Louisiana Republicans move to abolish clerk's office won by exonerated man

Calvin Duncan was arrested in 1981 for the murder of 23-year-old David Yeager in New Orleans and spent more than 28 years in maximum-security prison before his release in 2011. Prosecutors offered to reduce his sentence to time served if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery, and Duncan accepted in order to go free. He did not stop fighting to clear his name.

In 2021, Louisiana passed a post-conviction relief law allowing defendants who had pleaded guilty to challenge their convictions if evidence of their innocence had been withheld from court. Duncan sought relief under that law, and after a judge vacated his conviction, Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams dropped all charges against him. Duncan's name now appears on the National Registry of Exonerations.

In November 2025, Duncan won 68 percent of the vote to become the Orleans Parish clerk of criminal court, running on a platform to reform a system he had spent decades navigating from the inside. His swearing-in was scheduled for May 4, 2026.

The Orleans Parish clerk of criminal court controls the record-keeping infrastructure for all criminal proceedings in one of the largest criminal courts in Louisiana. The clerk's office processes sentencing paperwork on every defendant committed to city and state institutions, manages all court files and evidence chains, and serves as the public access point for criminal records. The office also oversees all city elections in Orleans Parish.

Duncan's platform centered on using that record-keeping power to improve access for defendants seeking post-conviction relief. During his years in prison, he had personally fought to access court records to prove his innocence and used that experience to help other incarcerated people do the same. He founded the Light of Justice Program to expand court access for incarcerated people before running for clerk. The clerk post was, in his words, the culmination of his life's work.

While incarcerated, Duncan became a jailhouse lawyer and played a central role in advocacy that led to Open concept, the 2020 Supreme Court decision striking down Louisiana's non-unanimous jury conviction law. That law, adopted at the state's 1898 constitutional convention, had allowed guilty verdicts on 10-2 jury votes. The convention chairman stated the avowed purpose was to establish the supremacy of the white race, and the Court cited that history in its majority opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which filed an amicus brief in Ramos, documented that Black jurors in Louisiana were 2.5 times more likely to be in dissent on non-unanimous verdicts than white jurors. The ruling freed Evangelisto Ramos, who had been convicted 10-2 of murder, and affected all cases still on direct appeal at the time. More than 1,500 people convicted under the non-unanimous rule whose direct appeals were exhausted remain imprisoned, because the Supreme Court and Louisiana courts declined to apply the ruling retroactively.

Senate Bill 256, authored by Sen. Jay Morris of Monroe, would merge the Orleans Parish criminal and civil clerk's offices into a single position. The Louisiana Senate passed the bill 25-11 on April 8, 2026, sending it to the House for approval. The bill is part of a package with Senate Bills 197 and 217, which together would cut 11 judgeships across Orleans Parish courts.

Morris acknowledged in committee that the bill's timing was connected to Duncan's election, saying that otherwise the state would have to pay Duncan for four years in a job being eliminated. The legislative auditor estimated the elimination would save approximately $27,300 per year, while acknowledging the costs of combining the offices were unknown. Morris also acknowledged the civil clerk's office would likely struggle with the criminal caseload, and his solution was to hire someone.

Duncan's campaign manager, Emily Ratner, said the efficiency argument was implausible because the bill includes no transition timeline and no operational plan for combining offices with fundamentally different record types.

Gov. Jeff Landry, who as Louisiana's attorney general in 2023 opposed Duncan's petition to be compensated for his wrongful conviction, told the Associated Press that eliminating Duncan's office was about improving government efficiency. Sen. Royce Duplessis, Democrat of New Orleans, said on the Senate floor he had never seen something so barbaric and told his Republican colleagues that history would record the vote.

Even Darren Lombard, the outgoing clerk whom Duncan defeated, urged the Legislature to vote down the legislation. Lombard wrote in a public column that he respected the will of the voters who had chosen his successor and urged the Legislature to stand with them. Sen. Gerald Boudreaux, Democrat of Lafayette, said his preference would have been to let Duncan serve the term voters chose him for but voted with the majority anyway.

Duncan told the Associated Press he believes the state is retaliating against him for years of fighting to clear his name, citing the fact that Landry opposed his wrongful conviction compensation claim as attorney general. Leon Cannizzaro, the DA who offered Duncan the 2011 plea deal, now leads the criminal division in Murrill's AG office.

The Louisiana GOP's actions against Duncan's position are part of a broader assault on voting rights in the 2026 legislative session. On the same day the Senate passed SB 256 to eliminate Duncan's office, April 8, 2026, the Senate's Governmental Affairs Committee rejected SB 365, the Louisiana , in a 4-3 party-line vote. Sen. Duplessis authored SB 365 to prohibit election practices that suppress or dilute minority voting power, modeled after the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. Four Republican senators voted against advancing the bill; none explained their opposition on the record.

Ashley Shelton, president of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, told the committee that the ability to elect a candidate of their choice is what's at stake for Black Louisianans. Duplessis noted that since the Supreme Court's 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the federal preclearance requirement, 61 percent of parishes closed 103 polling places and consolidated more than 300 precincts, with a documented disparate impact on Black voters.

The Supreme Court is also expected to decide Louisiana v. Callais by mid-June 2026, a case brought by white plaintiffs arguing it is unconstitutional to factor race into how voting maps are drawn. State Attorney General Liz Murrill, who had initially defended Louisiana's second Black-majority congressional district, now argues it's unconstitutional and has questioned whether Section 2 of the federal should exist at all.

The pattern of using legislative action to block Black elected officials from taking power has recurred throughout American history. Georgia's Democratic-controlled legislature expelled all 33 of its Black elected officials in September 1868, just two months after the state was readmitted to the Union. Louisiana's P.B.S. Pinchback was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1873 but was never seated after Senate Democrats filibustered the question for years until Republicans accepted a compromise that gave Democrats control of the Louisiana state assembly.

In 2022, the Alabama Judicial Resources Allocation Commission voted 8-3 along racial lines to permanently transfer a Jefferson County judgeship to majority-white Madison County weeks after Tiara Young Hudson won the Democratic primary for that seat. All three Black members voted against; all eight white members voted in favor. The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the transfer in March 2023, blocking Hudson from the bench.

In April 2023, the Tennessee House voted to expel two Black Democratic representatives, Justin Jones of Nashville and Justin Pearson of Memphis, who had led a gun control protest on the House floor. Rep. Gloria Johnson, who is white and participated in the same protest, narrowly avoided expulsion by one vote, 65-30. Both Jones and Pearson were reinstated by local government bodies within days and won their special elections.

New Orleans has a predominantly Black electorate and is one of the state's most reliably Democratic cities. The Louisiana Legislature is largely Republican and white. Morris, who authored all three bills targeting New Orleans courts, represents a district in north Louisiana and acknowledged in committee that he hadn't spoken with Duncan or any Orleans Parish judges before filing the legislation.

The bills Morris authored could cut 11 judgeships across Orleans Parish courts in addition to eliminating the clerk position. Senate Bill 197 would cut two of 12 judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Senate Bill 217 would cut four criminal court judges, two civil court judges, two municipal and traffic court judges, and one juvenile court judge. All three bills passed the Senate and moved to the House as of April 9, 2026.

New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno, a former state legislator, told the New Orleans Advocate that some bills come about because they are about efficiencies, and some because they are political. She said these were political.