Louisiana Supreme Court Orders New Trial for Rodricus Crawford in Controversial Caddo Parish Death Penalty Case

The Louisiana Supreme Court has over­turned the con­vic­tion of Rodricus Crawford (pic­tured) and ordered that he be giv­en a new tri­al in a con­tro­ver­sial death penal­ty case that attract­ed nation­al atten­tion amid evi­dence of race dis­crim­i­na­tion, pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al excess, and actual innocence. 

Crawford was con­vict­ed of mur­der­ing his young son based upon the tes­ti­mo­ny of a local doc­tor who claimed the boy had been suf­fo­cat­ed, although autop­sy results showed per­va­sive bron­chop­neu­mo­nia in the boy’s lungs and sep­sis in his blood, indi­cat­ing that he may have died of pneu­mo­nia. After the tri­al, Crawford’s lawyers pre­sent­ed addi­tion­al evi­dence from experts in the fields of pedi­atric pathol­o­gy, pedi­atric neu­ropathol­o­gy, and pedi­atric infec­tious dis­ease that the child died of nat­ur­al caus­es from pneu­mo­nia and sepsis. 

The court did not over­turn the con­vic­tion on those grounds, how­ev­er, rul­ing that the local doc­tor’s tes­ti­mo­ny had pro­vid­ed a suf­fi­cient evi­den­tiary basis from which jurors could have con­vict­ed Crawford. Instead, it ruled that pros­e­cu­tor Dale Cox — who gained noto­ri­ety for telling the Shreveport Times that Louisiana needs to ​“kill more peo­ple” with the death penal­ty — had vio­lat­ed the con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion against strik­ing jurors on the basis of race when he exer­cised peremp­to­ry chal­lenges to exclude five African Americans from serv­ing on the jury. 

A 2015 study of jury selec­tion in 332 crim­i­nal tri­als in Caddo Parish between January 2003 and December 2012 by the human rights orga­ni­za­tion Reprieve Australia showed that, his­tor­i­cal­ly, Caddo pros­e­cu­tors were three times as like­ly to strike an African-American from jury ser­vice than a prospec­tive white juror. 

Crawford’s lawyer, Cecelia Kappel, praised the Court’s deci­sion, say­ing ​“I am so thank­ful that they did the right thing in this case. It was a ter­ri­ble tragedy since Day 1, and his con­vic­tion was a total injus­tice and the court real­ly stepped up and fixed it, and I am look­ing for­ward to con­tin­u­ing to work with the DA’s office in order to reach a just outcome.”

James E. Stewart, who was elect­ed as the parish’s first black dis­trict attor­ney in 2015, said he would reas­sign the case to a new assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney for ​“re-eval­u­a­tion … to make a deter­mi­na­tion of a prop­er course of action to pro­ceed for­ward in this matter.” 

Caddo Parish is one of the 2% of coun­ties that is respon­si­ble for 56% of all death row inmates in the U.S. and was the sub­ject of a recent report by Harvard University’s Fair Punishment Project on out­lier death penal­ty prac­tices. Cox — who in 2014 wrote a memo say­ing that Crawford ​“deserves as much phys­i­cal suf­fer­ing as it is human­ly pos­si­ble to endure before he dies” and told the the jury that Jesus Christ would have imposed the death penal­ty in this case — along with one oth­er Caddo Parish pros­e­cu­tor, was respon­si­ble for 3/​4 of all death sen­tences imposed in Louisiana over a recent five-year period.