Orleans Parish, Louisiana, is where Bryan Stevenson repeatedly pursued new sentences and release for Robert Caston and Joshua Carter after nearly fifty years in prison. Its courthouse looms over those efforts as both a physical and procedural obstacle: a monumental building filled with crowded courtrooms, unsettled schedules, and people waiting to be heard, where repeated trips produced no immediate result before a judge finally granted Caston’s release.

The Courthouse and Its Setting

The trial courts in Orleans Parish occupy a courthouse of imposing scale. Multiple courtrooms line an enormous hallway, beneath high ceilings and above grand marble floors; hundreds of people move through the building each day. The setting is not a quiet backdrop to litigation but a crowded public system in motion, with lawyers, clients, and family members sharing hallways and courtrooms.

That scale contrasts with the uncertainty of what happens inside. Hearings were never reliably scheduled, and a stated date and time for Carter’s or Caston’s resentencing could mean little. Stevenson could arrive to find a stack of cases ahead of them and an overcrowded courtroom where judges attempted to manage proceedings through bench meetings. Dozens of young men, most of them Black, sat handcuffed in orange jail-issued jumpsuits at the front, while lawyers consulted with clients and relatives scattered around the room.

Repeated Hearings for Carter and Caston

Stevenson traveled back and forth to the parish’s trial courts for the Carter and Caston cases. The defense team met with the district attorney, filed papers, and consulted local officials in an effort to obtain constitutionally acceptable new sentences. Because both men had already spent nearly fifty years in prison, their lawyers sought immediate release rather than further delay through resentencing proceedings.

The first three trips did not secure a new sentence for either man. A couple of weeks before Christmas, Stevenson returned for a fourth hearing. The cases were before different judges in different courtrooms, but the lawyers hoped that winning release for one man might make it easier to obtain release for the other. They worked with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, whose lawyer Carol Kolinchak served as local counsel, while trying to resolve the accumulated issues keeping Carter and Caston incarcerated.

Family, Delay, and Release

Carter’s family continued to support him despite the long separation. After Hurricane Katrina, relatives had left New Orleans and were living hundreds of miles away, yet about a dozen family members appeared at each hearing; some traveled from as far away as California. Carter’s mother was nearly one hundred years old and had promised him for decades that she would not die before he came home. Their presence brought the cost of the court’s delays into the courtroom, even when the schedule itself seemed indifferent to the date set for a hearing.

At the fourth hearing, the effort to free Caston finally succeeded. After the lawyers presented their arguments in the noisy, frenetic courtroom, the judge granted their motion to resentence him so he could be released immediately. As she recited the date of Caston’s conviction and spoke about his decades in prison, the room fell silent: lawyers stopped conferring, prosecutors waiting on other cases paid attention, family members ceased talking, and the handcuffed men awaiting their cases became quiet. In a courthouse defined by crowding and interruption, that pause marked the weight of the years the proceedings had taken to address—and the immediate consequence of the court’s decision.