New Orleans, Louisiana, is where the effort to win freedom for Robert Caston and Joshua Carter moved through crowded courtrooms, repeated delays, and, at last, two resentencing victories. The city’s massive courthouse makes the machinery of justice visible: long waits, handcuffed young men, lawyers trying to manage crowded proceedings, and families who keep coming back. Against that backdrop, a courtroom’s sudden silence and applause mark a rare reversal of its ordinary rhythms.

The courthouse and its rhythms

The Orleans Parish, Louisiana, courthouse is described as massive and intimidating, with grand marble floors, high ceilings, and multiple courtrooms opening onto an enormous hallway. Hundreds of people bustle through those halls each day. The architecture lends the building a sense of grandeur, but the proceedings inside are often difficult to navigate: hearings are not reliably scheduled, and an announced date and time may do little to ensure that a case will be heard then.

The wait was not abstract for those who arrived to seek resentencing. A lawyer could come to court for a scheduled hearing only to find a stack of cases ahead, clients and lawyers gathered in an overcrowded courtroom, and overwhelmed judges trying to manage matters through bench meetings. Dozens of young men, most of them Black, sat handcuffed in orange jail-issued jumpsuits at the front of the courtroom. Lawyers consulted with clients and scattered family members amid the congestion. The contrast between the courthouse’s imposing marble scale and the cramped, unsettled work of its daily cases gives the setting its particular force.

Repeated hearings for Caston and Carter

The courthouse became a recurring destination in the effort to obtain new sentences for Caston and Carter. Both men had been imprisoned for nearly fifty years, and the legal team sought their immediate release through constitutionally acceptable resentencing. The advocate traveled back and forth to New Orleans for their cases, meeting with the district attorney, filing papers with the judge, and consulting local officials. After three trips for sentencing hearings, neither man yet had a new sentence.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, the advocate returned for a fourth hearing. Caston and Carter’s matters were before different judges in different courtrooms, but the team hoped that winning release for one might make success for the other easier. Carol Kolinchak, a lawyer with the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, served as local counsel in the Louisiana cases. At the hearing, Kolinchak and the advocate worked through paperwork and the many issues that had kept the men incarcerated. The repeated trips and procedural obstacles show how the promise of a new sentence did not itself translate quickly into freedom.

Families in the halls and courtrooms

Carter’s family maintained a close relationship with him despite the decades of separation. After Hurricane Katrina, many relatives had left 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. Carter’s mother was nearly a hundred years old and had promised him for decades that she would not die before he came home. Their presence made the distance between prison and home tangible inside the courthouse: each hearing was also a family’s repeated journey to witness whether the law would finally change the course of Carter’s life.

Caston’s history carried a different physical record of imprisonment. He had spent forty-five years at Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary) and lost several fingers while working in a prison factory; he was disabled as a result of that forced labor. The resentencing hearings in New Orleans therefore concerned more than correcting the terms of old sentences. They brought the consequences of long confinement into a courtroom where the men themselves were not always physically present. The state usually did not bring prisoners from Angola to New Orleans for hearings, instead connecting them to proceedings by video.

A courtroom changed by release

At the fourth hearing, the judge granted the motion that allowed Caston to be resentenced for immediate release. As she recited the date of his conviction and spoke about his decades in prison, the courtroom, usually busy with lawyers and cases, fell completely silent. Lawyers stopped conferring; prosecutors waiting on other matters paid attention; family members stopped talking; and even the handcuffed inmates awaiting their cases became quiet. When the decision was clear, people across the courtroom—including defense lawyers, prosecutors, family members, deputy sheriffs, and inmates still in handcuffs—applauded. The moment briefly transformed the courthouse from a place of waiting into a public recognition of what the ruling meant.

Because Caston was watching by video, the advocate had to explain the ruling to him by phone. He was overjoyed. He became the first person released as a result of the United States Supreme Court’s ban on life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders. The team then went down the hall to Carter’s courtroom and won a new sentence that also meant immediate release. Carter’s family responded with hugs and promises of home-cooked meals for the legal team.

The victories still required practical work beyond the courtroom. Caston and Carter were to be released that evening, but the protocol at Angola was to release prisoners at midnight and provide bus fare to New Orleans or another city in Louisiana. Staff were sent to Angola, several hours away, to meet the men and spare them the midnight bus trip. In this sequence, New Orleans is both the site where the legal decision was made and the point of connection between the courthouse, the distant prison, and families waiting for their relatives to come home.