As Maurice Lewis was granted his freedom at the end of last year, he wept before a judge. “God bless you,” he told her. “I’ll never do this again. Thank you for putting me back with my family.”
Lewis, a 57-year-old man, had been sentenced to life without parole in 1998. He had spent the last 23 years at Angola prison, serving his punishment by laboring on the fields, sweeping the prison hospital wards, and cleaning toilets at Louisiana’s state legislature.
Life without parole is a sentence so harsh, it is associated with heinous crimes. But not in Louisiana, the most incarcerated state in the world’s most incarcerated country.
Lewis’s crime had been so banal it has never been written about before. He was sentenced in an almost empty courtroom, with no family members present, at the end of a hearing that lasted a few minutes.
He had been convicted of stealing $20 in cash from a snatched purse.
“It felt like it was me against the world,” he remembered in an interview. “They kept on digging over my past.”
That the money was returned to the unharmed white woman within minutes of the crime did not matter. Under the state’s habitual offender laws, voraciously enforced by the Orleans parish district attorney’s office at the time, he had been branded a career criminal. And as this was the third time the state invoked the habitual offender law, he was mandatorily sentenced to life with no chance of release.
A glance at Lewis’s prior record reveals no career criminal, but a life of struggle instead. He had left school at the age of 14 without learning to read and had taken a few low-paying jobs – delivering newspapers, and dish cleaning at a local hotel to support his mother.
His youth had been punctuated by a series of convictions for minor crimes in which no one was physically hurt and a grand total of $44 was taken and later returned. He was involved in the theft of some stereo equipment aged 19. A purse at the age of 21. And at 27, he took an umbrella from a front porch. It was, he recalled, raining that day.
Lewis was convicted of burgling an inhabited dwelling and sentenced to 80 months in prison.
Using his prior record, the city of New Orleans deemed that Maurice Lewis should die in prison after the final purse snatching offense in 1998, in which he had pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors described him at trial as “a predator”, a racist trope.
At the end of September last year, Lewis became one of the first 128 people given back their freedom thanks to a new civil rights division in the Orleans parish district attorney’s office.
The division was created by the city’s new district attorney, Jason Williams, who ran as a progressive reformer and pledged never to use Louisiana’s habitual offender statute again. Part of his new civil rights division’s work to address past harms has been to revisit excessive sentences. It has since relitigated 82 habitual offender cases, resulting in their sentence enhancement or “multi-bills” being amended or revoked, and leading to immediate release from prison.
Overuse of Louisiana’s habitual offender law is seen by many reform advocates as one of the major drivers of mass incarceration in the state. The act automatically increases prison time (from a second felony conviction onwards) and significantly removes the discretion of judges.
Their implementation was memorably derided by Louisiana’s former supreme court chief justice, Bernette Johnson, in a 2020 dissent after the court denied a request to review the sentence of a man named Fair Wayne Bryant who was sent away for life for the attempted theft of a pair of hedge clippers. Judge Johnson described the law’s usage as a “modern manifestation” of 19th-century Pig Laws, racist statutes designed to criminalize Black people implemented shortly after the US civil war.
Nowhere in the state were they as readily enforced as in New Orleans, where prosecutors used them routinely for decades, first at the instruction of former DA Harry Connick and continuing into the tenure of Leon Cannizzaro. Although in recent years the Louisiana state legislature has amended the laws to reduce mandatory sentences and later made it harder for prosecutors to enforce them as vigorously as before, there are still hundreds of people incarcerated, with their sentences enhanced by multi-billing.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .At the beginning of 2021, at least 718 people from Orleans parish were still incarcerated under sentences extended by the habitual offender statute. Ninety-three per cent of them are Black.
