Bryan Stevenson and Joshua Carter

Bryan Stevenson and Joshua Carter were joined by a long-delayed effort to turn a sentence imposed on a child into a path out of prison. Carter had spent almost fifty years incarcerated after being condemned as a teenager; Stevenson helped pursue a new sentence that would allow him to come home. Their relationship, as the book presents it, is principally one of attorney and client, but the work around Carter’s case also brought his family, local advocates, and the machinery of Louisiana courts into the story of what release would require.

Identity and Background

Carter was sixteen in 1963 when he was accused of rape in New Orleans and quickly sentenced to death. Police had beaten him brutally to coerce a confession. The severity of that abuse was so evident that, in 1965, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned his conviction. The reversal did not end his imprisonment: Carter was resentenced to life without parole and sent to Angola.

His sentence made the distance between the legal reversal and any meaningful return to freedom stark. The conviction had been overturned, but Carter remained incarcerated for decades. By the time Stevenson and his colleagues took up his case, Carter was in his sixties, blind, and had spent nearly half a century in prison. In the 1990s, he developed glaucoma and did not receive the medical care he needed; he eventually lost sight in both eyes. Those circumstances gave the resentencing effort a particular urgency: the work was not simply to revisit a childhood conviction, but to seek release for an older man whose imprisonment had already consumed most of his life.

The Resentencing Effort

Stevenson’s team made Carter one of two “old-timers” whose Louisiana cases they chose to prioritize. The other was Robert Caston, who had also spent decades at Angola. Working with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, the team sought constitutionally acceptable new sentences for both men. Carol Kolinchak served as local counsel in the Louisiana cases. Their objective was immediate release, not another sentence that would leave Carter imprisoned after nearly fifty years.

The route through court was slow. Stevenson traveled repeatedly to the trial courts in Orleans Parish for the Carter and Caston cases. Hearings were difficult to secure and unreliable in practice: scheduled dates did not ensure that the cases would be heard, and crowded courtrooms were filled with other matters awaiting attention. After three trips to New Orleans, Carter and Caston still had no new sentences. Stevenson and his colleagues met with the district attorney, filed papers with the judge, and consulted local officials, trying to resolve the procedural obstacles keeping the two men incarcerated.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, Stevenson returned to court for a fourth attempt. The cases were assigned to different judges and courtrooms, but the team hoped that winning release for one man might make it easier to obtain release for the other. This was not a single dramatic hearing but a sequence of journeys, filings, consultations, and unresolved issues. The repeated trips make the relationship visible through work: Stevenson’s representation meant continuing to press the case after the first attempts had failed to produce a new sentence.

Family and the Stakes of Release

Carter’s family sustained its connection with him across the decades. After Hurricane Katrina, relatives had scattered from New Orleans and were living hundreds of miles away, yet about a dozen family members continued to attend each hearing. Some traveled from as far away as California. Their presence turned the court proceedings into more than a dispute over sentencing: they were also occasions on which a family kept showing up for someone whose return had been deferred for most of his life.

Carter’s mother was nearly a hundred years old. For decades, she had promised her son that she would not die before he came home from prison. The account places that promise alongside the lawyers’ repeated court appearances, giving the legal campaign a human measure of time. The mother’s commitment did not itself resolve the case, but it made the stakes of delay concrete: every unsuccessful hearing extended a separation that had already lasted nearly half a century.

Release and the Meaning of the Partnership

At the fourth hearing, Stevenson and Kolinchak first secured a new sentence for Caston that meant immediate release. The judge described Caston’s forty-five years at Angola for a non-homicide crime committed when he was sixteen. The courtroom fell silent, then erupted in applause. Stevenson had to explain the result to Caston by phone because Caston could not see what was happening on the video monitor. That first success was followed by another: the lawyers went down the hall to Carter’s courtroom and won a new sentence that also meant he would be released immediately.

Carter’s family was ecstatic. The account records hugs and promises of home-cooked meals for Stevenson and the EJI staff, an expression of welcome that followed years in which the family had traveled to court to ask that Carter be allowed to return. Stevenson and Kolinchak then began arranging both men’s releases for that evening. Angola’s usual protocol was to release prisoners at midnight and provide bus fare to New Orleans or another Louisiana city. Rather than leave Carter and Caston to make that journey after their release, the team sent staff several hours to Angola to meet them.

The result gives the relationship its decisive shape: Stevenson’s representation helped convert a long sentence imposed after a coerced confession into a new sentence and immediate freedom. Carter’s story also shows how release depended on more than a courtroom ruling. It required repeated advocacy, local legal support, a family that remained present, and practical arrangements for the first hours outside prison. The book gives no account of a private exchange between Stevenson and Carter at the moment of release; instead, it emphasizes the accumulated work and the family’s long-awaited welcome. Their relationship is therefore recorded through its consequences: a case pursued across years and hearings, and a homecoming made possible after almost fifty years of confinement.