Tyrone Mitchell, 54, vividly remembers the night in October 2010 that turned his world upside down. Dressed in blue jean shorts and a crisp white shirt, he and his girlfriend and two of their friends had pulled up to a nightclub in Abbeville, Louisiana in a red Navigator.
Because of what happened afterward, those details are imprinted in his mind: the music that night, the crowd, who he was with, what he was wearing.
It was Cattle Festival, so the streets were packed in Abbeville, his hometown, he said. He remembers getting out of the Navigator and walking down the block to visit his parents’ house. The street was lined with cars on both sides, as he walked through.
Mitchell, who was well-known in town for installing car stereos and detailing autos, soon walked back to the club. He found his girlfriend and their friends.
It seemed like a normal night. Fun but forgettable.
But a year later, an undercover cop took the stand in court and described Mitchell as selling drugs that night, dressed in all orange. He sold her two rocks of cocaine worth $40, she said.
He still cannot believe that anyone believed the prosecution’s narrative, which was based on a fabricated police story, Mitchell said. He got little help from his defense attorney, who barely spoke or objected. He was convicted and given a life sentence, then shipped to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He spent the next 10 years saying that he was innocent, but he couldn’t back up his claim with hard evidence.
“Even people who are innocent can’t always get into court and prove it,” said Meredith Angelson, the deputy director of Innocence & Justice Louisiana.
Even when he initially appeared in court on the drug charges, it was hard for him to prove his innocence. Police in Abbeville hadn’t issued a warrant until several months after the Cattle Festival was over. Mitchell wasn’t actually arrested until nearly a year after the alleged incident, long after witnesses had dispersed and most details had been forgotten.
Difficult to prove his innocence
Because of Mitchell’s delayed arrest, his lawyers lost the chance to interview all the people he’d seen that night out, during Cattle Festival.
“It was a huge scene,” said Angelson. “If somebody had been investigating this case at the time, they could have talked to any of the many people who were outside the club or inside the club.”
Instead, no one questioned anyone or did any interviews. “The lawyer never went to talk to any witnesses. Didn’t do any investigation,” Angelson said.
No one even seemed skeptical about the case’s crazy twist, that Mitchell was allegedly wearing all orange when he sold them cocaine that night. Nearly everyone in Abbeville had seen a person like that. He’s sort of an institution there. “There is a man in the neighborhood who always wears orange. He even told them it was him, not me,” Mitchell said.
That detail, along with other key details of the case, are still baffling to Angelson. “The police story barely made sense,” she says.
Because of cases like Mitchell’s, the Innocence Project New Orleans recently took on a new name, Innocence & Justice Louisiana, which reflects the nonprofit law firm’s larger mission, to help a wider range of people, including those who were over-sentenced or treated unfairly by the justice system.
Lawyers ‘couldn’t quite prove’ innocence
“Technically he’s innocent, but we couldn’t quite prove it,” said Angelson, who saw serious problems with Mitchell’s case but no real way to pursue a true innocence defense.
Mitchell had always professed his innocence. And lawyers from the Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) believed he was innocent. But 10 years after his conviction, there was little evidence and few records left. So Angelson took another route, combatting his conviction and sentence based on the issues of ineffective legal counsel and excessive sentencing.
In 2022, they were able to forge a plea deal with prosecutors.
A recent change in the law had opened the door for relief, within certain tight time constraints. “Given the new law that seemed like the fastest way and the surest way to do it,” Angelson said. “But because of the time bars, we had to do it quickly.”
The result was not perfect: when his case was resolved, Mitchell’s conviction remained on his record. But after a decade in prison, he was free. That is what mattered most, he decided.
Yet even today, he carries the memory of what happened. “I get aggravated and angry when I talk about this,” he said. “I’m not ever going to be all right with what happened.”
After his release, Mitchell wanted nothing to do with Abbeville, his hometown. So he moved to Texas to get a fresh start.
He returned to Louisiana recently and found that the familiar sights and faces brought him comfort. “I came back home for my birthday so I could get some love,” he said. “I wanted to hug my people.” He got together with his family and ate a big meal. He blew candles out on a birthday cake.
After spending 10 years in prison, staring down a life sentence, because of careless police work in his hometown, he felt himself remembering the good parts of life there.
He was healing.
He and Angelson have talked at length about his case and how easy it would have been to fight it – if the undercover police had simply put cuffs on him while he was at the club that fateful night, instead of waiting months to file charges.
“The sloppiness hurt you in so many ways,” said Angelson, who has seen far too many cases where legal protocols were not followed, leading to convictions like his.
For Angelson and other lawyers at Innocence & Justice Louisiana, Mitchell’s case serves as a reminder of how easily unjust convictions can happen, only to be overlooked in the system. Across the state, similar cases warrant a closer review, they say.
And while Mitchell can never restore the decade he lost, he believes that his case, and his imperfect path to justice, offers some hope to other wrongly convicted people in Louisiana.
