dont mind if I pull some excerpts....niggas dont click lanks
If Louisiana is arguably the most punitive state in America, Caddo Parish, home to the city of Shreveport, is likely the most punitive in Louisiana. Caddo lies in the far northwestern corner of the state. Long and thin on the map, the parish is bordered on the east by the squiggly 19th-century contours of the Red River. It’s home to an Air Force base and a Harrah’s Casino and, thanks to some tax breaks for Hollywood, the city has been the backdrop for several movies.
In 2015, a writer in the New Orleans Advocate called the death penalty a “cottage industry” in Shreveport. Caddo Parish led the country in death sentences per capita for some time, and between 2010 and 2014 was responsible for three of every four people sent to Louisiana’s death row. It is also among the 2 percent of U.S. counties responsible for more than half of America’s death sentences.
In their vigor to send suspects to death row, Caddo prosecutors have been known to invoke the wrath of God, and to instruct to jurors that no less than Jesus himself would demand that they hand down the ultimate penalty. That sort of unapologetic fire-and-brimstoning has attracted a lot of media attention.
Caddo also seems to have a race problem. Aviv pointed out last year in the New Yorker that 77 percent of the people sentenced to die in the parish have been black, though blacks make up only about 49 percent of the population. Of the black people Caddo has sent to death row, almost half were sentenced for killing white people. Meanwhile, despite a long and ugly history of racial terrorism by white supremacist groups (the parish once carried the well-earned nickname “Bloody Caddo”), a Caddo jury has never sentenced a white person to die for killing a black person. One 2015 study found that over the previous decade, prosecutors in the parish used peremptory challenges three times as often to strike black people from juries as others. To look at it another way, Caddo prosecutors bumped 46 percent of qualified blacks from juries in criminal cases, vs. just 15 percent of qualified jurors of other races. Earlier this month, the parish’s sheriff complained about the new reform laws, which would allow for the release of some nonviolent prisoners. The sheriff lamented that the prisoners targeted for release were those “we use every day to wash cars, to change oil in our cars, to cook in the kitchens,” comments that to some were reminiscent of convict leasing programs.