On Tuesday at noon, Calvin Duncan raised his right hand and swore that he would faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon him as clerk of Orleans Parish criminal district court, to the best of his ability and understanding.
Social-justice lion Bill Quigley administered the oath.
The moment is bittersweet.
Duncan may never take office, if the legislature votes to abolish the clerkship at criminal court. If Gov. Jeff Landry signs Senate Bill 256, Duncan’s office will be immediately folded into the office of clerk of civil district court, run by Chelsey Napoleon.
Landry says it’s a necessary move to “right-size” Orleans courts. Opponents say it’s a power grab, representing yet another incursion by the state into the New Orleans justice system.
But Tuesday’s swearing-in puts that aside for the moment. It’s for the people, Duncan said.
“It’s for the people of New Orleans. It’s for the voters,” he said. “It’s for the people who don’t think they can’t contribute anything because of their upbringing or their start in life. It’s a triumph in ‘this great sentence of life,’ as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described it.”
The swearing-in will take place on the steps of the Gothic courthouse on Tulane Avenue, which carries its own poignancy. “This is the building where my life was destroyed. Every destructive thing in my life happened in this building,” Duncan said. “But today, a good thing is happening here. It’s like redemption. I come to make this building right again. To restore back to what it’s supposed to be: a place rooted in what’s fair and what’s just.”
In a runoff in mid-November, voters put Duncan into office with an overwhelming 68% of the vote during a campaign where his opponent, incumbent Darren Lombard accused him of not being exonerated. (As the recent legislative debate raged, Lombard released a statement urging legislators to allow Duncan to move forward. “Democracy must be honored,” he wrote.)
Though Duncan had qualified for office last fall as a relatively unknown candidate, his story soon became well-known: he had been convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, serving 28 years in prison and becoming well-known for his work as an “inmate counsel substitute” – a jailhouse lawyer – in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Some of his cases were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, as described in his autobiography, Jailhouse Lawyer, published last year by Random House.
But it always was about the records.
Duncan sat innocent in prison for nearly three decades because he had requested records from the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court but couldn’t get them, he says.
Motivated by that injustice, Duncan ran for clerk – and won. Once he took office on May 4, he planned to scour the clerk’s office and properly sort all records so that the staff could fulfill every public record request. “I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else,” he has said.
His campaign’s message and its success cannot be diminished, says his old friend Norris Henderson, who also was a standout jailhouse lawyer at Angola until 2003, when he was released and formed the group VOTE, Voice of the Experienced.
“Calvin’s victory is a fact. And he won big, it wasn’t like he sneaked by,” Henderson said. “He actually has the certification from the Secretary of State. But now these people are trying to pull off this hanky panky.”
As this year’s session began, Sen. Jay Morris of West Monroe introduced a trio of bills to cut numerous judgeships along with the clerk’s office in Orleans, saying that the Orleans system must become like every other parish in the state, with one clerk of court serving both criminal and civil functions.
In recent weeks it’s become clear that the Louisiana Supreme Court caseload data that Morris relied upon to compare courts is basically meaningless – instead of relying on a uniform case definition, the Supreme Court allows parish clerks to certify their own data, based on their own personal definition of what a case is. Even the Orleans data represents only half of the defendants who actually enter the courthouse at Tulane Avenue and Broad Street. An analysis by the Bureau of Governmental Research released on Monday found that the legislation is moving faster than the evidence supports. But Morris continues to cite the data and champion the bills, saying he is tasked by the governor to get this done.
Henderson, who has spent the past 23 years working to emphasize the value of the ballot box, says that what’s happening to Duncan legislatively is an extension of VOTE’s longtime emphasis on voting rights.
“Elections have consequences,” Henderson said. “Calvin won, against all odds, because the voters showed up and wanted change. But our failure as a people to show up for the governor’s race is responsible for everything that’s happening in this state. What’s happening to Calvin is shedding light on these systems and how mean-spirited these people are.”
Duncan says he will continue to fight. But after years of legal work, he understands his limits. “Whether they take it away from me, it’s not even in my sight. I can’t stop them. Laws dictate how we live,” he said.
