Louisiana Is Trying to Block Lloyd Gray From Seeking Freedom — ProPublica

When Lloyd Gray stood trial for rape in 1980, two jurors didn’t believe he was guilty and voted to acquit. Today, a split-jury verdict would mean a mistrial and possibly Gray’s freedom. But back then, in Louisiana, it resulted in a life sentence for the 19-year-old from Tunica, a rural community nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Gray, who has always maintained his innocence, spent the next four decades in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. During that time he lost everything, he said. From behind bars, he learned that his mother, who for a time was a guard at the prison where he was being held, had dementia and died in 2020. Prison officials refused to allow him to attend her funeral.

That same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that nonunanimous jury verdicts, legal in only Louisiana and Oregon, were unconstitutional and based on an inherently racist law designed to uphold white supremacy.

Going forward, there would be no more Lloyd Grays.

But in fact, there are more than 1,000 people in Louisiana like Gray, convicted by split juries and still imprisoned, according to the Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans-based nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform. Although the Supreme Court says cases like theirs are unconstitutional going forward, it left the decision about what to do with those convicted long ago to the states. And Louisiana alone says they should stay behind bars.

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Louisiana State Supreme Court declined to grant new trials for those prisoners, acquiescing to local prosecutors who feared that retrying hundreds of decades-old cases would tie up state courts. The conservative state Legislature, meanwhile, has repeatedly rejected bills that would have required a reexamination of their cases.

That left one very narrow path for Gray and others like him, mostly Black men, to have their cases revisited. If they could credibly argue that their convictions were secured illegally — if there was race-based discrimination in the case, for example — they could strike a plea deal with a prosecutor, securing their release. But a new state law, passed last year at the urging of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, limited local prosecutors’ ability to broker such deals, cutting off the last remaining avenue of relief for those imprisoned by nonunanimous juries.

The key problem, legal experts say, is that the Supreme Court did not make its 2020 ruling retroactive as it did in Montgomery v. Louisiana, a 2016 case in which the justices found that life sentences without parole for juveniles should be banned going forward as well as for those already convicted.

What’s more, in a separate decision in 2021, the court ruled that its 2020 opinion did not apply to older cases, like Gray’s, that had already gone through the regular state appeals process. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court’s majority, Oregon and Louisiana were still free to offer retroactive relief on their own.

In contrast to Louisiana, Oregon’s Supreme Court vacated every split-jury conviction in the state, after which prosecutors offered plea deals with reduced sentences to the majority of those prisoners convicted by nonunanimous juries. Verite News and ProPublica estimated about 760 prisoners were convicted by nonunanimous juries based on a 2018 list provided by the Oregon Department of Justice of people who had filed lawsuits claiming their convictions were unconstitutional.

“There are a lot of injustices in our legal system we can’t fix. And yet, here is this issue that is so clear and obvious that it’s on all of us to do the right thing,” said Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, who fought for years to end the state’s split-jury system.

“When I look at Louisiana, it’s really heartbreaking.”

The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment.

Zach Daniels, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, said the group, which backed Landry’s law, has attempted to reach a compromise with criminal justice reformers who want all past split-jury verdicts overturned. This included an alternative that would give those convicted by nonunanimous juries the opportunity to apply for parole instead of having their cases either vacated or reexamined. But some lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates rejected that option because they did not view the opportunity to be heard by a special parole committee appointed by Landry, as the plan called for, a compromise for people imprisoned unconstitutionally.

Gray’s case for freedom is particularly strong, his attorneys said, because there is good evidence that racial animus led to his conviction. They discovered last year that the two jurors who had voted to acquit were Black — a fact that doesn’t appear in the court records. And that someone had drawn a swastika on the upper right hand corner of the original district attorney’s case file.

In addition, the lone surviving family member of the victim told the district attorney’s office he is “fully supportive” of Gray’s release. He could not be reached for comment.

The New Orleans District Attorney’s Office had been in discussions with Gray’s legal team about a potential deal to secure his release before Landry’s 2023 election. But the governor’s new law constraining prosecutors from making such deals could ensure that Gray spends the remainder of his days in Angola. His current case before the court will next be considered Tuesday at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, where a judge will decide whether Landry’s law applies in Gray’s case.

“When you’re sent to prison with a life sentence, they send you here to die,” said Gray, now 65, through his attorney because the prison rejected requests from Verite News and ProPublica to interview him directly. “After 45 years, I’m no closer to freedom than the day I walked into this place.”

“Jim Crow Juries”

Louisiana began allowing nonunanimous verdicts — or “Jim Crow juries,” as they are sometimes called here — in response to the 14th Amendment, which ensured that Black citizens, including formerly enslaved people, had equal protection under the law. This included, among other things, the right to serve on juries. Until then, Louisiana had required a unanimous vote for criminal convictions. But state lawmakers did not want to give a single Black juror the power to undermine the will of 11 white people.

During an 1898 constitutional convention, Louisiana’s elected officials lowered the threshold for a criminal conviction from 12 votes to nine (and increased it to 10 in 1973). One committee chairman was cited in the Supreme Court ruling against the practice saying that the provision was meant to “establish the supremacy of the white race.”

In 1934, Oregon followed suit, becoming the only other state to ever approve the use of split-jury verdicts. (Oregon passed its law following public outrage that a Jewish man was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder in the high-profile death of a Protestant man.)

The jury’s decision at Gray’s trial in December 1980 unfolded as Louisiana legislators had envisioned nearly a century ago.

After initially charging Gray with aggravated rape, prosecutors offered him a deal, according to Gray and his attorneys. If he pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, he would receive a 10-year sentence. But Gray rejected the offer, never wavering in his claims of innocence. The district attorney’s office said there is no record of a proposed plea deal.

Gray and Dianna Knockum, the woman who accused him of rape, each testified on a single day, providing wildly divergent versions of what happened on a Wednesday night six months earlier. Gray, 19 at the time, and Knockum, 33, knew each other from frequenting a bar called Club Hollywood in the Hoffman Triangle neighborhood of New Orleans. Gray claimed they got into a fight outside the bar over $15 Knockum owed him. When she refused to pay, Gray said he hit her twice in the face, at which point a mutual friend separated them and brought him back into the club.

Knockum claimed Gray was angry after she rejected his advances. She said he followed her as she left the bar then hit her with a hard object on the back of the head. Knockum said she regained consciousness in an abandoned building where Gray raped her.

At trial, prosecutors noted that Knockum identified Gray as her attacker, and that doctors found bruises on her head. Gray’s defense team focused on the lack of physical evidence or witnesses tying him to the crime, and that Knockum’s injuries didn’t indicate she was raped. DNA testing didn’t exist at the time, and the evidence was not saved for later examination.

After 54 minutes of deliberations, the jury returned with its verdict: The 10 white jurors voted guilty, and the two black jurors, Elizabeth Sensley and Audrey Kaywood, not guilty. Gray was sentenced to life without parole.

Knockum died more than 20 years ago, according to a 2024 court filing by New Orleans prosecutors.

Sensley and Kaywood provided statements to Gray’s attorneys last year in which they said the racial makeup of the jury likely contributed to his conviction. Sensley said there were plenty of Black people in the jury pool, yet only two were selected. The prosecution used its only jury selection strike to prevent a third Black person from serving. At the time, Black people made up 67% of the city’s population.

“I knew that my voice would not matter,” Sensley told an investigator with Gray’s legal team, recounting how she felt about being Black on the nearly all-white jury. “I cannot believe that Lloyd Gray is still in prison.”

Kaywood told the investigator she had a “strong feeling” Gray might be innocent. “I wondered aloud to my husband, what if he didn’t do it. The case impacted me deeply,” she said. “I never wanted to serve on a jury again.”

Neither woman could be reached for comment.

Keeping Black people off juries was vital to prosecutors, as they were seen to be more “skeptical of the state,” according to a 2018 investigation by The New Orleans Advocate. In convictions with split-jury verdicts, Black jurors were 2.5 times more likely to dissent compared with white jurors, the report found. That’s why prosecutors used their strikes to remove prospective Black jurors at more than twice the rate as they did white jurors.

Gray’s legal team has noted that his conviction happened at a time of intense racial strife in New Orleans. Just a few years earlier, the Ku Klux Klan, led by David Duke, marched through the French Quarter to protest the city’s first Black mayor. The district attorney’s office was headed by Harry Connick Sr., whose 30-year tenure was stained by accusations of racial bias. During Connick’s time as district attorney, there were 32 cases of wrongful convictions, 27 of which involved prosecutorial misconduct, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Of those wrongfully convicted, 97% were Black.

And yet Connick refused to crack down on his staff, drawing the ire of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. As part of a wrongful-conviction case in which prosecutors hid blood evidence, Ginsburg said in a 2011 dissent that Connick had created a “tinderbox in Orleans Parish” where it was expected that prosecutors hide evidence from the defense. And when those violations occurred, she wrote, “Connick insisted there was no need to change anything, and opposed efforts to hold prosecutors accountable on the ground that doing so would make his job more difficult.” Five of the other eight justices disagreed with her.

After his conviction, Gray was sent to Angola, one of the most violent penitentiaries in the country at the time. The 19-year-old was frightened, but he wasn’t alone. A few years prior to his incarceration, his mother, Ora Gray, had taken a job as a guard at Angola. She worked the night shift in a watchtower that overlooked the same cell block that would briefly house her son.

Gray said he would wake up early every morning, sit by a window and look up into his mother’s tower, about 40 yards away. And every morning she would look down at him.

“I was sitting there to let her know that I was safe,” Gray said.

After about six weeks, Gray said he was transferred to another part of the prison. Gray assumed prison officials wanted to separate them, afraid his mother would hesitate to shoot if he tried to escape.

Ora Gray worked at Angola for more than three decades until she retired in 2012. She died eight years later. Lloyd Gray, wracked by guilt, said he should have cared for her in her final years and held her hand as she slipped away. Instead, he couldn’t even attend her funeral.

The system “was designed to put people of color in the situation I’m in,” he said.

A Deal Retracted

After nearly four decades in Angola, Gray had settled in as best he could. He held a mixture of jobs — tutor, office clerk, field hand, kitchen orderly — and tried to stay safe and out of trouble. But he told his lawyers he struggled to come to terms with where life had taken him.

Gray’s sister sent him a family picture, and he didn’t know who half the people were, especially the younger children. That was the hardest part, he said, contemplating everything that had been taken from him.

Gray’s prospects began to improve, however, in tandem with a growing sentiment that the criminal justice systems across the country were heavily weighted against poor and minority communities and needed to be reformed. A series of victories for this movement, on both the state and national levels, gave Gray hope, starting in 2018. That’s when 64% of Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment outlawing nonunanimous juries for any crime committed after Jan. 1, 2019.

Those who fought for the amendment focused their campaign on the damage such juries had done to the state’s minority communities: Black people make up 67% of the prison population but 80% of those convicted by split juries, according to a report from the Promise of Justice Initiative.

Split-jury verdicts also resulted in lengthier sentences. In Louisiana, 62% of all prisoners convicted by split juries are serving life sentences, like Gray, while only about 16% of the overall prison population is doing so, the report said.

That’s because the split-jury law created an incentive for prosecutors to hand down the most serious charges they could. Lesser crimes that carried shorter sentences were tried before a six-person jury that had to rule unanimously. Former prosecutor and state Sen. Dan Claitor said during a 2018 legislative hearing on nonunanimous juries that the numbers frequently led him to “up-charge” defendants “because it was easier for me to convict them with 10 out of 12 than it is six out of six.”

Louisiana’s voter referendum prohibiting nonunanimous juries was a significant victory, but it did little to address the plight of people like Gray who had already been convicted. And then, two years later, in Ramos v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 vote that split-jury verdicts violated the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a fair trial.

In his majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed to the court by President Donald Trump, wrote that the origin of split-jury verdicts could be “traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute the influence of racial and ethnic and religious minorities.” In Louisiana, he wrote, the point was “to ensure that African-American juror service would be meaningless.”

In the months that followed, the Promise of Justice Initiative filed appeals for 1,049 Louisiana prisoners convicted by split juries. Hundreds of those, including Gray’s, were filed in New Orleans, where a new district attorney, Jason Williams, had just been elected.

Williams took office in January 2021, one of a wave of progressive prosecutors across the country. He pledged to root out and reconsider potentially problematic cases involving wrongful convictions, excessive sentences or racial bias. He also took on split-jury verdicts.

Within days of being sworn in, Williams had established a civil rights division and hired Emily Maw, the former head of the Innocence Project New Orleans, to lead it. As of July 2024, the division had vacated or reduced the sentences of more than 350 men and women, 150 of whom were convicted by nonunanimous juries, according to the district attorney’s office.

In 2022, prosecutors with the unit proposed a potential deal to Gray’s attorneys: If he pleaded guilty to forcible rape, he would walk, according to Gray and his attorneys. The lesser charge carried a maximum sentence of 40 years; Gray had already served 41.

Such plea deals would soon prove to be the only shot people like Gray had at freedom. The same year Gray was offered a plea deal, the state’s highest court ruled in a 5-2 vote that the federal ban on nonunanimous juries was not retroactive, preventing more than 1,000 people convicted by split juries from having their day in court, according to estimates by the Promise of Justice Initiative.

The only Black member of the Louisiana Supreme Court, Justice Piper Griffin dissented, writing: “Such convictions were racially discriminatory in 1898. They were racially discriminatory in 1975. They remain racially discriminatory today.”

While he agreed with the majority that the state shouldn’t overturn all past split-jury verdicts, Justice James Genovese wrote in a partial dissent that prisoners who could demonstrate that their verdicts were “tainted by racial animus” should be “entitled to relief, regardless of the date of their conviction.” In particular, he said, new trials should be granted when it can be proven that a Black juror had voted to acquit the accused.

Louisiana’s rejection of retroactivity put a premium on the type of deals offered to Gray. But before his could be finalized and approved by the courts, it was upended in November 2023 by a massive political shift in Louisiana as Landry was elected governor.

Campaigning on a tough-on-crime platform, the former police officer and state attorney general vowed to accelerate executions, impose stiffer sentences and end the reign of “woke district attorneys” whom he accused of “playing a dangerous game of catch and release” with criminals.

Within his first few months in office, in March 2024, Landry signed Act 10, which prohibits district attorneys from waiving the two-year deadline for prisoners to challenge their convictions through post-conviction relief. Such a waiver is typically needed to revive decades-old cases like Gray’s.

It was set to go into effect Aug. 1, 2024.

Swastika on the Case File

The clock was now ticking for Gray and his attorneys. Given the drastic change in the political climate, they believed they needed to uncover additional evidence that Gray’s prosecution was unjust to increase his chances of being released. And they needed to do so before Williams lost the ability to have missed deadlines waived.

They caught their first break the same month Landry signed Act 10 into law. That’s when they requested and received Gray’s original 1980 case file from the district attorney’s office, something they had never seen before.

Colin Reingold, Gray’s attorney from 2021 to 2024, said he skimmed the file, blowing past the cover page, looking for any facts that could help secure Gray’s release. He then recalled receiving a Slack message from an investigator on his team who was also scouring through the new documents: Wow, this swastika on the front cover is sure crazy, isn’t it?

“I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I didn’t see it at all,” Reingold said. “And then I immediately went to the DA file and pulled it up. And, I mean, it’s unmistakable.”

That someone with the district attorney’s office would doodle the Nazi symbol on the case file of a Black man accused of rape in the early 1980s raises significant concerns about the motivations of the prosecution, Reingold said.

“You always suspect that there are, in some cases, bad actors with beliefs that could taint the whole process,” Reingold said. “But you never think that you’re going to find it in black and white like that.”

The district attorney’s office does not dispute the swastika’s existence or that a staff member might have drawn it more than 40 years ago, according to a September filing by prosecutors. Assistant District Attorneys Jim Letten and William O’Hara prosecuted Gray’s case. O’Hara died in 2007. Letten, who would later serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, did not respond to requests for comment.

“Our office acknowledges that a derogatory symbol appears on a microfilmed copy of Mr. Gray’s case file,” Keith D. Lampkin, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, told Verite News and ProPublica. “There is no record indicating who drew the symbol or when it was drawn.”

The swastika was important to Gray’s claims of racial bias, but even more vital was the discovery two months later, in June 2024, that the two people who voted to acquit Gray were Black.

Erica Navalance, an attorney with the Promise of Justice Initiative who currently represents Gray, said these new pieces of evidence spoke directly to the two factors Genovese said in his partial dissent should trigger a new trial: racial bias and proof that a Black juror voted to acquit.

Armed with this information, Gray’s attorneys filed a new appeal the day before Act 10 went into effect. They knew that Williams was under increasing pressure from Landry to abandon his efforts to reinvestigate old cases but hoped this new evidence would convince his office to keep their word and free Gray.

Publicly, Williams refused to back down, telling his conservative opponents during a legislative hearing last September that he could not ignore the city’s long history of wrongfully convicting Black people.

“In the city of New Orleans, we’ve been so good at mass-producing defective convictions that I think it is incumbent that we make sure that we let these cases be heard,” Williams said.

Eleven days later, Williams’ office took an unexpected position in its response to Gray’s appeal. Its hands were tied by Act 10, it said, and it could no longer waive missed deadlines. As a result, Gray would have to serve out the remainder of his life sentence, prosecutors claimed.

The district attorney’s office has maintained this position despite Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Robin Pittman stating in November as part of Gray’s case that its interpretation of Act 10 was wrong. As long as the appeal was filed before Aug. 1, Pittman said, it retained the ability to waive deadlines. Four months later, the state Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Taylor came to the same conclusion.

Navalance said she’d never before witnessed the state district attorney’s association rallying behind a law that would strip them of their own power.

“​​I thought our goal was to see justice done,” Navalance said. “I thought we all agreed that meant Lloyd Gray should come home 45 years after being convicted of a crime he didn’t commit.”

The district attorney’s office told Verite News and ProPublica that its response to Gray’s case simply reflects statutory changes. “It is now for the court to determine whether Mr. Gray’s application overcomes those procedural requirements,” Lampkin said.

Gray said the whiplash of events over the past several years — from believing he once had a shot at freedom to fearing the door might be permanently closed — have felt like a “mirage.”

“You see it,” he said, “but when you reach for it, it’s not really there.”