- Associated Press - Saturday, July 8, 2017

ANGOLA, La. (AP) - Theortric Givens, 66, has already stripped the sheets from his prison bed. He’s packed up his prized carpentry tools, personal property that he used for decades to make furniture at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. He’s hoping the Louisiana Committee on Parole will soon hold a hearing to consider his release.

“I’m ready to go. I’m trying to be the first one out of here,” Givens said “You know how long 40 years is waiting?”

Convicted in 1976 of killing a neighbor in his New Orleans apartment complex, Givens is one of a few hundred Louisiana prisoners who might become newly eligible for parole, the result of a sweeping package of criminal justice reform measures approved this spring by the Legislature and signed by Gov. John Bel Edwards. The aim is to reduce Louisiana’s incarceration rate, now the highest in the world, and save taxpayers $78 million over the next 10 years.

Most of the changes provide leniency to non-violent offenders. But two groups of people convicted of murder will also get their first shot at parole:

-Inmates who were convicted of murder when they were juveniles and sentenced to life in prison with no chance at parole. They may become eligible for parole Nov. 1 once they have served 25 years of their sentence and met certain other criteria. Prosecutors still have the opportunity to ask a judge to keep their life-without-parole sentences in place. About 300 juvenile lifers are currently incarcerated in Louisiana.

-About 110 to 120 inmates who were convicted of second-degree murder between 1973 and 1979 and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole — only to see that option denied to them because of contradictory state laws. They become eligible Nov. 1 if they have served 40 years of their sentence.

The Department of Public Safety and Corrections could not say exactly how many inmates are affected. Some offenders meet both criteria.

Further, Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc said some prisoners newly eligible for parole might not realize it. Prison officials are trying to spread the word.

These changes won’t affect most of the lifer population, however and Louisiana will remain an outlier in doling out life-without-parole sentences. About 4,800 prisoners had no parole eligibility before these law changes were approved last month.

Louisiana is one of only a few places where adults convicted of second-degree murder will continue to be sentenced to life without parole no matter what. Only Florida, California and Pennsylvania, each with much larger populations than Louisiana, have more people serving life-without-parole sentences, according to a report from The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that tracks prison populations.

In 2016, Louisiana had more people serving life-without-parole sentences than Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas combined, according to the report. Its life-without-parole population rose 28 percent between 2003 and 2016, a period in which Louisiana’s overall crime rate dropped.

Against that backdrop, leniency for violent offenders has still been a tough sell politically. Louisiana legislators changed the law for juvenile lifers only because the U.S. Supreme Court required it. Even then, it took the state five years to comply with the ruling.

And legislators approved parole eligibility for 1970s second-degree murderers because those prisoners ostensibly had the option when judges sentenced them four decades ago. Back then, second-degree murder sentences came with the possibility of parole after 20 or 40 years in prison. But there was a confusing conflict between the sentencing law and the more stringent parole law, and eventually more than 100 prisoners saw their parole eligibility taken away.

Many inmates caught between these two laws didn’t find out they had lost their parole eligible until 20 years into their sentences, in the 1990s, said Givens and others interviewed at Angola. They discovered it when the first batch started applying for Parole Board hearings and were denied.

It was disconcerting for inmates like Haki Sekou. He said he accepted a plea deal in 1978 for second-degree murder because it came with parole eligibility, instead of going to trial on a first-degree murder charge. First-degree murder did not include that option, and still doesn’t.

“I wanted the possibility to get out of prison one day,” said Sekou, one of three people convicted of killing a restaurant manager in New Orleans.

Inmates in the position of Sekou and Givens have challenged whether they could be denied parole options, but the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled against them. To be eligible for parole, they needed a change to the parole laws that matched their sentencing laws.

That happened last month when the Legislature and Edwards approved Senate Bill 139. Louisiana’s district attorneys, who had balked at almost all proposals for leniency for violent offenders, didn’t object to this change because they concluded it would not break promises to survivors and families of the 1970s murder victims.

“There were no victims told at that time that they weren’t going to have to go through a parole hearing,” said Pete Adams, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association.

Many of the inmates such as Givens are only now approaching their original parole eligibility date anyway. It’s been about 40 years since people convicted of second-degree murder during those years were put in prison in the first place. They would have had to wait this long, even if they had been parole eligible all those years.

And just being eligible for parole does not guarantee release. Only about one third of prisoners who were granted a Pardons and Parole Board hearing from 2006 to 2016 were actually paroled, according to a report from the Department of Corrections. An objection from a prosecutor or victim can doom a parole application.

With their parole eligibility in question, some of the prisoners sentenced in the 1970s tried to get released in other ways. Jimmie Lee Puckett, for example, convicted in 1978 of murdering a man after a scuffle over a bar seat in New Orleans, won a recommendation last fall from the Pardons and Parole Board for a shortened sentence that could have made him eligible for parole. The governor, however, has not yet acted on the request.

Now Puckett is eligible for parole under the new change in the law, and it might end up being an easier route to being released. The five board members who voted to shortern Puckett’s sentence make up the majority of the seven-member board, and if they vote for parole he will soon be a free man without waiting on the governor’s permission.

For the past few months, Puckett has been doing custodial work for the Angola Museum, which sits right outside the gates of the maximum security prison. Sheryl Renatza, the head of the foundation that runs the museum, also chairs the state’s Pardons and Parole Board.

He got the job because prison officials consider him, like Givens and Sekou, a model inmate. They stay out of trouble and have very few disciplinary infractions.

But that doesn’t make their crimes any less objectionable.

Givens’ victim, Dorothy Mae Bankston, 39, was found dead in a canal off Almonaster Road by three boys scavenging for crawfish a month after her mother reported her missing. Her skull was fractured, and someone had fired a shotgun into her chest. Givens, 26, had fled to Missouri then California. He was brought back to Louisiana for trial.

Sekou, at age 26, drove two other men to Baton Rouge to rob a Shoney’s Big Boy restaurant then helped kidnap the manager, Ronnie Lawrence, 22. They brought Lawrence to New Orleans, where he was fatally shot in the throat and chest.

Puckett, at age 24, shot Wallace Morris, 27, at close range in the temple during an argument over a bar stool. Puckett surrendered to the police about an hour later and, at trial, asserted that he shot Morris in self-defense.

In Louisiana, inmates aren’t allowed to contact their victims or the victims’ families directly. They also can’t talk directly about their crimes or victims with the news media. But in general terms, Sekou and Givens expressed remorse during interviews at Angola in June for what they did. Givens wrote a letter to the family of his victim several years ago, which was delivered to them through his lawyer.

“You take a victim’s family. You have to be considerate of them. Every time they sit down at the dinner table, there is an empty chair there,” Givens said of victims in general. “That hurts.”

Prison officials say all three have grown while incarcerated. Sekou tried to minister and counsel other inmates, including people on death row. Givens has helped fellow offenders prepare legal challenges, developed into a skilled carpenter and speaks to school groups about the importance of staying out of trouble. Puckett has run a program helping elderly prisoners complete forms and contact their families. He reads and writes letters for inmates who aren’t literate.

“It’s not something you just prepare for overnight,” Givens said of getting out of prison. “I didn’t just start preparing myself for freedom just when this Legislature went into session.”

Even if they are released, longtime prisoners can face difficulty adjusting to freedom. Employment for ex-offenders is not easy to find, especially if they have been out of the job market for four decades and are approaching normal retirement age.

But it’s not impossible. Should he be released, Givens has a carpentry job awaiting him, courtesy of Daniel Duncan in Baton Rouge. They met at the annual Angola Prison Rodeo, and Duncan offered him a job. Duncan and his wife have bought a few wood-working items from Givens at the rodeo in the past.

“He is better than half of the guys I employ right now,” said Duncan, who has hired other ex-prisoners. “I don’t judge people by their backgrounds. I judge people by who they are in the present.”

Another challenge for newly released inmates is establishing a good support network. Givens, for example, no longer has regular contact with his family. That’s not unusual for people who have been in prison for decades.

“When you are fresh in this place, it starts off like that,” Sekou said. “You see your family consistently on a regular basis. As time goes on, they begin to die out and they begin to get ill and communication becomes tough and the financial situation becomes tough.”

“They may have good intentions, but they just can’t get here. It’s a long way to come from New Orleans for 40 years.”

Some longtime prisoners do manage to keep in close contact with their families. If he is released, Puckett will be living with his daughter in New Orleans. She already has a room ready for him.

Demetrice Puckett, 43, was 3 when her father went to prison. She talks to him on the phone about once per week but hasn’t visited him much since she moved back to New Orleans from Baton Rouge in 2013. She has lost her eyesight, which makes it hard to get to Angola.

“I’m just so glad he’s coming home,” she said in an interview. “I’m a diabetic and sick.”

Puckett said he intends to cook and clean for his daughter if he is released. “My goal is to get out and help my kids. And to be the daddy I haven’t been since I’ve been incarcerated,” he said.

In addition to finding work and a support network, the Angola lifers newly eligible for parole will face public pressure to succeed. LeBlanc, the Corrections secretary, hopes to hold them up as an example of why people who have been in prison for decades should have a shot at parole. Givens, Sekou and Puckett agreed it’s a challenge.

“I’m hoping those who get an opportunity take full advantage of it: Do something to represent those they left behind, so they can say, ’Look at us. Look at the ones (who) have been released,’ and say, ’Well, we said it could work, and it’s working,’” Sekou said. “We want to be amongst those who try to make it work.”

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Information from: The Times-Picayune, https://www.nola.com

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