Rodricus Crawford Becomes 158^th Death-Row Exoneree

Caddo Parish, Louisiana pros­e­cu­tors for­mal­ly dropped charges against Rodricus Crawford (pic­tured) on April 17, exon­er­at­ing him in a con­tro­ver­sial death penal­ty case that had attract­ed nation­al atten­tion amid evi­dence of race dis­crim­i­na­tion, pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al excess, and actu­al inno­cence. He is the 158^th per­son exon­er­at­ed from death row in the United States since 1973. 

Crawford was con­vict­ed in 2012 and sen­tenced to death on charges he had mur­dered his one-year-old son. Crawford’s appel­late coun­sel, Cecilia Kappel, argued that the tes­ti­mo­ny under­ly­ing his con­vic­tion — the opin­ion of a local doc­tor who claimed the infant had been suf­fo­cat­ed — was con­tra­dict­ed by autop­sy results that showed per­va­sive bron­chop­neu­mo­nia in the baby’s lungs and sep­sis in his blood. After the tri­al, Kappel pre­sent­ed addi­tion­al evi­dence from experts in the fields of pedi­atric pathol­o­gy, pedi­atric neu­ropathol­o­gy, and pedi­atric infec­tious dis­ease that the child had died of natural causes.

In a state­ment announc­ing that it was drop­ping the charges against Crawford, the Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office said, ​“New evi­dence pre­sent­ed after the tri­al raised ques­tions about the degree of pneu­mo­nia togeth­er with bac­te­ria in the child’s blood indica­tive of sep­sis are pos­si­bil­i­ties that require con­sid­er­a­tion. … The death of a child is a tragedy under any cir­cum­stance for the vic­tim, the fam­i­ly and the com­mu­ni­ty as a whole, but this office is charged with the task to con­sid­er all of the evi­dence in a case and to bring a charge when the evi­dence can sup­port it. For these rea­sons, the State has elect­ed not to retry Rodricus Crawford.” 

In November 2016, the Louisiana Supreme Court had ordered a new tri­al for Crawford because pros­e­cu­tor Dale Cox had improp­er­ly removed jurors on the basis of race. Caddo has a doc­u­ment­ed pat­tern of racial­ly biased jury selec­tion, with a 2015 study find­ing that pros­e­cu­tors struck black jurors at more than triple the rate of oth­er jurors. Data from 22 felony tri­als pros­e­cut­ed by Cox showed he had struck black jurors at a rate 2.7 times high­er than other jurors. 

Cox attract­ed nation­al crit­i­cism for ques­tion­able com­ments and prac­tices and his per­ceived overzeal­ous pur­suit of the death penal­ty. He per­son­al­ly pros­e­cut­ed 1/​3 of all the cas­es in which Louisiana juries returned death sen­tences between 2010 – 2015, and wrote an inter­nal memo on the Crawford case in 2014 stat­ing that Crawford ​“deserves as much phys­i­cal suf­fer­ing as it is human­ly pos­si­ble to endure before he dies.” In 2015, he told The Shreveport Times that he believed the state needs to ​“kill more people.” 

Caddo Parish is among the 2% of U.S. coun­ties respon­si­ble for a major­i­ty of death-row inmates, and had a death sen­tenc­ing rate per homi­cide eight times high­er than the rest of the state of Louisiana from 2006 to 2015. 

Ben Cohen, an attor­ney for Crawford, said, ​“This case has always been about injus­tice and the dis­pro­por­tion­ate use of the death penal­ty in Caddo Parish. In decid­ing not to retry Rodricus Crawford, the Caddo Parish District Attorney’s office is right­ing this injus­tice, restor­ing integri­ty to their office.”

Crawford is the sec­ond recent death-row exoneree from Caddo Parish. In 2014, Glenn Ford was released from death row after 30 years. He died of can­cer in 2015. Corey Williams, who was 16 at the time of his alleged crime and was removed from death row after being found to be intel­lec­tu­al­ly dis­abled, is still serv­ing a life sen­tence despite evi­dence that his con­fes­sion was coerced and that oth­ers com­mit­ted the offense for which he was condemned.