NY Times by Adam Liptak 8/5/2019
“For 23 years, I was a jailhouse lawyer,†said Calvin Duncan, a former inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. “That was my assigned job.â€
He had a 10th-grade education, and he was serving a life sentence for murder. The prison paid him 20 cents an hour to help his fellow prisoners with their cases.
He got good at it, and he used his increasingly formidable legal skills to help free several inmates. He knew how to spot a promising legal issue, and he was relentless. Seasoned lawyers sought his advice.
One issue in particular consumed Mr. Duncan. He could not understand how a Louisiana law that allowed non-unanimous juries in criminal cases could be constitutional. He would not let it go, working on about two dozen failed attempts to persuade the Supreme Court to address the issue.
The justices finally agreed in March to decide the question. They will hear arguments in the case, Ramos v. Louisiana, No. 18-5924, on the first day of their new term, on Oct. 7.
G. Ben Cohen, the lawyer who filed the petition in the latest case and many others, said Mr. Duncan had played a crucial role in identifying, shepherding and presenting the cases.
“From well before I was involved,†Mr. Cohen said, “Calvin understood that this was a winning legal issue — how to frame it, raise it and challenge the non-unanimous law.â€
“The lessons that Calvin taught me were not just about the law,†Mr. Cohen said. “They were about not giving up.â€
Emily Maw, a lawyer with Innocence Project New Orleans, said Mr. Duncan was persistence personified.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/us/politics/supreme-court-nonunanimous-juries.html