Chadarius Morehead, 30, walked slowly up to the court’s witness stand in an orange prison jumpsuit, shackles around his ankles and restraints around his wrists. He raised one hand to take the oath.
He’s originally from Monroe, in northern Louisiana, he told the court. In 2023, he arrived at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and was assigned to work in the fields, on the Farm Line.
Morehead’s testimony came on Thursday, during the third day of the expected five-day trial that will determine whether forced labor, like the Farm Line, is unconstitutional within state prisons.
The trial, held in front of U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson in the Middle District of Louisiana court in Baton Rouge, drew a crowd on Thursday. As Morehead looked out to the crowd, he saw Angola’s warden and other officials seated within a sea of sympathetic faces: members of the organization Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), which filed suit against the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections in 2023, to stop forced prison labor in the state. In December, Jackson certified the suit as a class action, on behalf of Farm Line laborers now and into the future.
Many of the men in the audience on Thursday had also worked the Farm Line, typically the first work assignment given to guys who arrive at Angola. So as Morehead testified, he saw heads nodding in agreement.
On his first days in the fields, Morehead said, he was shocked at what he saw. He knew that Angola used to be a plantation. And his grandfather had told him how his ancestors had worked in Louisiana’s hot sun. He felt that history within himself as he labored, he said.
Constitution ‘loophole’ allows forced labor in prisons
In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed forced labor—slavery—for everyone except as punishment for someone who has been “duly convicted.” Some states have since eliminated that exception. But in Louisiana, it’s a viable loophole that allows forced labor within state prisons.
The history should be corrected, said plaintiffs’ attorney Lydia Wright, legal director of Rights Behind Bars. “In 2026, that work should be compensated, it should be meaningful, it should be safe, and it should be voluntary — and our brothers and sisters on the inside deserve no less,” she said.
But on the Farm Line, it was as if emancipation had never happened, Morehead said. “When I’m digging through the dirt with my hands, my back seizing and drenched with sweat, overseen by a guard with a gun, I think of my enslaved ancestors,” he said in a deposition filed with the court. “Generations later, not much has changed.”
Again, heads nodded. That told him that people knew, it seemed, what it felt like to return to Angola’s dorms exhausted, their bodies aching even after they showered and laid down in their bunks.
But for Morehead, even sleep was no relief from the fields.
He has recurring nightmares, he told the court.
In one dream, Morehead was ordered to bend down and pick vegetables. When he refuses, a uniformed guard walks over and shoots him at point-blank range in the upper body. “I woke up shaking, gasping for air, and drenched in sweat,” he said.
In another nightmare, he is an enslaved person chained together with other Black men with heavy metal chains wrapped around their necks, waists, and wrists.
In a third dream, he is standing outdoors in Angola’s pecan grove at night and sees bodies hanging from the trees. When he moves closer, he realizes each corpse is him.
In the audience, heads bowed as he described the horrors that visit him at night.
Nightmares continue, even after work assignment shifted
Though his work assignment changed in August 2024, the nightmares have continued, he said. He felt valued only when he was picking okra or pulling weeds, he said, describing how, during the summer of 2024, he experienced shooting pain in his back while working. A medical staff worker checked his vital signs and cleared him to return to the fields—without examining his back.
It’s accounts like his, documenting shoddy medical care and poor screening of disabled workers, that support the lawsuit’s claims that the Farm Line’s operations violate federal disability law and the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
When Morehead’s muscles hurt so bad that he could not return to work, he was written up and lost access to the canteen for two weeks. But no one seemed to care why he was in pain. “They never checked my back,” he said.
After the hearing, at a press conference on the steps of the courthouse, Morehead’s narrative was referenced by Samantha Pourciau, senior attorney with the Promise of Justice Initiative, which is representing the plaintiffs along with Rights Behind Bars.
Over and over, Pourciau said, lawyers for the case have heard about inadequate medical care that reflected an even greater wrong—the prison staff’s blatant disregard for the wellbeing of the men who worked the Farm Line, to the point where it recreates the conditions of chattel slavery, she said.
Yet the Eighth Amendment guarantees that people in prison “are to be afforded basic standards of dignity.” It’s a key point argued within the VOTE lawsuit that spurred this week’s trial.
“Every person has inherent dignity,” Pourciau said. “That dignity doesn’t disappear at the prison gate.”
