Criminal court records are sacred to Calvin Duncan. He knows they can mean the difference between freedom and life in what he calls “the pit.”
Duncan spent decades fighting for case documents from his murder trial from the confines of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. As a legal counsel in the prison, he handled thousands of other prisoners’ appeals as well, pushing for copies of trial transcripts, supplemental police reports and other records.
“Every parish’s clerk office in this state, I could get records from prison — except Orleans Parish,” Duncan said in a lengthy interview last week. “And I see my friends dying because they can’t get their damn records.”…