Robert Caston

Robert Caston was a juvenile offender whose forty-five years at Angola Prison ended only after a Supreme Court ruling made resentencing possible. His case joined the legal effort to turn a constitutional change into an actual release: after years of forced labor and repeated, unsuccessful court trips, Caston was resentenced and freed immediately. The moment carried a meaning larger than one man’s exit from prison, because it showed that a sentence imposed on a child could still be changed decades later.

Identity and Background

The book gives only a few details about Caston’s life before prison. It identifies him as a sixteen-year-old when he was sent to Angola in the 1960s for a nonhomicide crime. By the time his case became part of the resentencing effort, he had spent forty-five years there—nearly half a century under a sentence that had left no ordinary path home.

Prison labor had marked his body as well as his time. Caston lost several fingers while working in a prison factory and was disabled as a result of the forced labor. His physical injury was one concrete trace of the conditions endured by men whose long sentences had begun when they were children; it was not an abstraction in a courtroom argument, but a consequence he carried into the effort to obtain release.

The Resentencing Effort

After the Supreme Court prohibited life-without-parole sentences for children convicted of nonhomicide crimes, the Equal Justice Initiative established a re-entry program for people who had spent many years in prison after being incarcerated as children. The organization committed to providing services, housing, job training, life skills, counseling, and other support needed after release. That promise mattered to the resentencing campaign: the effort was not simply to obtain a new sentence, but to make release a practical possibility for people who had been separated from ordinary life for decades.

The initiative made Louisiana cases a priority, particularly those of the oldest juvenile lifers, and undertook representation of all sixty Louisiana prisoners eligible for relief. Caston and Joshua Carter were selected as the first two cases to litigate. Both had been imprisoned for nearly fifty years, and the legal team sought their immediate release. Their cases required work with local officials and prosecutors as well as repeated court appearances; the Supreme Court’s ruling had created an opening, but it did not itself put either man outside prison.

The resentencing hearings took place in the crowded Orleans Parish courthouse. The building’s grand halls and marble floors contrasted with the disorder of its daily proceedings: cases accumulated, schedules slipped, and clients and lawyers waited among crowded courtrooms. After three trips to New Orleans, Caston and Carter still had no new sentences. The lawyers met with the district attorney, filed papers, and consulted local officials, but the practical obstacles keeping the men incarcerated remained unresolved.

The Fourth Hearing

A couple of weeks before Christmas, the legal team returned for a fourth hearing. Caston and Carter had separate judges and courtrooms, but the team hoped that success in one case might make success in the other more attainable. In Caston’s courtroom, the lawyers worked through the remaining paperwork and issues while the hearing unfolded in the same noisy, frenetic setting that had characterized earlier visits.

The State usually did not transport prisoners from Angola to New Orleans for hearings; instead, inmates watched by video hookup from the prison. After the arguments, the judge granted the motion to resentence Caston. As she recited the circumstances of his conviction and his decades in prison, the courtroom fell completely silent. Lawyers stopped conferring, prosecutors waiting on other cases paid attention, family members stopped talking, and handcuffed inmates awaiting their own proceedings listened.

The judge emphasized that Caston had been sent to Angola in the 1960s at sixteen and had spent forty-five years there for a nonhomicide crime. She then pronounced a sentence that meant he would be released immediately. The change came not through a gradual reduction of his term, but through a new sentence that brought his incarceration to an end.

Release and Significance

The silence gave way to applause. Defense lawyers, prosecutors, family members, deputy sheriffs, and even the handcuffed inmates in the courtroom joined in. The response made Caston’s release a shared public moment within a courthouse usually governed by the churn of individual cases. For the lawyers, the applause marked a reversal of the long impersonal process: the court had finally paused to acknowledge the years contained in one sentence and one life.

Caston was watching from a video monitor and could not see everything that had happened. Bryan Stevenson spoke with him by phone to explain the ruling. Caston was overjoyed. He became the first person released as a result of the Supreme Court’s ban on death-in-prison sentences for juvenile lifers, giving the new constitutional rule a tangible result in a case involving a child sent away in the 1960s.

The team then went to Carter’s courtroom and also won a new sentence that meant Carter could be released immediately. Staff began arranging both men’s departures that evening. Angola’s release protocol ordinarily sent prisoners out at midnight with bus fare to New Orleans or another city in Louisiana; because the journey would have left the men to make their way from prison after midnight, staff were dispatched to meet them at Angola. Caston’s case thus ended not at the moment the judge spoke, but with the practical arrangements required to carry a court order into the world beyond prison.