TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019 A
NWASHINGTON — “For 23 years, I
was a jailhouse lawyer,” said Calvin
Duncan, a former inmate at the Louisi-
ana State Penitentiary in Angola. “That
was my assigned job.”
He had a 10th-grade educa-
tion, and he was serving a life
sentence for murder. The
prison paid him 20 cents an
hour to help his fellow pris-
oners 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-unani-
mous 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. Louisi-
ana, 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.
“The lessons that Calvin taught me
were not just about the law,” Mr. Cohen
added. “They were about not giving
up.”
Emily Maw, a lawyer with Innocence
Project New Orleans, said Mr. Duncan
was persistence personified.
“He’s been on it for decades, when no
one was on it and no press was report-
ing it,” she said. “Calvin pushed con-
stantly. He has pushed when it was
unpopular. He has pushed when no one
thought it was going anywhere. He has
pushed and pushed and pushed.”
If the Supreme Court agrees with Mr.
Duncan’s position, Ms. Maw said, “it
could save hundreds of men from life in
prison.”
Over time, many people came to
question the Louisiana law, which al-
lowed convictions by a 10-to-2 vote.
Oregon is the only other state that
allows non-unanimous verdicts in crim-
inal cases.
Last year, Louisiana’s voters
amended the State Constitution to
require unanimity, though only for
crimes committed after 2018. In April,
The Advocate newspaper in Baton
Rouge won a Pulitzer Prize for a series
of articles on the subject.
Mr. Duncan himself has nothing to
gain from his efforts, having been con-
victed by a unanimous jury. Innocence
Project New Orleans secured his re-
lease in 2011 as part of a deal in which
he agreed to plead guilty to lesser
charges in exchange for a sentence of
time served. He has always maintained
his innocence.
In prison, Mr. Duncan enjoyed the
respect and affection of his fellow pris-
oners. One of them, the acclaimed
journalist Wilbert Rideau, wrote in his
memoir that Mr. Duncan had “the most
brilliant legal mind in Angola,” the
nation’s largest maximum-security
prison.
On the phone the other day, Mr. Ri-
deau elaborated. “You’re talking,” he
said, “to somebody who is the direct
beneficiary of his legal work.” Mr. Ri-
deau was released in 2005 after Mr.
Duncan helped him get a new trial.
“He did the legal research,” Mr. Ri-
deau said. “He put together the case. I
would not be here but for Calvin. But
I’m not the only guy. He got other guys
out of prison, too.”
Mr. Duncan was also a resource for
real lawyers. “I had a legal question I
couldn’t figure out,” said KatherineMattes, now a law professor at Tulane
University, recalling her early days
representing prisoners challenging
their convictions. “I started asking
capital defense lawyers around town.
They said: ‘I don’t know the answer to
that. Go ask Calvin Duncan.’ ”
She went to see him at the prison. “I
ask him the question,” she said. “He
immediately, off the top of his head,
gives me the case name and the citation
that answers the question.”
While he was in Angola, Mr. Duncan
was once allowed to visit Tulane’s law
library. “Before prison I had never setfoot on that campus,” he said. “I said
back then, and that was a long time
ago, that I wanted to go to that univer-
sity.”
He was released on a Friday. “That
Tuesday, I was on the Tulane campus,
trying to figure out how to go to school
there,” he said. “I was too late for the
spring, but I enrolled for the fall.”
He graduated last year. “I was told I
needed my bachelor’s degree to go to
law school,” he said. “That’s what I’ve
been working on.”
On the outside, Mr. Duncan continued
to question the Louisiana law allowing
non-unanimous verdicts. “I went to the
law library,” he said. “I discovered that
the law had been introduced for the
purpose of making sure that white
supremacy stayed alive.”
In 1898, after the Supreme Court
ruled that states could not exclude
black people from juries, Louisiana held
a constitutional convention whose
purpose, as the chairman of its judicia-
ry committee put it, was “to establish
the supremacy of the white race in this
state to the extent to which it could be
legally and constitutionally done.”
The new State Constitution replaced
a unanimity requirement with one that
said the votes of nine jurors out of 12
were enough to convict defendants ofnoncapital felonies. In 1973, the Consti-
tution was amended to require 10 jurors
to agree.
“They came up with a system to
make sure that black jurors’ votes
would not count,” Mr. Duncan said. “If ablack did get on a jury, whatever they
said would not count anyway. It’s like
the last of the Jim Crow-era laws.”
Mr. Duncan visited Professor Matt-
es’s law school clinic not long after he
was released. The students were in
their third year, tired of studying and
perhaps a little jaded.
Mr. Duncan asked to see the law
library, and he marveled at the vast and
pristine collections of cases, codes and
treatises.
“All of a sudden, he stops and he
turns to the students,” Professor Mattes
said. “He gets very serious and he
says: ‘You guys need to know how
incredibly lucky you are. Because what
you have here is power.’ ”ADAM
LIPTAK
SIDEBARJ. D. Scholten, a Democrat who nearly
toppled Representative Steve King of
Iowa in a heavily Republican district in
2018, announced on Monday that he
would run again for the seat in 2020. His
decision sets up a possible rematch with
Mr. King, whose history of racist re-
marks has made him a pariah among Re-
publican leaders, though not always with
voters.
“Last time, we were hoping to win,”
Mr. Scholten said in an interview before
the announcement. “Now, we are expect-
ing to win. We know how to do it.”
Mr. King was stripped of his congres-
sional committee assignments this year
by House Republicans, after he ques-
tioned why white nationalism was offen-
sive. He later said he had nothing to apol-
ogize for and would run in 2020 for a 10th
term in his deeply conservative district
in northwest Iowa.
If he survives a primary challenge
next year, Mr. King will appear on the
same ballot as President Trump, whose
nativism and anti-immigrant remarks
Mr. King long foreshadowed. In Mr.
King’s Fourth District, which Mr. Trump
won by nearly 30 points, voters in the
past have either agreed with or over-
looked Mr. King’s divisive language
about Latino migrants, who sustain
much of the agricultural economy there.
“Having Steve King have a voice in
Congress, I think that’s at the root of why
I feel it’s so important to get him out of
office,” Mr. Scholten said.
Mr. Scholten, a former minor league
baseball player and a fifth-generation Io-
wan, said he would once again crisscross
the 39 counties of the largely rural dis-
trict in an R.V., overnighting in Walmart
parking lots, while engaging with voters
about health care, agriculture and get-
ting corporate money out of politics.
Mr. Scholten, 39, weighed running
against Senator Joni Ernst, a potentially
vulnerable Republican, but learned in
June that national Democrats, including
Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority
leader, were backing a different chal-
lenger, Theresa Greenfield.
“Ultimately, I would have a tough time
abandoning what we were able to accom-
plish and watch Steve King get re-
elected if I were to run in that race,” Mr.
Scholten said over the weekend. “And, I
mean, the Fourth District is where my
heart’s at.”
Iowa will be in the political spotlight
next year, not just for its presidential cau-
cuses in February, but also because it
will feature competitive races up and
down the ballot in November, for the Sen-
ate and all four of its congressional seats.
To win re-election, Mr. King must first
defeat three primary challengers, most
prominently Randy Feenstra, a state
senator who has outraised him with the
support of the Republican establish-
ment. Mr. King brought in just $91,000 in
the quarter ending in June, compared
with Mr. Feenstra’s $140,000.
Money, however, has never mattered
much in Mr. King’s re-elections. He hasnearly universal name recognition in his
district, and until recently, voters
broadly embraced his pugnacious per-
sonality and positions on bedrock con-
servative issues like abortion and gun
rights.
Mr. Scholten, who outspent Mr. King
nearly four to one in 2018, came within
three percentage points of unseating him
after the congressman endorsed a candi-
date for Toronto mayor with neo-Nazi
ties and, in an interview with an Austrian
publication that surfaced late in the race,
seemed to endorse the “Great Replace-
ment,” a conspiracy theory espoused by
white supremacists.
In January, in an interview with The
New York Times, Mr. King said, “White
nationalist, white supremacist, Western
civilization — how did that language be-
come offensive?”House Republican leaders removed
him from the Judiciary and Agriculture
Committees, while Mr. King defended
himself by saying his remarks had been
taken out of context.
More recently, in town-hall-style
events with constituents, he has claimed
he did not utter the words as quoted.
Many Democratic politicians issued
fresh condemnations of white national-
ism over the weekend after at least 29
people were killed in mass shootings in
El Paso and in Dayton, Ohio, and some
placed a portion of the blame on Mr.
Trump’s remarks. The authorities said
they were investigating the El Paso
shooting as a possible hate crime.
“Words have consequences,” Mr.
Scholten said when asked about the
shootings. “The hatred and racism that
has become too commonplace in ourcountry does fuel violence.”
Despite his yearslong history of racist
remarks, Mr. King was rebuked by Re-
publican leaders only recently. Senator
Ernst denounced Mr. King this year, but
she has campaigned with him in the past,
eager for the support of his voters in the
state’s most conservative region.
Should Mr. Feenstra or one of the other
primary challengers emerge as the nom-
inee, Republicans would quite likely
have an easier time against Mr. Scholten
without Mr. King’s baggage.
If Mr. King wins the nomination, Mr.
Scholten would have to win the votes of
many Republicans and unaffiliated vot-
ers to defeat the congressman in a dis-
trict where active registered Republi-
cans greatly outnumber Democrats. Mr.
Scholten lost to Mr. King by about 10,
votes last year, out of 313,000 cast.
“We got 24,000 more votes last time
than there are Democrats in the district,”
Mr. Scholten said. “I have to do even bet-
ter than that this time.”
Strategists for both parties in Iowa
said they would still consider Mr. King
the favorite if he became the nominee.
“Republicans in the Fourth District
have not yet indicated they’ve had
enough” of Mr. King, said Kurt Meyer, a
Democratic county chairman in the First
District. “If a Democratic candidate for
president runs strong in Iowa, there’s
maybe a one-in-three chance we take
him out.”Democrat Who Nearly Beat
King in Iowa Is Trying Again
J. D. Scholten lost by three percent-
age points last year to Representative
Steve King, whose history of racist
remarks has lost him national Re-
publican support in Iowa’s heavily
conservative Fourth District.JOSHUA LOTT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESBy TRIP GABRIELAn archive of Adam Liptak's recent
articles and columns:
nytimes.com/adamliptakONLINE:MORE 'SIDEBAR'Jailhouse Lawyer Propels a Case to the Supreme Court
Applying His ‘Brilliant Legal Mind,’ a Former Inmate Challenges Non-Unanimous Jury Verdicts
Calvin Duncan at his home in New Orleans on Friday. While in prison, Mr.
Duncan was a resource for not only fellow inmates, but also seasoned lawyers.
Mr. Duncan, far left, who is fighting a Louisiana law with roots in the Jim
Crow era, “could save hundreds of men from life in prison,” one lawyer said.WILLIAM WIDMER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESGERALD HERBERT/ASSOCIATED PRESS