Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana

The Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana is identified in the book as a legal partner in litigation seeking new sentences and release for Robert Caston and Joshua Carter. Its documented role is concrete but limited: it worked with Bryan Stevenson’s team in Louisiana, with the project’s lawyer Carol Kolinchak serving as local counsel across the cases. The account places the organization within a long effort to obtain constitutionally acceptable sentences for men who had spent nearly fifty years in prison.

Role in the Louisiana Cases

The project worked with Stevenson’s team on the cases of Caston and Carter. At a hearing held a couple of weeks before Christmas, Stevenson and Kolinchak were processing papers and trying to resolve the many issues that continued to keep both men incarcerated. The project’s participation connected the defense effort to local counsel as it moved through Louisiana courts; the account does not describe its internal structure or broader programs.

Repeated Hearings and Family Presence

By this point, Stevenson had already made three trips to New Orleans for sentencing hearings, yet neither man had received a new sentence. The defense had met with the district attorney, filed papers with the judge, and consulted local officials while seeking a new, constitutionally acceptable sentence—and immediate release, given the men’s decades in prison. The fourth hearing involved two judges and two courtrooms, and the lawyers hoped that winning release for one man might make it easier to secure release for the other.

Carter’s family remained a visible presence through the drawn-out proceedings. After Hurricane Katrina, many relatives had left New Orleans and were living hundreds of miles away, yet around a dozen attended each hearing, some traveling from California. Carter’s mother was nearly a hundred years old and had promised for decades that she would not die before he came home. Their persistence gave the legal effort a human measure of what delay meant, even as the lawyers confronted the procedural obstacles keeping the cases unresolved.

Outcomes and Evidentiary Limits

At the fourth hearing, the judge granted the motion to resentence Caston so that he could be released immediately. The courtroom fell silent as the judge recited the circumstances of his conviction and decades in prison. This was a significant step in the joint effort, but the account does not establish that the Juvenile Justice Project alone secured that result, nor does this hearing passage report Carter’s release. It shows the project’s documented contribution as part of a collaborative legal effort, with distinct outcomes unfolding through separate proceedings.