Earlier this month, Calvin Duncan folded his notes into the chest pocket of his trusty tweed blazer and drove his white pickup truck to Orleans Parish Criminal District Court in Mid-City.
He was headed to a press conference on the courthouse’s front steps, where he would defend himself from accusations that he’d lied – accusations that came from his political opponent and from the highest levels of the state of Louisiana.
“They can’t scare me, because I’ve been here before,” Duncan said, as he stood on the steps and spoke briefly into a portable microphone.
At age 19, within the walls of this Gothic courthouse, he was convicted of first-degree murder for a crime that he did not commit, despite a fraudulent lineup and descriptions of a chubby killer that did not match his slim teenage frame.
The wrongful conviction and the subsequent 28 years spent behind bars, with 24 of them at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, fuel his current quest – to be elected the parish’s Clerk of Criminal District Court. The race, against incumbent Darren Lombard, has become one of the most interesting contests on Saturday’s ballot.
The reasons for Duncan’s candidacy can be summarized by a line from one of the petitions he’d filed several years before his release: Calvin Duncan has diligently striven to vindicate himself over the last 20 years but has been denied access to the courts and the documentation he needed.
As Duncan entered the race to become clerk, his contention was simple: he had requested his case records, and records for thousands of other incarcerated men in his role as a jailhouse lawyer. He got them from other parishes. But he rarely got records from Orleans. And he never got his own. Finally, decades later, when lawyers from the Innocence Project of New Orleans got the records, the inconsistencies within them pointed to his innocence and led to his release in 2011.
Because of that, no one else is better positioned to understand the importance of this office, he says. Earlier this year, when court records from a storage trailer were somehow dumped into a city landfill, Duncan questioned publicly how the clerk, the custodian of those records, had allowed the destruction of those records, which are allegedly the case records for people on death row and other convicted of rape. Though Lombard had promised to convert his office to digital records, that also hadn’t happened, he noted.
This week, text messages from Duncan’s campaign continue to echo his key points. “I’ll fight for your rights like I fought for my own freedom,” he writes.
Lombard fires back
At first, Lombard’s office remained fairly quiet, despite Duncan’s criticism. But in recent weeks, Duncan, initially seen as a quixotic candidate with little chance of winning the office, began to have more visible grassroots support in town. On neutral grounds and poles all over town, handbills and lawn signs bore his name, face, and number on the ballot – VOTE #7.
Duncan’s campaign budget can’t afford to hire a pollster, so his level of voter support is unclear. But at some point, Lombard must have sensed that his challenger’s campaign had legs. Because he began to strike back. In a filing that was withdrawn the next week, Lombard’s campaign filed for a temporary restraining order against Duncan for referring to himself as exonerated.
Within the suit, Lombard raised the question of Duncan’s guilt or innocence, this time with the backing of an unusual ally, Liz Murrill, the state attorney general, who also questioned whether Duncan was qualified to use the term “exonerated.”
Earlier in a debate on WDSU, Lombard had questioned whether Duncan could really be considered exonerated, since Duncan’s initial release came after he had pleaded guilty to manslaughter. (In 2021, he went back and successfully filed other paperwork that asserted his “factual innocence.” Lombard he hasn’t looked at that particular filing, he told a Duncan supporter, in an in-person exchange recently posted on social media.)
Lombard’s and Murrill’s assertions were roundly derided by more than 100 attorneys in a public statement released last week in defense of Duncan. “The facts, the law, and the procedural history are clear: Calvin Duncan was wrongfully convicted, he has proved his innocence, and he is now fully exonerated.”
Everett “Buff” Offray, who works in the Orleans Public Defenders office was more blunt about it. “They’re lying. Straight-up lying,” he said. “The clerk himself has the paperwork to show that Calvin actually is exonerated.”
In the recent social-media exchange, Lombard made clear that he is still standing his ground about Duncan as a convicted murderer. Lombard’s campaign also has been sending text messages to that effect to local voters, most of whom seem to be white women.
“This is Darren Lombard,” the texts begin. “It’s one thing to murder an innocent man during an armed robbery. It’s another to build a political campaign on the idea that you were freed due to your innocence. We need leaders who can stand on their record without misrepresenting it. This is important for every office, but especially for a role like Clerk where accuracy is so critical.”
A mental map of the clerk’s office
During his time at Angola, Duncan became an “inmate counsel substitute,” a jailhouse lawyer. He taught himself case law and ended up working on a number of cases that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Calvin Duncan is a legal genius,” said attorney Will Snowden, who helped to introduce Duncan on the steps of the courthouse that day in early October by noting how many other men on those steps had also been wrongly convicted.
Many would not be released were it not for Duncan, he said.
In some ways, Duncan is a natural legal scholar. As he worked on cases within the prison’s walls, 134 miles from New Orleans, he gained an uncanny sense of how the clerk’s office functioned. It’s as though he has the parish’s legal filings mapped out in his head.
Local defense attorneys working on innocence or over-incarceration cases regularly consult with him to help them find necessary client records. Sometimes he’ll tell them to check civil-court records for lawsuits filed by wronged parties. Other times, he advises checking hospital or school records looking for a specific item that he’s found helpful in past cases.
As John Thompson, sitting on Angola’s Death Row, faced execution for a high-profile murder he hadn’t committed, Duncan advised Thompson’s investigator. Look in the microfiche files, he said, for evidence about Thompson’s armed robbery conviction. The investigator found that prosecutors had hidden blood evidence from the robbery that didn’t match Thompson. That piece of microfiche brought Thompson off Death Row and eventually to freedom.
As his friends and colleagues tell it, it goes beyond intellectual ability. When it’s called for, Calvin Duncan is the guy behind the lawn mower. He is the man with the mop bucket. He is the person washing the dirty dishes from the sink at the campaign headquarters. He is the guy who, for decades, burned the midnight oil to make sure that other men’s appeals and post-conviction appeals were filed on time.
And although campaigns don’t typically brag about their candidate’s ability to do yardwork or type a last-minute letter, men incarcerated with Duncan say that his devotion to the small things means something in Louisiana, which by some counts has the highest rates of per-capita wrongful convictions in the nation.
“The system completely failed us,” said Robert Jones, who spent 23 years imprisoned on a wrongful conviction. And this brother Calvin Duncan understands that more than anybody that has ever run for this position.”
Promising to make clerk’s office “accessible to all”
His typed-out notes in his hand, Calvin Duncan walked to the front of the crowd. Jones handed him the microphone. “They’re attacking me because we could win the election,” he said, noting that Jones, others in the crowd standing behind him, and “many more in the state of Louisiana” also knew the dire importance of records, because they too had been wrongly convicted.
Over the years, he’s likely helped “thousands” of people with legal filings, said his good friend Norris Henderson, founder of VOTE, Voice of the Experienced.
As Duncan spoke into the microphone, he was flanked by people whose faces showed intense admiration, like he was a firefighter who’d run into a burning building to save the last occupant or a paramedic who continued to give CPR even when the patient’s pulse seemed gone.
Overhead, the windows of the clerk’s office reflected the afternoon sunlight, as if to emphasize that the powers of the incumbent were still formidable.
Jones grabbed Duncan’s arms and pulled them into the air, symbolizing victory. That inspired Duncan to go for the strong finish. “I would make this court more efficient and more accessible to all,” he said. “I’m running for office because we deserve better. Calvin Duncan: Number 7 on the ballot.”
