Bryan Stevenson and Robert Caston

Bryan Stevenson and Robert Caston were brought together by a campaign to turn a constitutional ruling into release for a man who had spent forty-five years in prison. Caston had lost several fingers while working in a prison factory at Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary); Stevenson helped pursue a new sentence for the non-homicide crime Caston committed at sixteen, and stood in court when that effort finally succeeded. Their relationship is documented chiefly through this work: the years of confinement that gave the case its stakes, the repeated hearings that delayed relief, and the release that followed a judge’s ruling.

Caston’s imprisonment and the prospect of relief

Robert Caston had been at Angola for forty-five years and was disabled after losing several fingers in prison factory labor. His case was among those of people serving life without parole for non-homicide offenses as children. Although the Supreme Court of the United States had barred such death-in-prison sentences, securing a new sentence did not automatically mean freedom. Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative focused on Louisiana’s juvenile lifers who had been incarcerated for decades, and selected Caston and Joshua Carter as their first two cases to litigate. Their aim was not simply a revised sentence: because both men had spent nearly fifty years in prison, Stevenson’s team sought their immediate release.

The conditions at Angola formed part of the context in which Caston’s long imprisonment had unfolded. Many of the Louisiana clients eligible for relief had lived through a prison regime marked by violence, forced manual labor, and disciplinary punishments. Caston’s lost fingers made that history personal and physical, rather than an abstract account of prison conditions. The evidence does not describe his relationship with Stevenson as extending beyond legal advocacy, but it shows that Stevenson’s work addressed both the sentence imposed on Caston as a child and the consequences of the decades he had spent incarcerated.

Repeated hearings in New Orleans

Stevenson traveled repeatedly to New Orleans, Louisiana, for the resentencing cases. After three trips, neither Caston nor Carter had received a new sentence. Stevenson’s team had met with the district attorney, filed papers with the judge, and consulted local officials, yet the procedural effort still had not cleared the way for release. A fourth hearing, scheduled a couple of weeks before Christmas, brought Stevenson and local counsel Carol Kolinchak back to court to work through the remaining issues keeping the men incarcerated.

The hearing was part of a larger, difficult court process. The courthouse in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, was crowded and hearings were not reliably called at their scheduled times; lawyers and clients waited amid a busy docket while judges managed cases in packed courtrooms. Against that background, Stevenson’s immediate task was practical: resolve the outstanding matters and persuade the court to resentence Caston. The state generally did not transport inmates from Angola for such hearings, instead connecting them to proceedings by video. That arrangement would shape the moment of success: Caston could not see everything from the monitor, so Stevenson later had to explain the ruling to him by telephone.

The ruling and the courtroom’s response

At Caston’s hearing, the judge granted the motion for a new sentence that would release him immediately. As she recounted the date of his conviction and the decades he had spent at Angola, the courtroom changed. The noisy room fell silent: lawyers stopped conferring, prosecutors waiting on other matters paid attention, family members stopped talking, and handcuffed inmates awaiting their own cases listened. The judge identified the central facts—that Caston had been sent to Angola in the 1960s and had spent forty-five years there for a non-homicide crime committed at sixteen—before pronouncing the sentence that meant he would be released.

Stevenson smiled at Kolinchak. Then the courtroom broke into applause. Defense lawyers, prosecutors, family members, deputy sheriffs, and even the handcuffed inmates joined in. Kolinchak wiped away tears, and the judge, who ordinarily tolerated no disruptions, seemed to accept the moment’s emotion. The response did not alter the legal basis of the ruling; it revealed how the ruling had been received by people who had witnessed the accumulated weight of Caston’s imprisonment and the effort to end it.

Because Caston was following the hearing by video, Stevenson spoke with him by phone and explained what had happened. Caston was overjoyed. He became the first person released as a result of the Supreme Court of the United States’ ban on death-in-prison sentences for juvenile lifers. The case therefore marked both a personal turning point and an early practical realization of a ruling whose implementation had required repeated litigation.

Release and the meaning of the partnership

Stevenson and Kolinchak began making arrangements for Caston’s release that evening. Angola’s protocol was to release prisoners at midnight and provide bus fare to New Orleans or another city in Louisiana. To spare Caston that midnight journey, the team sent staff the several hours to Angola to meet him when he was released. The planning extended the courtroom victory into the concrete work of getting a person home; the evidence records those arrangements, rather than further details of Caston’s life after release.

The partnership’s significance lies in the distance between a promise of legal relief and its delivery. A Supreme Court ruling had opened a path, but Caston remained imprisoned through three trips to court and required a fourth hearing before a judge resentenced him. Stevenson’s role was persistent and specific: he worked with local counsel, navigated the unresolved court matters, sought immediate release, and explained the result directly to Caston when the video hearing left him unable to see the courtroom’s response. The applause was a striking public sign of recognition, but the relationship’s defining act was the sustained legal work that made Caston’s release possible.