BATON ROUGE, La. — (AP) — As 18-year-old Bobby Gumpright rode his bike home from his bartending job in New Orleans in 1999, he began to concoct a story about why he didn’t have any money. In the throes of addiction and not wanting to admit he had spent his paycheck on drugs, Gumpright lied to his father and said a Black man had robbed him at gunpoint.
The fabrication spun out of control when a detective, armed with photos of potential suspects, asked Gumpright to point to the culprit.
Across town, Jermaine Hudson, a 20-year-old Black man, was pulled over for a traffic stop and taken into custody. He figured he would soon be released to go home to his pregnant wife and 10-month-old daughter…