Glenn Ford spent 30 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. Sentenced to die in the electric chair, he was sent to a Louisiana penitentiary in 1985. "My sons, when I left, was babies,” he said. “Now they’re grown men with babies.” Earlier this month, he was released at age 64, but his story doesn't end happily. He has stage-four lung cancer. He is expected to die within months. And the state of Louisiana doesn't want to pay the $330,000 it owes for destroying his life, as The Shreveport Times noted in an editorial denouncing the state's behavior.
The injustice is so outrageous that a former prosecutor who helped send Ford to death row, A.M. "Marty" Stroud III, has spoken out in a letter to the newspaper. He begins by denouncing "the audacity of the state's effort to deny Mr. Ford any compensation," noting, "there was no technicality here. Crafty lawyering did not secure the release of a criminal." He insists that Ford should be "completely compensated."
[For more of this story, written by Conor Friedersdorf, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...to-death-row/388496/]
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