Page 30 - ACTL Journal Win24

For the last twenty-two years, IPNO has been freeing innocent people from Louisiana prisons. We have successfully reunited sixty-four peo- ple with their families. We’re one of the most successful Innocence or- ganizations in the world, and there are seventy-two of us, all across the world. We’re all independent organizations united in a similar mission to undo wrongful convictions.
Louisiana is the incarceration capital of the world. We imprison more of our citizens than any other state or country. Unlike our LSU Tigers and Tulane Green Wave, this is not a point of pride; this is a point of deep shame. This did not hap- pen by accident; it happened by design because of our sentencing laws.
During the 2023 Annual Meeting in San Diego, Jee Park’s own words, slightly abridged below, demonstrated that the Gumpert Committee made the right decision in choosing IPNO-Second Chance at Life Initiative as the Emil Gumpert Award recipient.

In 2020, IPNO launched the Unjust Punishment Project; going beyond innocence to look at other grave injustices in our criminal legal sys- tem. And we did this in 2020 because of people like Fate Winslow and Clarence Simmons.
I met Fate Winslow when he was fifty-three years old, serving a life sen- tence for handing twenty dollar’s worth of marijuana to a plainclothes, undercover police officer. He had been in prison for twelve years previ- ously for a crime that actually was not even a crime in sixteen states. At the time of his arrest, Fate was unhoused and constantly hungry. When he was asked by an undercover police officer where he could buy marijua- na, Fate told him, “If I get this drug for you, will you give me five dollars for food?” By acting as a go-between for the buyer and the seller, Fate was arrested, he was convicted, and he was sentenced to life, because this was Fate’s fourth conviction. Under Louisiana’s Habitual Offender Law, he received a mandatory life sentence. His three prior convictions were for nonviolent crimes - possession of drug offenses where no one was harmed, no person was threatened, and in fact, no one was even present.
Like Fate, Clarence Simmons, was sen- tenced to life for a crime in which no one was harmed and no one was threatened, a nonviolent crime. On the day of his release, Clarence was in a wheelchair; he was eighty- eight years old. He was imprisoned for thir- ty-one years; he had served thirty-one years of a life sentence for stealing a camera.
So let’s take a moment. Thirty-one years. For theft. And this camera was returned to the store almost immediately. He was ap- prehended right outside. Because Clarence had prior convictions, he was sentenced to life in prison under Louisiana’s Habitual Offender Law. Fate and Clarence are free today, but their sentences were cruel and incredibly unjust.
In 2021, Louisiana passed a new law, Act 122, which permits imprisoned individuals serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes to be eligible for parole for the very, very first time. Implementation of this law was delayed because the Louisiana Corrections
Department did not know how to imple- ment it and how to interpret it. That’s how novel this new law was.
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