In December 2015, I interviewed, in his office in Shreveport, Louisiana, A. Martin Stroud III, the former Chief Assistant District Attorney of Caddo Parish for a book I was then writing on injustice (Broken Scales: Reflections On Injustice, ABA Publ. 2016). The reason? In 1984, Stroud had prosecuted and convicted before an all-white jury one Glenn Ford, a black man represented by court-appointed lawyers with zero criminal experience, for the murder of a local jeweler. Ford was sentenced to death and sat on death row at Angola—the worst of the worst—for 30 years, all along maintaining his innocence.

In 2013, long after Stroud went into private practice, “credible evidence” exonerating Ford came to the attention of the then-district attorney, who called Stroud telling him he had convicted a man who turned out to be innocent. Ford was going to be released, “so, now we set it right,” said the DA. “We set it right.” Just imagine! Stroud successfully had prosecuted an innocent man to death row.