courts

The Desperate Client

William Kissinger · June 5, 2025 · Leave a Comment

Left At The Altar

The interview meeting was not my first. It was to my knowledge, however, the first of its’ kind. I had been an Inmate Counsel (“lawyer” in the jailhouse sense) for a fair number of years and had encountered many entirely new and different – some might go so far as to say “unique” – situations. The guy sitting across from my desk I had talked to a number of times when I made my morning rounds of the tiers on Death Row. Just never at length, never without bars separating us, and never in such a tense moment.

His wrists were wrapped with solid stainless steel handcuffs threaded through the notorious ‘black box’ and his feet were shackled to his chair. Two security officers had brought him into the Legal Aid Office and strapped him in and cautioned him; “Do NOT fuck up! Act like you’ve got some sense now.”

At the time, I was kind of a hero, as I had just a few years before beaten the Warden, Burl Cain, in a huge lawsuit wherein I was portrayed as the hero and he the villain. It was not much of a stretch to frame Cain as a villain – he was wildly popular with Louisiana’s legislature – his brother, James David Cain (R) from Pitkin, Louisiana, was a legislator for some 36 years – and was often caught up in mildly scandalous affairs and various goings-on. Burl testified that I “used bad words,” and deserved to be punished for saying them. All I had said (in a letter to the FDA requesting an investigation into a private enterprise on prison grounds) was that it was “shrouded in secrecy and stinks of impropriety”

So he locked me up in solitary, I was threatened with being “shot while attempting to escape,” and various other forms of not-so-pleasurable treatment. However, thanks to a friend who smuggled a letter detailing my experiences to a federal judge, a volunteer lawyer who fought tooth-and-nail on my behalf (Keith Nordyke), and favorable public opinion, I eventually prevailed in a federal lawsuit. Instant fame amongst the convicts, instant landfall monies, and an instant target on my back from several different quarters.

I had fought my assignment to Death Row for some time. Burl Cain had summoned me to the A-Building late one night and asked me to take on the role. He explained why I was the perfect candidate for the job. I demurred with the best initial answer I could come up with at the moment – “Warden, how do you expect me to go in at night and lay my head down on that pillow and sleep, not knowing if I had correctly and effectively done everything possible to save that man’s life knowing that next week or the week after you’ll be the one to kill him?! I can’t do that.”

Well, as Wardens will do, he let me go with that, and then a week later Colonel Sam Smith called me in to an Internal Review Board and basically told me I had better take the assignment or…else. He said (off the taped record, of course) he had received instructions from Burl Cain. I abandoned my clients on the Civil Litigation Team and I accepted the assignment.

I had settled in fairly well and grown to learn most of my clients – all condemned to die by lethal injection – and become familiar with most of them and their needs. I had Shepardized cases for them, fetched and delivered law books to them, drafted motions on their behalf, filed public records requests for them, obtained DNA tests and located “lost” evidence in police files for them, and advocated with everybody on earth I could think of on their behalf.

This, however, was a beast of a different stripe. When I made morning rounds on the Tiers, Kevin S. had stopped me and thrust a piece of paper in my face. Shaking from fear or anger or worry or some emotion, he said, “Man, these mother-fuckers trying to kill me and I ain’t even got a lawyer!” Well, this wasn’t right or…was it? I mean, everybody on Death Row has lawyers, don’t they? Don’t they?

It was very simple – it was an Order from the 19th Judicial District Court in Baton Rouge (the state’s capital) setting his date of execution. The date that the State of Louisiana would calmly, methodically and purposefully kill him had been set.

But, to my way of thinking, it hadn’t been set in stone. And that’s the only thing that counts. You see, when a convict (especially an Inmate Counsel) thinks there’s a way to get past something, he’s going to find it. Now, it might be around it, over it, under it, or through it…but he’s going to find it.

So, after getting past my initial uneasiness at the way the meeting had started out, we got into the details. Kevin S. – a tall, heavily built and very dark Black man – had been convicted of the July 30, 1991, 1st Degree Murder of one Kenny Ray Cooper, a young guy working at a Church’s Fried Chicken. As he continued with the story, my skepticism began to wane. He told me that it was NOT an armed robbery, as the DA had presented it to the jury. It was actually a case of self-defense.

Louisiana defined 1st Degree Murder (Louisiana Revised Statute R.S. 14.30) at the time as:

“The killing of a human being:

(1) When the offender has specific intent to kill or to inflict great bodily harm and is engaged in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of certain listed felonies (e.g., aggravated kidnapping, rape, robbery, arson, burglary, assault, etc.),

OR

(2) When the offender has specific intent to kill or inflict great bodily harm and meets other aggravating factors.”

As Kevin unraveled the story to me, Kenny owed him money from a previous drug deal, and he had gone to collect after several failed attempts. An argument ensued, and Kenny pulled a gun and Kevin pulled his and they exchanged shots. Kenny died – Kevin survived. Now, Kevin was awaiting the horror of being killed by Louisiana for defending himself.

Before I go further into the story and my reliving of the moment, let me tell you a few things about Louisiana’s death penalty and its’ prosecution and application in Louisiana. Louisiana is inherently a racist state, and always has been. It has a rich and vibrant history of horrific racism. Even today, Louisiana’s justice system fights to maintain Jim Crow-era laws that are responsible for the mass incarceration crisis in the state, and which even now, threatens to dominate the nation in the numbers of prisoners stuck behind bars for the remainder of their natural lives.

When I was in Angola prison (where I served 47 flat calendar years), at one point I was fortunate enough to meet the artist Debra Luster, while she was working on her beautiful exhibit One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. As a wooden bowl maker and erstwhile craftsman, I participated in her project. This was only one of the myriad of experiences where I began to realize that Louisiana had a serious problem with racism and mass incarceration.

However, as I sat across the desk from Kevin on that day, these were all thoughts far from my mind. I was focused on one thing and one thing only: saving his life from being murdered by the State of Louisiana. It really made no difference to me whether Kevin was truly guilty or truly innocent – at moments such as this, innocence is never the point – the point is taking the next in a series of breaths.

Now, I believe I had told you that Kevin said to me, “…trying to kill me and I ain’t even got a lawyer!” Well, that wasn’t entirely correct, Turns out that he did indeed have attorneys appearing on his behalf. They just weren’t there. Turns out there was a big fancy wedding taking place in England, and his attorney was doing the most vitally important task of attending the wedding. Hmmm…balancing the scales between attending a wedding and getting a stay on Kevin’s case….I believe I would have chosen the latter. But, I digress….

I called Ms. Dora Rabalais, (Director of Legal Programs at Angola for 26 years) and explained the situation to her. At that point in time, we had a pretty good relationship because (secretly) she had admired my first battle with Warden Burl Cain, (wherein I wrote the now-famous “shrouded in secrecy” letter). At the conclusion of my case in Federal District Court, she had told me that I had brought credibility and strength back to the program. So, today, she was willing to help in this seemingly urgent matter.

She called the Death Row Warden who was in charge of both CCR (Close Cell Restriction) and Death Row, and I have no clue as to how the conversation went. I do know that it was only about an hour later that one of the post officers came to my office and told me that they would be bringing Kevin to the office in about thirty minutes. So, that’s how we came to be sitting across from each other, how I heard his story, and how the first-of-its-kind meeting was arranged, and how the next events took place.

Kevin and I talked for at least an hour or two and I told him what we would do. I would file for a Stay of Execution and go from there. I prepared it (my first one in such a critical matter!) using a Louisiana Formulary, and had it carried to Ms. Dora’s office where she faxed it to the court. As expected, a few hours later it was DENIED. I had already prepared an appeal of the denial and sent that back to Ms. Dora, where it was faxed to the Louisiana State Supreme Court. Baby stuff, right?

Maybe ‘baby stuff’, but for me, for Kevin, for everybody, it was huge. In times of clear pressure, Legal Programs was thriving and delivering on the promise of effective assistance of counsel substitutes to all inmates.

Under her leadership, Angola’s legal programs became a model for other states. States like Florida, Mississippi, and Texas adopted similar programs to enhance legal assistance for inmates without the need to hire additional attorneys.

Kevin eventually received his stay order. That night, if no other, I could lay my head down and rest knowing that I had done everything I could to help Kevin, and that it would not be the next week that Louisiana would kill him.

We had several more interactions over the next year or so, and I continued my work for Death Row, Treatment Center, and Infirmary Center inmate clients. Years later, I looked up one day in the chow line and Kevin was standing there – free from the promise of death. He had been re-sentenced and now had a LWOP (life without parole) sentence.

Sadly, though, my battles with Burl would resume some time later. We would get into a war over my accusations of financial impropriety and he would again send me to another institution. It was a harrowing experience to endure for what I felt was – again -doing the right thing. Ultimately, I prevailed again,

I have now been free for 781 days. I just turned 72. I’m living my best life. I hope you are too!

Donate NOW To My Life After Prison – FREEDOM CHANNEL

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Unraveling (IN)Justice – Part II

William Kissinger · May 5, 2025 · Leave a Comment

Willing Ears – And A Wide Divide

Recall the two “experts,” Michael West and Steven Hayne. As I explained before, Jimmie’s case has become a hot gathering spot for wrongful conviction advocates primarily because of its connection to two of the most well-known names in forensic misconduct.

These discredited forensic figures have been linked to many wrongful convictions, many of which have been overturned, and of the overturned, 4 are death row veterans. Yet, in spite of mounting evidence that Duncan was convicted based on junk science, Louisiana continued to push onward with the tortuous path towards his execution.

Michael West first: the evidence analysis provided by Dr. Michael West, a so-called “bite mark expert,” has led to the wrongful conviction of almost a dozen people.

I chose one particular case of Dr. West’s to highlight out of the myriad of cases where he sold his soul and honed his craft. He operated his own little cottage industry where he delivered on demand the testimony most desired by prosecutors: something to tie the case together and point the finger directly at the defendant However, his aim was often way off target.

Dr. West’s bite mark testimony directly contributed to the murder convictions of Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer. Brooks and Brewer were accused of killing two young girls in the early 1990’s, and while there wasn’t much evidence tying either man to the crime, West concluded that the bite marks seen on the two girls came from Brooks and Brewer, respectively.

As Oxygen reports, West even went so far as to say that the marks seen on one of the victims were “indeed and without a doubt inflected [sic] by Kennedy Brewer.”

….

He had even been discredited before Brewer’s trial, the first member ever to be suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology.

Levon Brooks: Levon Brooks spent 16 years in prison for the rape and murder of a three-year-old girl that he did not commit. Forensic dentist Dr. Michael West claimed that the marks on the victim’s body were human bite marks and he testified at Brooks’ trial that, of 13 suspects whose dentitions he had compared to the wounds on the victim’s body, Brooks’ teeth “matched” the marks on the victim. As he explained, “it could be no one but Levon Brooks that bit this girl’s arm.“

Based on this testimony, Brooks was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison. In 2001, DNA testing and a subsequent confession revealed that Justin Albert Johnson committed the murder. Johnson had been one of the 12 other suspects whose dental impressions Dr. West had determined did not match the bite marks on the victim’s body. Following Johnson’s confession, Brooks was freed on February 15, 2008.

Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated.

Remember that In Jimmie’s case, he has ALWAYS proclaimed his innocence – from arrest to arraignment to trial to conviction and on through appeals to post-conviction relief applications – he has never wavered, and his story has never wavered. In the face of death, he has remained steadfast in declaring his innocence. It seems that the only way that the prosecutors could come up with a theory of the case that they could then sell to a jury, was to do a little buying of their own. So they bought three separate things that jurors would eat up: the physical “evidence” testimony of Dr. West, pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne, whose longtime partnership as state experts fell under legal scrutiny after questions emerged about the validity of their techniques.and the testimony of Michael Cluse (whom we’ll see in greater detail in Part 3), a rewarded jailhouse informant (snitch).

Now, Michael Hayne: At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana’s “industry of courtroom experts.” Hayne could flip an autopsy around quickly, and unsurprisingly his findings nearly always supported whatever the working theory of law enforcement was, implicating their primary suspect in whatever crime they were investigating.

Hayne had found an ideal and perfectly willing partner in West, one of the leading “experts” in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively newcomer science whose main claim to fame was to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter.

On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies completed in Mississippi and bragged that he completed around 1,500 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed what the annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners would equal. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization.

Evidently, he also performed the impossible: in one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when it had, in fact, already been removed long before the man’s death. In another, he testified that he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not even exist in young girls.

Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long and well-documented history of errors and straight-out lies. There have been numerous news reports, court records and even books written about this partnership in the years after Duncan’s conviction.

So, as I said above, they had formed the perfect little cottage industry – reliable and seemingly credible testimony that would favor the state and deliver the desired result – a conviction and sentence.

Years after Haley’s death, Duncan’s post-conviction attorneys uncovered evidence that was not presented at trial that tends to prove his innocence. This includes:

a jailhouse informant who wrote to prosecutors offering to share Duncan’s confession to the crime in what the defense claims was an exchange for leniency (the informant later recanted his trial testimony); (covered in detail in the next part of this series)
past head injuries Haley (who had experienced seizures) suffered that might explain her death;
and a video in which West can be seen grinding a cast of Duncan’s teeth into Haley’s body.

“Cottage industry.” The term make you envision a cozy little gleaming kitchen with red-and-white plaid tablecloths, shiny ovens and the smell of artisan bread baking? No, this is a cold, not-quite sterile room with slide-out drawers, stainless steel tables and windowless walls – and the potential for raking in tens of thousands from willing and eager cops, top cops and frantic prosecutors searching for willing partners in stirring up a pot of criminal (in)justice stew.

They (West and Hayne) were essentially “hired guns,” willing and quite capable of putting on a very convincing show routine in any courtroom and sell any jury.

The amazing thing is that Haley’s autopsy occurred years after there were significant questions raised about West’s and Hayne’s methods and qualifications., as well as results. The wide divide here is the gap between West and Hayne growing and crumbling.

Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case.

“West has routinely collaborated with Steven Hayne, a medical examiner for hire who conducts nearly every autopsy for prosecutors in Mississippi – even though he flunked his board certification. He nets nearly $1 million a year from conducting autopsies across the state, and West helped set up the system that allows Hayne to handle so many autopsies (each year, Haynes conducts six times more autopsies than the recommended standard). Hayne conducted the autopsies on the victims in the Brewer and Brooks cases – and called West in for both autopsies. At Brewer’s trial, full video footage of the victim’s autopsy was deemed inadmissible in court because it was so offensive and inappropriate; throughout the autopsy of the raped and murdered three-year-old girl, Haynes listened to loud music, so the trial judge ruled that the sound from the video could not be played in court. West held the video camera during that autopsy.” The Innocence Project

Just a booming business, right? And a business that Louisiana is heavily invested in. It is NOT the business of truth – rather, the business of fabrication, corruption and eager ears…

Follow along for the next part of this series, and we’ll take a look at how a jailhouse informant helped place Jimmie Duncan in a 6’x9’ death row cell for over three decades.

A New Era for Executions in Louisiana

William Kissinger · March 28, 2025 · Leave a Comment

The Advent of Nitrogen Gas Hypoxia

**The execution gurney and a mask used for the nitrogen gas**

Gerald Bordelon expedited his own execution by choosing to waive his appeals, including his direct appeal, which was previously thought to be a mandatory part of the state’s death penalty process. Bordelon volunteered for execution after he was found guilty of raping and murdering his 12-year-old stepdaughter. The choice to waive his appeals was met with strong disagreement from his team of inmate counsels (prisoners who serve as attorney substitutes), who jointly decided that they would not assist him in his decision. Bordelon was represented in his desire to be executed by a fairly well-renowned constitutional law attorney from Baton Rouge, Jill Craft. She succeeded in having the court allow Bordelon to waive his appeals, but later said she “would never do it again. “

Bordelon told media sources why he volunteered for his execution: “I’m doing this for [the victim] Courtney. I’m doing it for her family. I’m doing it for me. I’m doing it for my family so they don’t have to worry and deal with it for the next 20 or 30 years. I’m doing it for a lot of reasons.”

On January 7, 2010, Gerald Bordelon was executed via lethal injection at Angola. He was one of three people executed in the United States on that same day. The others were Vernon Lamont Smith in Ohio and Kenneth Mosley in Texas. They were the first three people to be executed in the United States in 2010. The executions of three or more people within a single day is something that has not occurred in the United States since.

In Bordelon’s last statement, he apologized to LeBlanc’s family as well as his own. His last meal was fried sac-a-lait fish, topped with crawfish étouffée, a peanut butter and apple jelly sandwich, and chocolate chip cookies. He was pronounced dead at 6:32 pm.

As of this writing, Bordelon remains the last person executed in Louisiana, which has gone over fourteen years without an execution. He is also the only person to have been executed in Louisiana since 2002, when Leslie Dale Martin was executed for murder.

Due to a 2012 lawsuit challenging Louisiana’s lethal injection protocol and drug companies not wanting their products associated with capital punishment, Louisiana has been unable to carry out executions, despite capital punishment still being a legal penalty.

Despite remaining a legal penalty, there have been no executions in Louisiana since 2010, and no involuntary executions since 2002. Execution protocols are tied up in litigation due to a 2012 lawsuit challenging Louisiana’s lethal injection procedures. In addition, certain pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers do not want their products associated with capital punishment, meaning the state has been unable to obtain lethal injection drugs. Despite this, a 2018 survey by the Louisiana State University found that the majority of Louisiana citizens still support capital punishment.

On March 5, 2024, Governor Jeff Landry signed a law allowing executions to be carried out via nitrogen gas and electrocution. The law has opened the door for Louisiana to resume capital punishment after a fourteen-year hiatus.

No more is there a “liberal” decision on what is appropriate punishment or humane. So a new era is beginning in Louisiana, one of anger and hatred and – for lack of a better term – revenge, and simple political expediency. Landry campaigned on a promise to “get tough on crime,” even though crime had been on a steadily declining path for several years. The problem is that New Orleans has a fairly high profile and when anything happens there, it gets highly magnified. People ignored what was actually happening, a lot of people did not vote, and Landry won. Like Trump, Landry claims that a “mandate from the people” propelled him into office, when nothing could be further from the truth.

In the 2023 Louisiana gubernatorial election held on October 14, 2023, Jeff Landry secured the governorship by winning 51.56% of the vote, totaling 547,827 votes. His closest competitor, Democrat Shawn Wilson, received 25.93% of the vote, amounting to 275,525 votes.

Voter turnout for this election was notably low, with only about 36% of registered voters casting ballots—the lowest for a Louisiana gubernatorial primary since 2011. Given the state’s 2,970,167 registered voters, this means that approximately 18% of the total electorate voted for Landry.

While Landry achieved a majority in the primary, allowing him to avoid a runoff, the low voter turnout indicates that a significant portion of the electorate did not participate in the election. Therefore, his victory margin reflects both his support among active voters and the broader context of limited electoral engagement.

So, his election was hardly a “mandate,” but Louisiana’s largely conservative “Bible Belt” reputation strongly supports him. That fact is reflected in him holding a super-majority in both houses of government. He used this to great effect when, within days of taking office, he instituted a complete reversal of all criminal justice reform gains made during the terms of his predecessor, John Bel Edwards.

New methods of execution, legislation authorizing treatment of 17-year-olds as adults, elimination of parole for prisoners, and a vast reshaping of the entire criminal justice system were accomplished within weeks in “Special Sessions” of the legislature. He very publicly announced that he was creating a new State Police Troop to be based in New Orleans that would assist the notoriously corrupt NOPD in fighting crime in the city.

Within weeks, the new Troop was responsible for three separate car chases that resulted in four crashes. These incidents led to multiple arrests and the confiscation of various drugs and firearms. In at least one of those chases, an innocent bystander was injured.“

As far as the promised results, violent crime in New Orleans actually increased in the months ahead. Homicides increased, armed robberies increased, and a horrible homegrown terrorist attack occurred in New Orleans’ famed French Quarter, about a month shy of the city hosting the Super Bowl. Landry created a bit of a stir with his court-challenged uprooting of the city’s homeless population and placing them in an “emergency shelter,” and in the process destroying most of their personal property while promising to implement programs designed to get people off the streets and into residential housing.

So the Super Bowl came and went – and my Chiefs LOST! – and things pretty much returned to normal. Louisiana went right back to figuring out the quickest and best way to efficiently kill someone.

We are now less than a week from Jessie Hoffman’s execution date of March 18th, 2025. Although court challenges are in the works, it remains to be seen whether the date will be met, and what sense of pride Jeff Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill will exhibit following the intentional killing of a man. Both Landry and Murrill have said that they are “honoring promises made to the victims and their families.” I think they are only creating more victims.

The federal district court in Baton Rouge, Middle District of Louisiana Judge Shelly Dick, has granted an injunction halting (or at the very least, slowing) the execution, and in the ruling, said,

CONCLUSION

Considering the foregoing, Plaintiff’s Motion to Reconsider the Court’s Denial of his RLUIPA Claim (Count VI) shall be DENIED. Plaintiff’s Motion for Preliminary Injunction shall be GRANTED on the Eighth Amendment claim, and Defendants are enjoined from executing Jessie Hoffman on March 18, 2025, using nitrogen hypoxia. Plaintiff’s Motion for Preliminary Injunction is DENIED as to Counts III and IV.

March

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, this 11th ___ day of _______________, 2025.

S

________________________________

SHELLY D. DICK

CHIEF DISTRICT JUDGE

MIDDLE DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA

I pray for Jessie Hoffman, as I hope you do as well. He has asked that he be executed via firing squad, due to the lack of prolonged suffering. He will simply be wiped out of existence, like some terrible substance on the bottom of Jeff Landry’s shoes and Liz Murrill’s heels, and not drowned with fluids filling his lungs and prolonged suffering. After all, isn’t this what you wanted, Louisiana? Oh, I see. You didn’t vote. Well, then you couldn’t care.

Sleep safe tonight, Jessie Hoffman.

NOTE: This post was originally posted on March 14, 2025, prior to Jessie’s execution by nitrogen gas. I just never had the opportunity to update all of the places my writing is available. You can find my writing on my Substack or on my other website at MyLifeAfterPrison.

If you like my work, and appreciate it, please note that donations are greatly appreciated.