The Last Shall Be First

In 1994, a corrupt New Orleans cop ordered a hit on a civilian.

He went away for murder, but he left a trail of other victims in his wake.

They are still crying out for justice.

By Brian Fairbanks
Photographs by Rita Harper

A few weeks before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Len Davis rose to face a jury. A former policeman, Davis was a big man who’d once exuded toughness and sometimes thrown himself in harm’s way on the streets. He became known around New Orleans’s Ninth Ward as Robocop, but that wasn’t his only nickname: People also called him the Desire Terrorist.

In the early 1990s, Davis earned a fearsome reputation in and around a public housing complex called the Desire Development for helping drug dealers move product and cover up violent crimes. Murder is what landed Davis in court, but the victim wasn’t in the drug game. She was a single mother who had filed a brutality complaint against Davis. The next day, he ordered a hit man to kill her.

The murder is the most notorious of the 424 that were committed in New Orleans in 1994, the city’s deadliest year on record. After Davis was arrested, he became a national symbol of the depths of corruption and depravity the New Orleans Police Department had sunk to, and he was convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to die. The verdict was affirmed on appeal, but the death sentence was tossed out. In 2005, a resentencing trial was scheduled to determine Davis’s fate once more.

Davis represented himself in court, delivering an opening argument and even cross-examining witnesses. Despite damning evidence to the contrary, including recorded phone conversations between him and the hit man immediately before and after the murder, Davis claimed that he was innocent, that the witnesses testifying against him were lying. “When this case is over,” he said, “you will be filled with reasonable doubt.”

The jury was unmoved. On August 9, it recommended the same punishment as the previous panel: death. A judge affirmed the recommendation two months later.

For many people in New Orleans, the resentencing marked the end of the saga of Len Davis, and news of it was all but swept from the headlines by the worst disaster in the city’s history—a disaster that spurred shocking new instances of police brutality. For at least five incarcerated men, however, the story wasn’t over. In their view, that high-profile murder case from 1994 only scratched the surface of Davis’s wrongdoing. Were it not for him, the men claimed, they might not be behind bars. In a sense, they were the Desire Terrorist’s other victims.

No one seemed interested in their side of the story. Their appeals stalled or failed. In time the men came to understand that their only chance of getting out of prison was for someone to recognize the wrong done to them and take the extraordinary steps necessary to make it right. So they waited. For 17 years after Davis’s resentencing they waited.

Part I

Locals like to point out that the most infamous cop in New Orleans history isn’t from Louisiana at all. Born in Chicago in 1964, Len Davis moved to the Crescent City with his mother upon his father’s untimely passing. After he graduated high school, Davis drove a candy truck for several years. He also racked up a criminal record, including battery charges.

At 22, Davis enrolled in the NOPD’s training academy. Amid the crack epidemic and white flight from the city, the department was desperate for recruits. It loosened employment standards, allowing some individuals with criminal histories to attend the academy, and made getting through training easier than ever. “They created a situation where if you could not pass the final exam, you could still graduate,” Felix Loicano, a former acting chief of detectives with the NOPD, said in an interview.

Davis wasn’t at the academy long before he got in trouble for unspecified reasons and was given the heave-ho. But after taking a job guarding academy property, he was allowed to reenroll. He graduated in 1988.

At the time, the NOPD was plagued by misconduct and graft. Deputies vying for the department’s top job had loyal factions committed to protecting their own. “We had the equivalent of four Mafia crime families running the police department,” a city official told The New York Times. Pay was so low—the starting salary for an officer was less than $20,000—that many cops worked security on the side. Enterprising officers known as detail brokers even hired fellow police to work gigs for clients and took a cut of their earnings. Moonlighting, which often paid well, created perverse incentives. “The allegiance becomes to this seedy, after-hours establishment that you are guarding,” historian Leonard Moore has said, “as opposed to your particular shift at the precinct.”

Meanwhile, among city residents the NOPD was known to be ruthless. Between 1985 and 1990, the federal government received 26 civil-rights complaints for every 1,000 officers on the force. That was more than 50 times the rate for the New York Police Department.

Davis landed in the NOPD’s Seventh District after finishing the academy, and in some ways he distinguished himself. Once, after responding to the scene of a mugging, the victim wrote a letter to the department praising his courtesy. In another instance, Davis talked a woman out of shooting herself and into giving him her gun. For his efforts, Davis received commendations but not promotions, a fact that may or may not have been related to the infractions that were beginning to accumulate on his employment record: ignoring orders, failing to complete paperwork.

In May 1989, Davis was transferred to the Fifth District, known as the Bloody Fifth. Violence was rising as gang recruitment and drug use proliferated in the district’s public housing, including the Desire Development. One criminal group did business out of a black pickup emblazoned with the word “Homicide” in gold lettering.

On July 19, 1991, while Davis was chasing three armed suspects, a bullet shattered the windshield of his cruiser, causing him to lose control of the vehicle. He spun into a fence, then burst out of the car with his gun raised and collared one of the suspects. A moment later, a gun fired and Davis crumpled, groaning from a gut shot. The suspect he’d grabbed tried to shake free, but Davis managed to pin him down until backup arrived, all while blood flooded the front of his uniform.

Davis received a medal for sustaining injury in the line of duty, and after three months of recovery he rejoined the force. His return was far from triumphant. He cycled through a succession of partners. He had an alcohol problem. He was accused of brutality, physical intimidation, and stealing from the department. Once, when he was stopped for driving on the shoulder of a road, Davis threatened to beat up the officer who’d pulled him over. In 1992, he was suspended from work for 51 days on battery charges after he assaulted a woman with his flashlight, leaving her with a head wound and two black eyes. According to Davis, she had criticized and hit him as he made a drug arrest outside her house.

Attorney Carol A. Kolinchak, who later represented Davis, would argue that no one could have emerged from her client’s tribulations as a cop unaffected. “It’s well documented. It’s in [the] literature, it’s been published by experts who have studied law enforcement,” Kolinchak said in court. “The symptoms are common and they’re universal: stress, irritability, aggression, depression, alcohol, substance abuse, and increases in citizen complaints.”

At some point, Davis’s behavior became devious. His cousins Little June and Charles Butan dealt drugs in New Orleans, and they began funneling cash to Davis for accompanying them as they transported their product. He came to these jobs armed and in his NOPD uniform. “I’m sure not the police no more,” Davis once told a girlfriend. “They lost me a long fucking time ago. I’m on this bitch strictly to get what I can get, use my job to benefit me.”

Davis wasn’t the only New Orleans cop who crossed the line between enforcing the law and breaking it. The NOPD’s vice squad, for instance, was well on its way to being disbanded for thefts and shakedowns—the deputy in charge would eventually be convicted of snatching cash from the till during raids on strip joints and bars in the French Quarter. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Davis found a co-conspirator, another corrupt cop to be his partner in crime.

Davis got on the phone with Hardy and gave him a description of his target: bob haircut, black coat, jeans with bleach stains on the front. “Get that whore,” Davis instructed.

On Christmas Eve 1993, as the city fell into a hush, Terry Adams arrived for a meeting with representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Adams was a drug dealer, and he told the FBI that an NOPD cop named Sammie Williams was shaking him down. Hand over $10,000, Williams had told Adams, or spend Christmas in jail.

It wasn’t every day that a drug dealer approached the FBI with information about a dirty cop. The feds seized the opportunity and strapped a wire to Adams, who agreed to use $3,000 of his own money to appease Williams for the time being; the government would never reimburse him. Agents then tailed Adams to his meeting with Williams and watched the money change hands.

After the meeting, the feds continued to surveil Williams, as well as his new NOPD partner, Len Davis. “We felt it would be more convenient for us to be partners,” Williams later testified, “given the other things we were involved in.” Williams insisted that Adams pay off Davis, too. Once, Davis drove Adams down to the bayou, jammed a gun in his mouth, and patted him down in search of a wire—he found nothing, but it was a close call.

The FBI expanded its investigation, which it dubbed Operation Shattered Shield, and by March 1994, it had called in an undercover operative. Juan Jackson was a six-foot-three agent who for purposes of the op would pose as a drug dealer known simply as J.J. “The FBI taught you in undercover school to pick a name that if your back’s turned, if you’re distracted, whatever you’re doing, will make you turn your head,” Jackson said in an interview.

The feds’ plan was to have Adams transport cocaine for J.J., and for Davis and Williams to guard the shipments in return for payment. At first Davis and Williams were hesitant to work with a stranger from outside New Orleans. When J.J. met them in a Hilton hotel room on May 4, he convinced them he was legit by forcing everyone to strip to their underwear to prove they weren’t wired up. (The feds had bugged the room in advance of the meeting.)

By June, Williams and Davis were overseeing cocaine shipments while wearing their NOPD uniforms, carrying weapons, and sometimes using marked vehicles. Initially, the FBI used real drugs, but eventually it substituted dummy packages. The shipments arrived at a front nominally operating as an auto-supply warehouse near the banks of the Mississippi River. Williams and Davis guarded the packages until they were picked up by fake couriers, whom the cops escorted by car until they reached the state line. Davis recruited other NOPD officers to aid with the operation; he was soon paying seven cops to guard the warehouse in 12-hour shifts.

When Davis invited J.J. to a party at his home, the undercover agent noticed that Davis liked to dominate conversation and appear in charge of the room. Davis had also memorialized the shot he took to the stomach in 1991. “He had framed on his wall the uniform with the bloodstains where I guess he got hit,” Jackson said.

As part of the FBI op, J.J. gave Williams and Davis cell phones, still somewhat novel devices at the time. The phones were bugged—everything Williams and Davis said when they called their associates was recorded and transcribed by the feds. One of the people Davis frequently contacted was Paul Hardy. Known as Cool on the streets, Hardy was a drug dealer and a hit man. That April, he’d ordered the killing of a man named Corey Richardson because Richardson wouldn’t shut up about a murder Hardy had orchestrated. Another time, after participating in a shooting spree, Hardy followed a wounded victim to the ER and fired on the man as he was wheeled into the hospital.

Davis and Hardy were close friends, and the cop shielded the hit man from scrutiny. Davis gave Hardy advice—for instance, that the best time to commit a crime was when NOPD shift changes happened. In a recorded phone conversation, Davis once claimed erroneously: “You can’t go to jail for putting a hit on somebody, Paul. You only go to jail if you were the gunman.”

Davis and Hardy were conspiring at a moment of high anxiety in New Orleans. The city’s murder rate was rising so fast that, in the spring, a nine-year-old boy named James Darby Jr. sent a letter to President Bill Clinton. “I want you to stop the killing in the city,” Darby wrote. “People is dead and I think that somebody might kill me. So would you please stop the people from deading. I’m asking you nicely to stop it. I know you can do it.” Just over a week later, on Mother’s Day, Darby was killed in a drive-by shooting. Clinton practically waved Darby’s letter above his head while rallying support for a new tough-on-crime bill, which he signed into law on September 13.

Various witness accounts, to say nothing of the conversations captured on federal wiretaps, suggest that Davis was unfazed by the role he played in his city’s bloodshed. One day, while hosting a cookout for friends in his backyard, Davis took a call from Hardy and invited him over. Leon Duncan, one of Davis’s former partners and one of the cops who helped guard the sham cocaine shipments, expressed dismay. “What the fuck are you doing hanging out with a cold-blooded killer like Paul Hardy?” he snapped at Davis, according to court documents.

“Paul Hardy ain’t never killed nobody that didn’t deserve to die,” Davis replied.

“Who the fuck are you or Paul Hardy to decide who lives or dies?”

“Well, Dunc, you just don’t understand the game.”

“Fuck the game. We’re talking about people’s lives!”

 “You see, that’s your problem now,” Davis said.

In 1994, Kim Marie Groves was 32 and raising three children on her own. She worked part-time as a security guard and had also appointed herself as a kind of neighborhood-watch woman—she walked the streets near her home in the Ninth Ward and knocked on doors to alert parents if she saw that their kids were up to no good. On October 11, Groves witnessed two cops pistol-whipping and punching a young man she knew so well that she considered herself an aunt to him. His name was Nathan Norwood, and he was 17. Groves also recognized one of the cops as Len Davis; years back they’d been enrolled in the same security training program. The other officer was Sammie Williams.

Groves rushed up to the scene. Norwood was handcuffed and bleeding from his nose. “Why do y’all have him?” she demanded to know. Williams told her to leave, but she refused. Ultimately, the cops let Norwood go.

For years, the story was that Groves went straight to the NOPD’s internal affairs department and filed a complaint against Williams and Davis. In fact, as Justice Department memos reveal, the first person to report the assault was Tonga Amos, Norwood’s cousin. The IAD followed up in the morning, inviting Norwood and his mother to tell their side of the story. Groves visited the department that day to file a complaint, too. When asked why she was there, Groves said she was worried that her 16-year-old son, Corey, might be the next victim of the NOPD’s brutality.

At 1 a.m. on October 13, Davis called Williams. He’d just heard from his cousin Little June, who’d been tipped off about Groves’s complaint by someone at the NOPD. Davis screamed with rage and insisted that Groves was “lying on me.” Later that day, when he and Williams met for their NOPD shift, Davis told his partner, “Be looking for something to come down.”

A few hours later, a chance encounter further inflamed the situation. Around 5 p.m., Groves was in the back seat of a car with Norwood, his twin brother, Nathaniel, and their mother when the vehicle pulled up to a red light. To their left sat a police cruiser; inside were Davis and Williams. Groves jabbed her finger at the window. “That’s them!” she shouted. Davis sneered back at her. “I see you too,” he mouthed.

Soon, Davis was on the phone with Paul Hardy, setting a murder plot in motion. “The bitch got in the car with the twins,” he said. “You know what I wanna do.” He told Williams, “I can get P to come and do that whore now, and then we can handle the 30,” using the police code for homicide. Soon after, the two cops picked Hardy up in their cruiser and cased areas that Groves was known to frequent.

Williams and Davis parted ways with Hardy as evening fell, and according to Williams, over the next few hours Davis became “real mad” that Hardy hadn’t called him to report that he’d found and killed Groves. Around 9:45, the cops returned to Groves’s neighborhood and spotted her on the street. Davis got on the phone with Hardy and gave him a description of his target: bob haircut, black coat, jeans with bleach stains on the front. “Get that whore,” Davis instructed.

Around 10:45, Hardy pulled up near Groves’s residence in a blue 1991 Nissan Maxima with his associates Damon Causey and Steve Jackson. Groves spoke to a neighbor, who was doing someone’s hair on a porch at the corner of Villere and Alabo Streets, then waved goodbye and began walking away. That’s when Hardy approached her holding a 9mm Beretta.

“That you, Jimmy?” Groves called to the figure walking toward her, thinking he might be a man she was dating. When Hardy didn’t respond, Groves seemed to think she was being mugged. She held out her jacket. “Here, baby,” she said.

Hardy raised his gun, pointed it at Groves’s head, and squeezed the trigger. In the instant between noticing the weapon and seeing the muzzle flash, Groves screamed. After firing, Hardy bolted back to the Nissan and jumped inside. Jackson slammed the car into drive, and the men sped away.

A neighbor found Groves lying on the ground. The bullet had pierced her skull, scattering part of her brain across the road. Groves’s children ran from their home to their mother, screaming. One of the last things Groves had done before leaving them that evening was sing “Happy Birthday” to her daughter Jasmine, who’d be turning 12 at midnight. Now she was barely breathing. “Blood was pouring out of her head like a faucet,” Corey recalled of his mother’s last moments. “As she bled, her eyes focused on my eyes, looked me straight in the face. And then her eyes started going fast, side to side, and then they just stopped. That was it.”

Shortly after the murder, Davis, who’d been drinking at a bar called Flynn’s Den, used his police radio to confirm that the job was done. Davis contacted the officer responding to the scene and asked about the victim.

“Male? Female?” Davis asked.

“Female,” his colleague replied.

“You got a name?” Davis asked.

“Kim Graves, no, Groves,” the colleague said. “G-R-O-V-E-S.”

At roughly 11:10 p.m., Davis called Williams. “Signal 30, NAT,” Davis said (homicide, necessary action taken). “It’s the whore!” Williams replied gleefully. Outside Flynn’s, Davis celebrated. He slammed his hand on the hood of his patrol car. “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” he cried. “Rockabye!”

For days, FBI agents apparently didn’t flag anything suspicious in their recordings and field notes from Operation Shattered Shield. Not the chatter between Hardy and Davis, nor Davis telling his girlfriend, “That ho was dead when she left the scene. Fuck that ho! Goody for that bitch! Goody, goody, goody. Rock-head ho!” In an interview, retired FBI agent Jerri Williams (no relation to Sammie Williams) said that the way Davis and his associates talked to each other made it difficult to know what they were saying. “Not only were they talking in code, but even if they had said, ‘We’re gonna go out and kill this woman,’ the FBI didn’t know who she was or where she lived,” Williams explained.

By that standard, the bureau also would have been unable to decipher that Davis was talking about Nathan Norwood when he spoke to Hardy the day after Groves’s murder. “I still want that nigger,” Davis said, adding that, based on Williams’s advice, he was going to “hold off … for a while, because it’s gonna look too suspicious.” A few days later Davis told Hardy, “We gonna let that go.” Norwood had been allowed to live.

Some people in Groves’s neighborhood wondered if she’d been shot by an ex. Her daughter Jasmine remembered hearing that escaped convicts might have been responsible. Then, finally, law enforcement began to put the pieces together. In an interview, a former federal agent speculated that, as the FBI was reviewing evidence while preparing to charge Davis, Williams, and other NOPD officers with drug conspiracy, it realized that it had recorded a murder plot. Another agent told me that law enforcement received a tip about the homicide in the form of an anonymous note attached to a copy of Groves’s obituary; the gist was that this is what happened to someone who reported a cop to the IAD.

Harry Rosenberg, who’d recently finished a stint as the U.S. attorney in New Orleans, watched from the sidelines as Operation Shattered Shield came to a “screeching halt.” Once the murder plot was uncovered, “the FBI could not sit back and keep their undercover agents in play,” Rosenberg said. “It’s reasonable to recognize that, had that undercover investigation continued, the number of police officers who were implicated in criminal wrongdoing would’ve been much wider and much deeper.” (In response to a public records request, the FBI agreed to share files from Operation Shattered Shield with me; more than a year later, the bureau has yet to release any of the 26,000 pages of documents it found to be responsive to the request.)

The FBI brought in Sammie Williams and Steve Jackson, and after repeated interrogations, both men flipped on their co-conspirators. The murder weapon was recovered in Damon Causey’s bedroom. On December 5, Davis, Hardy, and Causey were arrested. A few days later, Davis and eight other cops, including Williams, were indicted for drug conspiracy based on evidence gathered by the FBI.

The news—in particular, the revelation about Davis ordering the Groves murder—made headlines across the country. “A drug cache. A hit. No one feels safe,” The Philadelphia Inquirer declared in a front-page headline. The New York Times noted that “even by New Orleans standards the evidence in the latest case was shocking.” Local columnist James Gill quipped that, given the crime rate, it might be better to “hire fewer policemen.” An elderly local declared in a community meeting, “We’re going to have to hire some criminals to protect us from the police.”

Mary Howell, a longtime civil-rights attorney in New Orleans who provided legal representation for the Groves family, compared the recording of Davis telling Hardy to kill Groves to the video of police in Los Angeles beating Rodney King. Some observers noted that Groves was killed the same day that a new NOPD chief, Richard Pennington, had been sworn in to office. After the ceremony, an FBI agent approached Pennington to warn him about the corruption infesting his department—meaning that at the exact time Davis was conspiring to commit homicide, his new boss was being told about the scourge of cops like him.

The federal government announced that it would try Davis, Hardy, and Causey together for conspiring to violate Groves’s civil rights. If convicted, Davis and Hardy could get the death penalty. A court date was set for April 8, 1996.

That was roughly two months after another murder trial was scheduled to begin, involving a case that the press covered far less than the Groves killing. The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office alleged that three teenagers had gunned down a man in the Desire projects one night in August 1994. To make its case, which could put the codefendants away for life, the prosecution would rely on evidence either provided by or linked to Len Davis.

Part II

In August 1994, Kunta Gable, Sidney Hill (who also used the name Leroy Nelson), and Bernell Juluke Jr. were friends on the precipice of adulthood. Gable had grown up with his grandparents, and at some point in his youth he’d fallen off the public school system’s radar. Now he was 17 and a new father—his girlfriend had recently given birth. Hill, also 17, had an abiding religious faith, liked to tap dance in the French Quarter, and was the primary caregiver for his three younger siblings. Juluke, who’d just turned 18, had been raised by his grandmother, a loan shark and grocery store owner, and his grandfather, a gangster everyone in the Ninth Ward bowed to. As a kid, he’d struggled to learn how to speak; he’d only gotten comfortable communicating with people other than his grandmother when he was about 14.

Juluke had an older half-brother named Warren Mays (sometimes spelled Mayes) who was a local rap star. Mays had self-released the underground hit “Get It Girl,” which helped him land an Atlantic Records deal. Mays was also a drug dealer and an exotic dancer. His success made him a known entity to the NOPD. Juluke remembers hearing Mays talk about the police in the same breath as the word “extortion.” Soon Juluke would become a victim of the NOPD’s corruption.

Around 9:22 p.m. on August 22, 1994, 19-year-old Rondell Santinac was in a hatchback exiting a driveway in the Desire projects when another car pulled up and someone leaned out one of its windows, unleashing a burst of gunfire. Santinac slumped over, killed instantly by a bullet to the head. Samuel “Danky” Raiford, 22, who was driving the hatchback, scrambled out of the car and ran to his girlfriend’s mother’s house, a block south, and then to a neighbor’s place to call 911. At 9:25, he gave a description of the shooter, which emergency dispatch recorded as “b/m wearing unk color clothing in a blu chevy beretta” (Black male wearing unknown clothing in a blue Chevrolet Beretta). Raiford didn’t name the suspect. 

Officers Len Davis and Sammie Williams arrived at the scene of the murder approximately two minutes after it happened—before the 911 call—and at 9:27, Davis radioed the NOPD with a more specific description of the suspect. Once transcribed, Davis’s message went into police records as “perps Pernell Maze bunch of gold in his mouth.” The name was an apparent misspelling of Bernell Mays, which Juluke sometimes went by. Davis gave no indication that there were other individuals in the car. He also reported that the suspect was driving a Beretta with four doors.

Between 15 and 23 minutes after the shooting—the exact timing would be contested at trial—Gable, Hill, and Juluke were driving in a borrowed gray Beretta coupé when a cop pulled them over near the Iberville housing projects, about five miles from the scene of the murder. The officer called in the stop, and suddenly Davis was on the police radio, too. He had revised intel: He now said that there had been three people in the Beretta when Santinac was shot, and he described the car as having two doors, not four.

Gable, Hill, and Juluke were taken to police headquarters, where Raiford, the sole eyewitness to the murder, identified all three of them. No one explained to the friends what was going on. According to Gable, cops grilled him about an outstanding warrant pertaining to an unrelated matter, but they didn’t mention anything about a murder. It was only when the teenagers were taken to central lockup for booking that they heard the name Rondell Santinac and the charge of homicide.

Police tore the gray Beretta apart looking for evidence but found no gun, no shell casings, nothing. Seven witnesses subsequently placed Gable, Hill, and Juluke in the Iberville projects at the time of the shooting. In a follow-up interview with police, and later in a motions hearing, Raiford’s story changed: He said that the shooter’s car was lime green, then turquoise, a claim echoed by two other witnesses who saw the vehicle. Those witnesses also described the car as having an enhanced sound system; the owner of the gray Beretta the defendants were driving testified that his car wasn’t customized.

How to explain Davis pinpointing Juluke as a suspect, and so quickly? Here too there were problems. The only person who could have identified Juluke as the shooter was Raiford, but police logs indicated that Davis and Williams didn’t speak to him until 9:30, three minutes after Davis called in the name transcribed as “Pernell Maze.” Raiford’s subsequent statements also suggested that he didn’t see Juluke, much less name him to police: He admitted under oath that while he’d recognized Hill and Gable when he saw them at police headquarters the night of the shooting, he’d only assumed that Juluke was in the Beretta because he’d seen the three friends together earlier that evening. (Raiford couldn’t be reached for comment.)  

Juluke came to believe that Davis had framed him, and he thought he knew why: When Davis heard that Santinac’s shooter had been in a Beretta—a car he believed Warren Mays drove—he seized the opportunity to punish Juluke’s half-brother for not paying him for protection the way other drug dealers did. “They wanted to mess with me to mess with him,” Juluke later said. “They wanted him to pay them $5,000 a week.” (Mays was murdered in 1999.)

Davis was never pressed for an explanation. Although his fingerprints were all over the prosecution’s case, he wasn’t called to testify. Had he been, his court appearance would have involved transport from prison, where he was awaiting trial for Kim Groves’s murder. Unable to question him, the defense counsel for Gable, Hill, and Juluke attempted to direct the jury’s attention to Davis’s disgraced reputation, hoping to cast doubt on the information he’d provided about the Santinac murder. But the prosecution objected.

The friends thought they would be acquitted. There was no physical evidence connecting them to the murder. Raiford’s testimony was inconsistent and filled with holes. Further undermining his credibility, witnesses stated under oath that after the shooting, Raiford had told people that the defendants were innocent. For his part, Gable couldn’t fathom how he could be convicted of a crime he wasn’t remotely involved in against a victim he’d never laid eyes on—a killing he may never have heard about if the cops hadn’t arrested him for it.

But after ten hours of deliberation, that’s exactly what happened. The three teenagers were shipped off to serve life sentences at Angola, Louisiana’s maximum-security prison, without the possibility of parole. A shocked Juluke felt like they were going to Gilligan’s Island—stranded far from everyone and everything they loved, with little chance of rescue.

Five weeks later, the Groves case went to trial. The Associated Press reported that when the prosecution played audio of Davis rejoicing over the victim’s death, his laughter “was met with stunned silence…. One juror bit her lip as the tapes rolled; another covered her mouth with her hand.” Sammie Williams, who had already pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy and had agreed to serve 60 months in exchange for testifying against his ex-partner, confirmed what was said on the tapes. He said that Davis had paid Hardy for the hit on Groves. “I’m going to pump him off about 300,” Williams recalled Davis telling him. Williams also testified that Hardy and Davis were so close that Hardy would have committed the murder for free if his friend asked. (Williams could not be reached for comment.)

“Len Davis voted to kill Kim Marie Groves,” the prosecution told the court near the end of the trial. “He didn’t have a judge—he was the judge, the jury, and the executioner through his agent … Paul Hardy.”

When the guilty verdict came down, Davis slumped in his chair. Hardy, seated next to him, didn’t blink. Both men were given the death penalty, making them the first people in U.S. history condemned to die for civil-rights violations. Damon Causey, who’d rejected a last-minute plea deal that would have meant spending only a few years behind bars, received a life sentence. (Causey, who is incarcerated at a federal prison in Pollock, Louisiana, did not reply to a letter requesting an interview.)

A few months later, Davis was tried for drug conspiracy based on intelligence gathered in Operation Shattered Shield. The jury saw surveillance video of Davis counting hundred-dollar bills that J.J. had given him in exchange for guarding the fake cocaine shipments. They heard testimony about Davis recruiting other cops to assist with the illegal enterprise. After closing arguments, the jury deliberated less than an hour before finding Davis guilty.

Among the most stunning revelations from Davis’s two turns in court were the details of how he’d helped cover up the truth about multiple murders. He did it to protect his associates, men like Paul Hardy and Damon Causey, and often had help from Sammie Williams. One evening in September 1994, for instance, Williams was driving in the Ninth Ward when he heard shots ring out. Moments later, he spotted Hardy leaving the scene. He also saw two men, one of whom was holding a gun, approach Hardy’s car as if to get inside; the man with the gun then seemed to change his mind, and he handed the weapon off to another individual, who went inside a building with it. “I realized … when I seen the guys going to Paul Hardy’s car that they must have had some involvement,” Williams testified. “I called Len immediately and tell him to ask Paul what’s happening.”

Davis in turn punched Hardy’s number into his cell phone. Taking a deep breath, he suggested that from now on, if Hardy was about to “go off,” he should send a bunch of “1”s or the number “34” to Davis’s beeper (34-S is the NOPD’s radio code for a shooting). Under this new system, Hardy and his crew warned Davis when they planned to commit violence so that Davis could scope out the surrounding streets. “Got a lotta people hanging around this motherfucker,” Davis said in one call. “So just come right”—meaning masked up, so the perpetrators couldn’t be identified.

Williams also testified that he and Davis once responded to a crime scene where, just before dying, a murder victim reportedly told witnesses that “Damon” had killed him. When Davis heard that, he called Causey, who claimed that he wasn’t responsible—if he had been, Causey said, the person would have died instantly from a bullet to the head. It’s unclear whether Causey was lying. Regardless, according to Williams, “If Damon was the perpetrator, that would never have been in the report.”

Despite these disclosures in open court, once Davis was condemned, the government didn’t move to pursue additional legal action against him. It didn’t announce that it would reexamine any homicide cases he and Williams had responded to. That included the Santinac killing.

“I don’t want you to make me comfortable here,” Juluke said through tears. “I want you to make me feel that I need to get out of here.”

The state penitentiary at Angola takes its name from the antebellum plantation that once occupied the land where the prison now sits, and incarcerated men still toil in fields there. Kunta Gable was put to work chopping down trees and even picking cotton. The labor was back-breaking, and the irony of his situation stung: Gable’s parents had named him after the main character in Alex Haley’s book Roots, and now here he was, indentured to the state.

Gable and his codefendants appealed their cases. In 1998, a court affirmed Gable’s and Hill’s convictions but threw out Juluke’s for insufficient evidence; the main point of concern was Raiford’s statement that he only assumed Juluke was in the car with Gable and Hill when they killed Santinac. The following year, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned Juluke’s acquittal.

Juluke appealed again, filing a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in 2002. The petition called attention to Davis’s and Williams’s roles in the Santinac investigation, and to what had been revealed about them at the Groves trial. “As these officers have been demonstrated to be capable of planning murders and cover-ups of murders,” the petition stated, “any murder case in which they are involved should be closely examined for their possible participation.” The courts disagreed: Juluke’s petition was denied by a district court in 2004, and again by a circuit court of appeals in 2005. In a cruel twist, the second ruling came within months of Davis’s resentencing in the Groves case.

Juluke acknowledged that he would likely die behind bars. Still, he avoided favors and compromises that might render life at Angola easier for him. “I don’t want you to make me comfortable here,” he said through tears in an interview with the Visiting Room Project, which documents the stories of men serving life at Angola. “I want you to make me feel that I need to get out of here.”

Gable, Hill, and Juluke weren’t the only prisoners struggling to prove that Davis had implicated them in a crime they didn’t commit. At Angola, Gable crossed paths with a man named Sherman Singleton who worked in the prison’s hospice wing and made quilts. Before prison, Singleton had been a drug dealer known as Puss Head, and he was all too familiar with Davis.

When he first encountered Davis in the late 1980s, Singleton didn’t think much of the stocky cop with a mustache and curly hair. Then came the rumors. “I kept hearing, ‘He gonna get you,’ ” Singleton said. “Other cops that I knew would be like, ‘Look, this dude serious. Watch that guy, man.’ ” Singleton didn’t get intimidated easily; he was used to tough guys of all kinds. “Around that time, everybody was just real bad actors and characters,” he said. So, according to Singleton, he refused to do what Davis wanted, which was to give up his drug territory in the Desire projects.

On August 8, 1990, a man named Bruce Vappie was murdered—shotgunned in the shoulder and the chest in the doorway of his New Orleans home. Singleton was arrested for the crime because, according to Davis, Vappie had made a “death declaration” to a witness naming Singleton as his killer. There was no physical evidence connecting Singleton to the crime. The case was so thin that the mother of several of Singleton’s children told her kids, “Daddy’s going to be home by Christmas.” But he was convicted in 1991 and put away for life. His appeals fell on deaf ears.

Yet another man’s fate was tangled up with Davis’s tenure with the NOPD. In fact, his case was also connected, albeit obliquely, to the Groves killing. While Gable, Hill, Juluke, and Singleton were serving time at Angola, Dwayne LeBlanc was locked up at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in Saint Gabriel, Louisiana, for the second-degree murder of a civilian and the first-degree attempted murder of a police officer.

LeBlanc’s story starts here: On August 27, 1994, five days after Rondell Santinac was killed, 27-year-old Richard Borden was shot through the window of his uncle’s truck on Tupelo Street in the Ninth Ward. The uncle, Lofton Fairchild, drove Borden to the hospital, where Borden died. When the NOPD spoke to him, Fairchild admitted that he’d driven his nephew to Tupelo Street to buy drugs. The nephew had snatched a bag of product outside a residence without paying and run back to the truck. According to Fairchild, the man Borden robbed was the person who shot him.

Accompanied by two detectives, Michael Mims and Norbert Zenon, Fairchild returned to the scene. The shooter was still sitting on the porch. When he saw the trio approaching, he opened fire, hitting Mims in the right hand. The perpetrator then fled the scene.

As Mims was treated for his injuries, officers combed the area. They interrogated a crack user who’d seen Borden die and claimed that a man called Twin was responsible for the murder. The witness didn’t know the suspect’s real name, only that his moniker meant what it sounded like: The shooter had a twin brother.

Detectives soon got a tip that the witness had been talking about one of the 18-year-old LeBlanc brothers, Dwayne and Dwight. Dwight was in NOPD custody at the time of the shooting, accused of being an accessory to another murder. Dwayne also had an alibi: He had relocated to California a week prior to attend college. A day before Borden’s death, he was marked present in one of his classes. “He was trying to change his life,” his brother Leonard later told a reporter. “In California, you have so many opportunities.”

Still, Mims, Zenon, and other witnesses picked Dwayne out of a photo lineup. That no one could locate him in or around New Orleans didn’t matter. Nor did the fact that there were no fingerprints, murder weapon, or other physical evidence tying him to the case.

In the weeks following the shooting, Len Davis and Sammie Williams were on the lookout for the man who’d shot Mims, and their actions cast doubt on the NOPD’s theory of the case. One night in September, they pulled over a car carrying Nathan and Nathaniel Norwood. The cops ordered the Norwood twins to get on the ground and accused them of shooting a cop. Nathan insisted that the officers had “the wrong twins.” Davis and Williams let the men go, but they would confront them again thinking they were the LeBlancs, including on October 11—this was the fateful assault on Nathan that Groves witnessed.

Dwayne LeBlanc was arrested in California in November 1994. Three years later, he was sentenced to life without parole plus 50 years in a ten-to-two split jury decision. (Louisiana allowed non-unanimous jury convictions for 120 years before outlawing the practice in 2018.) His appeals rested in large part on an argument of mistaken identity. When we met, LeBlanc showed me a Polaroid of two young Black men. “Which one’s me,” he asked, “and which is my brother?” When I pointed to one of the men and guessed it was him, Dwayne shook his head.

“Neither. Neither,” he said. “These twins? These are the Norwoods.”

In their youth, the four men—Dwayne, Dwight, Nathan, and Nathaniel—looked like quadruplets. “We went to the same school, we played together, all that stuff,” LeBlanc said. He described walking down the street with his brother as a kid and being asked by passersby, “Hey, what twins are y’all?”

Over the years, the various men whom Davis helped in one way or another to put away for life had advocates on the outside, well-meaning people who did what they could with the resources they had. Juluke pretended that he understood the documents a lawyer shared with him during his appeals—he didn’t know how to read and wouldn’t learn until he was 31 and still locked up at Angola. His grandmother always believed in his innocence, and when she passed away in 2008, it felt like he was left without a soul in the world who truly cared about him.

One of Singleton’s young daughters saved the money she otherwise would have spent on sweets—she liked Honey Buns best—because she wanted to help pay the $25,000 retainer she’d heard someone say her father needed for a good attorney. Just the thought of her kindness and naïveté made Singleton tear up. He told himself that if he weren’t in prison, a rival in the drug game might have come along one day and shot up his home. His big-hearted daughter might have been killed.

In 2012, LeBlanc’s case was picked up by Centurion Ministries, an advocacy group that works to get innocent people out of prison. Investigators and volunteers interviewed witnesses, reviewed reams of documents, and turned over every rock they could think of to build a case to exonerate LeBlanc. Centurion found a woman who, shortly after Mims was shot, told people that an eyewitness had said one of the Norwood brothers did it. She also alleged that when the Norwoods got wind of it, they beat her up. The woman called 911, and Davis was the officer who responded. According to Centurion’s findings, he subsequently detained one of the Norwoods for the assault. But these events didn’t disrupt the pursuit of LeBlanc for the shootings on Tupelo Street. (The Norwoods could not be reached for comment.)

Centurion’s investigators spoke to Davis, who didn’t offer a clear answer to the question of whether he—along with other NOPD officers, and perhaps even witnesses in the case—might have mixed up the LeBlancs with the Norwoods. However, he was quick to defend his legacy as a cop and dismiss everything his former partner ever said about him in court. “Sammie is a lying piece of frickin’ feces. Let’s get that on the record right now,” Davis said of Williams. “He would say anything. Sammie is basically a whore for the government. Whatever lies they put in him, he told.”

Centurion eventually sent an outline of its findings to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office. The response was positive; District Attorney Leon A. Cannizzaro Jr. even signaled the possibility of a plea deal. But the effort fell apart when the DA learned that LeBlanc had recently exchanged love letters with Schawanda McCall, his brother Leonard’s ex-wife. McCall was the person who more than 15 years prior, as a family member, had obtained the college attendance records that had confirmed his alibi. In Centurion’s telling, the evolving nature of McCall and LeBlanc’s relationship spooked the DA’s office by casting doubt on McCall’s credibility as a witness. In early 2015, Cannizzaro’s staff signaled that they were done considering the case. (The DA’s office declined to comment on the matter.)

Five years later, a glimmer of hope appeared amid scandal and controversy. It was revealed that—astonishingly—the DA’s office had a history of jailing rape survivors to ensure that they testified against their attackers. The office also incurred criticism for allegedly withholding evidence from defendants in as many as 28 cases resulting in convictions, which was in keeping with a pattern predating Cannizzaro’s tenure. When Cannizzaro announced that he would not pursue a third term as DA, it paved the way for the election of Jason Williams, a reform candidate. (Williams is an old acquaintance of mine; he has no relation to Sammie Williams.)

During his campaign, Jason Williams vowed, per his website, to “pursue charges against any police officer or other official who hurts, lies or cheats in the name of the law, including past investigations that were dropped.” In January 2021, after being sworn in, he announced that his team would also review the cases of people who might have been put in prison due to police or prosecutor misconduct. Williams created a dedicated Civil Rights Division in his office, which was tasked with examining the sins of the past—cases his predecessors got wrong.

To run the CRD, Williams appointed Emily Maw, the former director of the Innocence Project’s office in New Orleans. In roughly its first year of operation, the division received a slew of petitions from prisoners claiming that they’d been wrongfully convicted. Among them were Gable, Hill, and Juluke.

Part III

The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office is housed in an unremarkable building, colorless and dotted with grime. When the CRD got to work, it discovered that many old case files were missing. In most instances, according to Maw, this was due to poor storage methods, computer malfunctions, or flooding from Hurricane Katrina. “Very occasionally, we suspect something more nefarious,” Maw said. “It is very challenging in more cases than you would hope to find a complete court and prosecutor and police record for closed cases.”

There was paperwork on the Santinac killing, and Maw noted the discrepancies in Samuel Raiford’s various statements, the witness testimonies that placed the defendants roughly five miles from the crime when it occurred, and the lack of any evidence that a gun had been fired in the car they were driving. Then there was the Len Davis factor. Maw, who is from the United Kingdom, has lived in New Orleans since 1999. “I know Len Davis’s name, just like anybody who’s done any criminal justice work in New Orleans,” she said in a recent interview.

In Maw’s opinion, Davis wasn’t just “a big bad wolf”—he was a product of a corrupt and beleaguered NOPD. “This isn’t about individuals,” she said. “This is about systemic problems.” Still, given his criminal record, Davis’s involvement in the Santinac case was another reason to dig deeper into the question of whether a grave injustice had occurred. “We are committed to endeavoring to review all cases that are touched by government actors with track records of problematic behavior,” Maw said.

Over many months, the CRD reviewed evidence and court documents, and spoke with Gable, Hill, and Juluke, as well as several jurors from their trial. Maw’s team found that there was exculpatory evidence never disclosed to the jury, including Samuel Raiford’s contradictory statements about the color of the Beretta carrying the shooter, as well as information that should have called Raiford’s credibility into question—namely, that he had recently lied under oath in a separate case. (He was arrested and pleaded guilty to attempted burglary.) Based on the timeline of events the night of the Santinac murder, as well as his pattern of meddling in murder cases, the CRD also determined that Davis may have “inserted” Juluke as a suspect when he radioed dispatch with the name “Pernell Maze.”

When the CRD interviewed Davis in prison, he was cooperative. He acknowledged that when he learned that a Beretta was involved in Santinac’s murder, he might have assumed it belonged to Warren Mays, who was well known to him. He also said that Raiford wasn’t just the key witness in the case. “Danky was in the game,” Davis told the CRD. He indicated that Raiford, not Santinac, was the intended target of the shooting. The CRD determined that Davis’s statement “could suggest responding officers had more information about a motive or who was responsible than their initial report suggests.” 

Based on its findings, the CRD filed a motion to vacate Gable’s, Hill’s, and Juluke’s convictions. “The jury was unaware of significant evidence that undermined the State’s case,” the motion stated. “Every remaining juror that the State has been able to contact has indicated that the information now known would have certainly made a difference to what were anyway long and contentious deliberations and could likely have changed the eventual verdict.” The filing further argued that “the defendants suffered a miscarriage of justice” and that “clinging to these convictions will also get us no closer to knowing who was truly responsible for killing Rondell Santinac.”

On October 19, 2022, the CRD made its case before a judge. The codefendants watched the proceedings via Zoom from Angola; some of their family members attended in person. “The state won a conviction against three teenagers that came from the actions of NOPD officers that we knew were actively contributing to the record homicide rate that the residents of this city were suffering through in 1994,” Maw told the court. “For all these years, these three defendants have cried out for someone to look into this case, and no one has.”

When Maw was finished, the judge’s decision was immediate: She vacated the convictions and ordered that the men be freed that day. The judge called them “heroes” and said that they were owed “the utmost apology.” They had been behind bars for more than 28 years.

The courtroom erupted in cheers. Through the video link, Hill waved to his family. Gable addressed Santinac’s loved ones. “I never seen your son in my life,” he said. “I apologize that had to happen, but I never seen him in my life.”

Shortly before Christmas 2022, Sherman Singleton was released from prison. His case had landed on Maw’s desk with an assist from the head of a local chapter of the NAACP. Based on the CRD’s review, it was clear that Singleton’s conviction could not stand. In order to expedite his release, Singleton agreed to take a plea deal for a lesser charge. “I would never have harmed him in any way,” Singleton said of Bruce Vappie, the man he had been accused of killing. (Vappie’s family supported Singleton’s plea agreement.)

Singleton told the press that he wasn’t going to spend his life mad at the people who put him behind bars. When we spoke for this story, Singleton said that he was looking to focusing on writing books. He’d loved writing as a kid, until one day his mother suggested that he might not ever be a successful author; hurt, he threw out everything he’d written. Years later, at Angola, he completed a few novels he then had produced in hard copy at the prison’s print shop so he could share them with friends. “People are so creative in prison,” Singleton said, “it’s incredible.” Now his daughter Nonie wants him to turn one of his books into a movie.

In late 2022, Dwayne LeBlanc took a plea deal, too, but he was less than sanguine about his situation. He told me that he’d felt pressured into the deal. According to LeBlanc, the DA’s office told him that he could either submit a plea or wait indefinitely behind bars, because it wouldn’t have time to investigate his case for the foreseeable future. “What’s to investigate?” LeBlanc said, given that Centurion Ministries had already compiled a wealth of research on his case. (Asked about LeBlanc’s assertion, the DA’s office said that “any/all representations … regarding our review of this matter are contained in the pleading.”)

The sentencing memorandum compiled as part of LeBlanc’s plea agreement is packed with copies of various training certificates he earned behind bars. LeBlanc also read more than 2,000 books in prison and earned the nickname Malcolm X for his commitment to righting wrongs. Since getting out, he’s been doing nonprofit work, helping other formerly incarcerated people. “I’m not the same dumb kid that went in prison,” he said.

In 2023, Gable, Hill, and Juluke filed cases against the city of New Orleans and several former employees of the NOPD, including Len Davis and Sammie Williams. They also sued the district attorney. “Although the vacatur of Plaintiffs’ convictions is a long-overdue step towards justice,” one of the lawsuits states, “it does not begin to remedy the enormous harm caused by Defendants’ misconduct.” At a press conference, Juluke smiled for the cameras. “This situation is big,” he said.

Juluke was growing out his hair and wore a beard streaked with gray. He also had on a T-shirt with a photo of Davis screen-printed on it, beneath the phrase “The Last Shall Be First.” The quote is from the Bible: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many are called, but few chosen” (Matthew 20:16).

Sidney Hill has said that he will be “forever amazed” he’s no longer at Angola. He now enjoys being with his family, traveling, and meeting new people. For his part, Gable has been living with his girlfriend. In public appearances, he’s shown a fondness for mixing clothing patterns—plaid over a tropical print, for instance.

“The true highlight for me has been that all three of us made it,” Gable said in response to questions for this story sent through his lawyer. “It’s not every day that anyone in any state penitentiary where you have codefendants put in that kind of time come out alive and with all our limbs.” 

In an interview with the CRD during its reinvestigation of the Santinac killing, Davis said that, as a cop, he “never stood over an innocent corpse.”

Len Davis remains on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. He didn’t respond to a letter I sent him requesting an interview for this story. He continues to assert his innocence in the Groves case and to appeal his conviction. In an interview with the CRD during its reinvestigation of the Santinac killing, Davis said that, as a cop, he “never stood over an innocent corpse.”

Jason Williams has described Davis as “inflicting a reign of terror” on the community he was sworn to protect and serve. Today, the trauma Davis caused runs deep. Jasmine Groves, who turned 12 shortly after her mother was killed, spent the next few years in therapy dealing with suicidal thoughts. Her brother, Corey, wore a T-shirt with his mother’s face on it so often that the image faded. “I refused to buy a new one, because the first one meant more to me,” Corey said. It took a long time for his anger at the police to ebb to a manageable level. “I walked around for months, maybe even a few years, with a loaded 9mm, hoping to be stopped by the police,” he said. “I just needed to somehow give back the pain that I felt the entire NOPD had left me and my family with.”

Chief Richard Pennington, who took office the day Groves was killed, eliminated the internal affairs bureau where Groves issued her complaint, replacing it with a public integrity division housed in a building separate from the wider NOPD. He also raised hiring standards for the department. Over eight years, 350 of the more than 1,200 NOPD cops were hit with criminal charges, fired, or disciplined. By the time Pennington left office, the city’s murder rate was down by half. Both murders and police brutality increased in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, however, and in 2012 the city and the U.S. Department of Justice implemented a consent decree, or improvement plan, for the NOPD. The most expansive of its kind in the country, the plan remains in effect today.

Twenty-four years after Groves’s murder, her family finally received an apology from the city, along with a $1.5 million legal settlement. By then, Paul Hardy had been resentenced to life in prison on the grounds that he was mentally unfit for the death penalty. Jasmine said that Hardy apologized to her family “in his own way” around the time his sentence was reduced. “He did tell his lawyers to tell me it was nothing personal,” she said. “It was his job. He was a hit man. It wasn’t no flippin’ burgers. He was just working for a corrupt cop.”

When Jasmine learned that Hardy’s son had died in 2023, she did some reflecting on their shared history. She had met the son once and found that she felt no anger toward him. “He was a child when it happened—I was a child,” she said.

There’s reason to believe that Hardy may have been involved in several murders in 1994 that remain unsolved. Did Davis know and stymie the NOPD’s investigations? The FBI recordings from Operation Shattered Shield may hold some clues. For instance, one of the unsolved murders, in which a man named Carlos Adams was shot repeatedly, is the crime Davis reprimanded Hardy for on his tapped cell phone after Williams spied Hardy leaving the scene. During Davis’s resentencing hearing, the jury heard testimony about an anonymous tip that came through a law enforcement hotline, fingering Hardy for the killing.

The government has not indicated that it will pursue Hardy for other homicides. “There are multiple reasons that it’s hard to prosecute a murder from thirty years ago,” Maw said. “The fact that he’s already doing a life sentence affects any calculation as to what is a good use of resources. But that doesn’t preclude the possibility of revisiting those cases.”

Asked whether Davis might have other hidden victims—people still behind bars because of his corrupt or shoddy police work—Maw said that finding an answer is a “much harder task than it might seem.” Davis was a beat cop who responded to countless crime scenes, and the available records of his work—indeed, of much of the NOPD’s work from back then—are patchy at best. “If there was a Len Davis today, it would be much easier, because of databases and computerization, for somebody to go back and see which cases this officer had affected,” Maw explained. “It is much, much harder from any time pre-Katrina.” She also noted that a 2019 cyberattack complicated the work of government agencies even further.

Still, she doesn’t think “there’s anybody left” in prison because of Davis’s actions as a cop. If there is, they’re awaiting an unlikely miracle, serving time they’ll never get back. At the press conference about the lawsuits Juluke, Hill, and Gable filed against the city, a young man Juluke introduced to me as his son tried to articulate what that kind of loss means to someone. “People died off,” he said of the nearly three decades Juluke and his friends were behind bars. “Mama’s dead. Your grandma dead. Family is gone, right?”

He nodded before continuing. “How long it take,” he said, “for justice for something like this?”

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