Louisiana emerges as a central battleground in the effort to make juvenile-sentencing reforms real. After the Supreme Court barred life without parole for children convicted of nonhomicide offenses, and later prohibited mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, hundreds of people in Louisiana and neighboring states became eligible to seek new sentences. Many had no clear right to a lawyer. The Equal Justice Initiative took on almost one hundred cases after the first ruling and another hundred after the second, adding them to an already substantial juvenile docket. The resulting workload quickly overwhelmed the organization.

Louisiana and the Resentencing Challenge

The legal change was clearest on paper and harder in court. Louisiana was among the states where hundreds of cases were affected, yet trial courts often required lawyers to argue again for the basic distinction between children and adults that the Supreme Court had recognized. The difficulty was especially pronounced for people sentenced to life without parole for nonhomicide offenses: Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia together accounted for close to 90 percent of those cases, and the author spent increasing time in those states pressing courts to provide meaningful opportunities for release.

The scale of the problem was inseparable from the conditions in which many Louisiana clients had spent their lives in prison. The Equal Justice Initiative undertook representation of all sixty people in Louisiana eligible for relief from life-without-parole sentences for nonhomicide offenses; almost all were held at Angola Prison. In the 1970s and 1980s, when many first arrived, violence and dangerous labor were pervasive. Prisoners could receive additional punishment or time for conflicts with other inmates or staff, and could be forced into difficult manual work or face solitary confinement. Some suffered serious injuries, including the loss of fingers or limbs, after long hours in hazardous conditions.

Angola's History and the Long-Term Prisoners

The penalties attached to prisoners’ disciplinary records could obscure the conditions under which those records had been made. Angola had been a slave plantation before the Civil War, and for years incarcerated men were forced to pick cotton in its fields. Refusing the work could bring a write-up in a prisoner’s file and months in solitary confinement. Against this history, a long list of infractions did not necessarily show that a person was beyond rehabilitation: violence, dangerous labor, and the prospect of dying in prison shaped the conduct later presented at resentencing hearings as a reason to deny relief.

Some former juvenile lifers nevertheless built strong institutional records despite serving for decades with no expectation of release or review. They became trustees, mentors, and advocates against violence; others worked as law librarians, journalists, or gardeners. Angola gradually developed programs for prisoners who stayed out of trouble, and many of EJI’s clients made use of them. Their histories stood in contrast to the disciplinary records accumulated under harsh conditions, and gave the resentencing cases evidence of lives and contributions that a sentence of permanent imprisonment had treated as irrelevant.

EJI chose to begin its Louisiana resentencing litigation with two long-serving prisoners, Joshua Carter and Robert Caston. Carter had been sixteen in 1963 when he was accused of rape in New Orleans, Louisiana, and quickly sentenced to death. Police beat him to coerce a confession; in 1965, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned his conviction. He was then resentenced to life without parole and sent to Angola. After years of struggle, he became a model prisoner and trustee, but in the 1990s he developed glaucoma and, without the medical care he needed, lost his sight in both eyes. By the time EJI sought his release, he was blind, in his sixties, and had spent nearly fifty years in prison.

Caston had been at Angola for forty-five years. Forced prison labor had cost him several fingers in a factory and left him disabled. The two cases made the consequences of lifelong punishment tangible: Carter’s decades had included coerced confession, an overturned conviction, untreated loss of sight, and service as a trustee; Caston’s included lasting injury from work imposed inside the prison. EJI’s choice to prioritize such long-timers brought the conditions and accumulated years of juvenile imprisonment directly into the question of what a new sentence should permit.

Preparing for Life Beyond Prison

Resentencing also raised a practical question beyond the courtroom: how could people who had spent decades in prison rebuild a life after release, often with few support systems waiting for them? The Equal Justice Initiative created a re-entry program specifically for people incarcerated as children, offering housing, job training, life-skills support, counseling, and other services intended to help them succeed. It told judges and parole boards that clients would not be left to manage that transition alone. The program made release support part of the work of resentencing, not an afterthought to it.

From New Orleans to Angola and Back

Joshua Carter’s case traces a circuit through Louisiana’s institutions: an accusation in New Orleans, a death sentence overturned after police beat him to obtain a confession, a life-without-parole sentence carried out at Angola Prison, and, decades later, a request to New Orleans prosecutors to consider his release. The possibility of return thus came before the same city from which his imprisonment had begun, after nearly fifty years in custody. In this account, Louisiana is not merely the setting for resentencing litigation; it is the jurisdiction where the distance between a child’s original prosecution and the prospect of release had to be crossed.