Louisiana Wrongful Conviction Compensation: Why the AG’s Opposition Is Wrong

Louisiana Says It Compensates the Innocent. Our Attorney General Is Fighting to Make Sure It Doesn’t.

By David Rozas, Rozas Law

I have spent 21 years defending people the state of Louisiana wanted to lock up. In that time, I have learned that the hardest part of this job is not the trial. It is watching a system that claims to value justice turn around and fight, tooth and nail, against the very people it already admitted it wronged. That is exactly what is happening right now to Elvis Brooks, and it should make every person in this state furious.

Brooks spent 42 years at Angola for a 1977 murder he did not commit. He was 19 years old when he was arrested, convicted after a trial that lasted a single day, and sent away on the strength of a cross-racial eyewitness identification, the single least reliable form of evidence our justice system still tolerates. He was finally exonerated in 2022 after prosecutors admitted they had withheld fingerprint evidence that did not match him. Read that sentence again. The state had the proof of his innocence in a file the entire time.

Louisiana built a compensation fund back in 2005 for exactly this situation. If a court vacates your conviction and you can show your innocence by clear and convincing evidence, you are eligible for up to $480,000. It is not a windfall. It is not even close to fair, given what these men lost. But it is supposed to be the state’s small acknowledgment that it took someone’s entire life over a mistake, or worse.

Elvis Brooks filed his claim in April of 2024. It is still pending. He is 68 years old, living on 994 dollars a month in Social Security, in a senior center apartment. He has told reporters that if he is ever compensated, he wants to expand his family’s headstone, because seven relatives, including his parents and siblings, died while he was locked away, and there is only room on that stone for three of their names. Sit with that for a second before you keep reading.

The reason his claim is still pending is not a mystery. It is Attorney General Liz Murrill. Since taking office, she has opposed 22 of the 23 active wrongful conviction compensation claims that have come across her desk, including four cases where DNA or blood evidence proved innocence beyond any real dispute. She has told lawmakers, on the record, that the entire compensation fund should be abolished. She threatened exoneree Calvin Duncan, a man a judge ruled factually innocent after 28 years in prison, with perjury charges and a bar complaint simply for pursuing what the law says he is owed. In Brooks’s case specifically, her office is arguing that because he took a plea deal after he had already been released rather than while he was still incarcerated, the court’s action amounted to a pardon, which only the governor can grant, and she has moved to reinstate manslaughter charges against a man the state already admitted it wrongfully imprisoned for four decades.

Compare that to her predecessors. Buddy Caldwell opposed a third of these claims. Even Jeff Landry, when he held the AG office before becoming governor, opposed 10 of 12. A national expert on this exact issue, Jeffrey Gutman, put it plainly: he cannot think of another attorney general who has been this aggressive about denying compensation to people the courts have already found innocent. And Landry himself, now governor, vetoed a bill this year, one that passed unanimously through a Republican controlled legislature, that would have simply increased how much these men and women are owed. In his veto message, he called exonerees convicted criminals who only want money.

Let me tell you what that framing gets wrong, because I have sat across the table from men like Elvis Brooks. Nobody spends 42 years in Angola and comes out chasing a payday. They come out having missed every funeral, every birthday, every ordinary Tuesday that the rest of us take for granted. The compensation fund does not undo that. It cannot. What it can do is refuse to compound the injury by forcing an innocent man to fight the state a second time, years after the state already lost the first fight and had to admit it.

As a criminal defense attorney, I do not say this lightly. The adversarial system exists for a reason, and prosecutors have a job to do. But there is a difference between doing your job and using every legal maneuver available to punish people for the crime of having been wrongfully convicted in the first place. Prosecutors are happy to use DNA evidence to put someone away. When that same evidence proves they got it wrong, suddenly it is not good enough. You cannot have it both ways, and an attorney general who tells the legislature that innocent men should get nothing at all has lost sight of what the job is supposed to protect.

Elvis Brooks is still fighting, more than two years after filing his claim, more than three years after his name was cleared. He told a reporter that if the state thinks he is going to give up, they have him wrong. I believe him. I only wish his own government believed him too.

If you or someone you love has been convicted, wrongfully or otherwise, you deserve a lawyer who will fight for you at every stage, not just at trial. That is what we do at Rozas Law, every day, in Baton Rouge and across Louisiana.