIN DUNCAN: To be the custodian of the records and evidence and to make sure that they properly preserve for current and future. But also it's not just the records. It's the human part. The human toll.
ABRAMS: Duncan is intimate with that human toll. He spent over 28 years wrongfully imprisoned before securing his freedom over a decade ago, with the help of the Innocence Project New Orleans. While incarcerated, Duncan learned as much as he could about the law. At Angola, he became an inmate counsel substitute, what's known as a jailhouse lawyer, and gave legal counsel to thousands of inmates. He recently wrote a book about this. This is how he discovered the clerk of court is the linchpin of justice.
DUNCAN: I first heard the term clerk of court when I was extradited from Oregon. That was 1982. And at that time, I was in the job court, working and learning the trade. I was like, two weeks from signing up for the military, but then two detectives came to the campus and arrested me.
ABRAMS: The charge was murder, a murder Duncan knew nothing about, but police brought him back to his hometown, New Orleans and put him in the Parish jail. The advice he got from fellow inmates...
DUNCAN: You got to become a lawyer. And then I started trying to teach myself the law and trying to get some of my documents.
ABRAMS: Obtaining those documents - lawyers motions, police reports, trial records - was key to Duncan's freedom. Getting them took decades of fighting and civil lawsuits. Documents are key in so many people's cases, says Rachel Conner, a criminal defense attorney in New Orleans, the only parish in Louisiana that hasn't digitized its records. There's no e-filing, no uploading.
RACHEL CONNER: Everything is manual. So between these certain hours on these certain days, you can go to the clerk's office. You have to have all of your four copies on legal paper with the right number of paper clips. And things get lost all the time.
ABRAMS: Which is why when Duncan got out of prison, he started doing a sort of guerrilla clerking.
DUNCAN: I used to bring my scanner to the DA's office to scan records for people in prison to try to help people meet their deadlines.
ABRAMS: And he didn't stop there. After learning that Louisiana's nonunanimous juries were based on white supremacy. He used court records to find people who had been convicted by those split juries and petitioned the Supreme Court to consider their cases. And in 2020, the court found nonunanimous juries unconstitutional. Duncan was there in Washington for oral arguments, sitting in the front row.
DUNCAN: It was a great feeling, not only just to be in their presence, but to know that a person with a real-life experience could change things.
ABRAMS: Duncan will be sworn in as clerk of court in May of next year.
For NPR News, I'm Eve Abrams in New Orleans.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND'S "CARELESS LOVE (INSTRUMENTAL)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
