Glenn Ford, who spent nearly 30 years on death row in Louisiana for a murder he almost certainly did not commit, died Monday in New Orleans, less than 16 months after his conviction and death sentence were vacated and he was released. He was 65.
William Most, a lawyer for Ford, said the cause was lung cancer, a diagnosis Ford received shortly after his release in March 2014. He died at a home provided by Resurrection After Exoneration, a nonprofit group that assists freed prisoners, Most said.
Ford walked out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the nation’s toughest prisons, after spending 29 years, three months and five days behind bars, nearly half his life, most of that time in solitary confinement for all but an hour a day.
After years of failed appeals, Ford’s extraordinary release was precipitated by “newly discovered and credible exculpatory evidence,” as prosecutors described it.
In 2013, that evidence was provided by a confidential informant to Dale G. Cox, then first assistant district attorney and now district attorney for Caddo Parish, which includes Shreveport.
It was there, on November 5, 1983, that Isadore Rozeman, a frail 58-year-old with failing eyesight, was found shot to death in his small jewellery shop.
Four men were initially accused of the murder, as well as the theft, but Ford, who had done yardwork for Rozeman and was seen in the area of the shop on the day of the crime, was the only one who stood trial.
Unreliable testimonyHe was convicted largely on the basis of testimony by a witness, the girlfriend of one of the three other suspects, whose credibility was demonstrably undermined during the trial — she admitted to lying — and on circumstantial evidence.
On the day he left Angola, Ford was asked what the conviction had cost him. “Thirty years of my life, if not all of it,” he said. — New York Times News Service
