Louis Mitchell last made news as a “19-year-old Negro youth” when he was booked by New Orleans police in the rapes of multiple White women in the summer of 1966.
Police credited fingerprint evidence, The Times-Picayune reported. Six months later, Mitchell pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated rape to avoid the death penalty, a fate the U.S. Supreme Court later outlawed for rape. He was sentenced to two life prison terms, running together.
Among those advising him to take the deal was Revius Ortique Jr., who would become the first Black justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court many years later. Ortique, who was appointed to help with Mitchell’s defense, wrote in a 2003 affidavit that he told Mitchell he could be released after 10½ years with good behavior. Mitchell’s sister recalled an Orleans Parish prosecutor saying the same thing.
It was true, then. A commutation from the governor after 10 years and six months behind bars was for decades the way out of prison for "lifers" in Louisiana. Then state lawmakers began to harden life sentences, prison researchers say.
The law changed in 1973 to limit parole eligibility for lifers to those who had served at least 20 years. The minimum then rose to 40 years, and in 1979, Louisiana dispensed with parole altogether for life prisoners. At that point, the old rules no longer applied.
The window had closed before Mitchell and hundreds of other lifers knew it. Now 74, he remains in prison — though 55 years later, his days there appear to be numbered.
Mitchell and another long-serving Louisiana prisoner, 73-year-old Leroy Grippen, are slated to go free under plea agreements with Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams' office. Advocates with the Louisiana Parole Project say two other men are shoring up similar deals with Williams' office.
The four men are part of a larger group of more than 60 “10/6 lifers,” named for the 10-year, six-month sentences many of them were told they’d serve decades ago.
Williams, a reform district attorney in his first year in office, created a civil rights division to root out unjust convictions and sentences from the past. His prosecutors on Friday filed “post-conviction plea agreements” for Mitchell and Grippen.
Their new deals, calling for the two to be resentenced to 40 years, are slated to go before Criminal District Judge Nandi Campbell on Oct. 5.
Advocates with the Louisiana Parole Project say the deals mark the first reform aimed at the dwindling club of old-timers locked up since the Vietnam War era.
The new court filings portray them as a forgotten, geriatric sliver of the state’s mammoth population of more than 4,400 life-without-parole prisoners, or 1 in 6 state inmates. Per capita, Louisiana has by far the highest rate of inmates serving no-parole sentences.
Many 10/6 lifers pleaded guilty not only to avoid the possibility of execution but also on the understanding they’d have a shot at freedom after a decade, according to the group, which plans to house the four men after their anticipated release.
All four pleaded guilty and since have logged more than 200 combined years in prison.
In a statement, Williams said the civil rights division is "reviewing cases of more than 10 defendants who pled guilty before 1973 on the expectation, consistent with the law at the time, that they would be released after ten and a half years if they maintained a good record of conduct in prison. In 1973, this law was changed, but these defendants remained in prison."
The 60-odd 10/6 lifers still in prison today include 18 total from Orleans Parish courtrooms, according to the Parole Project. They range in age from 66 to 86. Most were convicted of murder, the rest of rape. More than 50 of them are Black.
Some were sentenced to death, but those sentences were converted to life prison terms after a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling put the death penalty on hiatus across the country.
Williams pegged the cost of the 10/6 lifers from Orleans Parish at about $1.5 million a year.
"So, in addition to the profound unfairness, housing these elderly men is costing ... an unnecessary amount of money nearly five or more decades after promising them potential release after 10½ years," he said.
Only one of the 10/6 lifers is a woman: Gloria “Mama Glo” Williams, the longest-serving female inmate in Louisiana, convicted of murder in 1971 in St. Landry Parish. Gov. John Bel Edwards, however, granted a clemency petition last month for Williams; a parole hearing is scheduled for December.
Andrew Hundley, executive director of the Louisiana Parole Project, said some 10/6 lifers have been released individually over the years through the clemency process. But the Orleans district attorney is the first to consider them as a class.
“There’s no one who’s served longer than this group, because anyone who was serving at that time, if they had a life sentence, they were 10/6 lifers,” Hundley said.
“That’s what everyone expected, and the people who went to prison had confidence that would happen, because they would see people in prison with them go home after 10 years and 6 months.”
Grippen has served 51 years from guilty pleas to armed robbery and aggravated rape from 1970. His lawyer told the judge he wanted to help Grippen in front of the pardon board when the time came.
“It’s one thing to go to prison; it’s another thing to go without understanding the terms,” argued Jane Hogan, an attorney for the men. “To have the goalpost shifted and shifted and the door slammed on these men is a travesty of justice.”
Commuting lifers “was codified into law. It wasn’t just like a wink and a nod,” she said. “There was no such thing as a real life sentence in Louisiana at the time.”
But courts haven’t bought the broken-promise argument, because the sentences originally doled out were nominally for life. They have deemed wardens’ recommendations for clemency administrative decisions.
State law from 1942 laid out a process that started in 1927 for Louisiana lifers to apply for a commutation after 10½ years. It required a letter from the warden and recommendations from the judge and top state officials.
“Most people got out, and anybody in there at the time will tell you the people who didn’t get out were the ones who were bad troublemakers, the ones who were maybe mentally slow or ones so completely cut off from the free world they didn’t have anybody to make an issue of it,” said Burk Foster, a retired criminal justice professor at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and a Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola historian.
“There was a window and it closed, and it closed pretty much all at once.”
Francis Abbott, executive director of the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole, said the state agency has no records indicating how often life prisoners received commutations before the law changed in 1973.
“What I’ve always heard is that the warden made this recommendation to the governor, and that it was after they had served 10 years and six months,” Abbott said.
Louisiana was “unique in having this particular custom that was so routine, and lasted a really long time,” said Reiko Hillyer, a history professor at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon who has studied the decline of clemency and pardons in the South.
She said the practice of commuting life sentences began in the early 20th century with Henry Fuqua, a warden at Angola who later became governor.
“He would recommend people to the governor, and they would get clemency,” Hillyer said. “Governors just gave clemency more regularly and didn’t consider it to be political suicide.”
Gov. Earl Long in the 1950s formed what he called the “Forgotten Man’s” committee to help free inmates languishing in the system. He offered commutations to an estimated 1,600 people before his term ended, from a prison population of fewer than 4,000.
Gov. Edwin Edwards signed more than 900 commutations during his first two terms, from 1972 to 1980, while being singed with allegations of favoritism. The pace of commutations declined in Edwards’ third and fourth terms, according to Loyola University researchers.
It slowed further under subsequent governors, dropping to just three over Bobby Jindal’s eight years. As of 2020, Gov. John Bel Edwards had agreed to commute 70 sentences.
State criminal justice reforms in 2017 left out the bulk of inmates convicted of violent crimes, including older lifers. Parole eligibility was restored, however, to more than 100 life prisoners who were sentenced between 1973 and 1979.
Advocates argue that long-serving inmates like Mitchell have followed a familiar path to low risk: aging out of violence. More than 1,200 life prisoners in Louisiana are 60 or older, corrections data show.
Mitchell had numerous write-ups in the late 1960s and 70s for fighting, disobedience and, in one 1969 episode, “Three gallons of home made beer,” court records show.
After several more write-ups for disobedience in the early 1980s, though, Mitchell has garnered only two over the past 20 years and none for the last seven, prison records show.
Advocates hope for more releases of those long-serving inmates in Orleans Parish and elsewhere, saying they face myriad health problems at cost to the state.
On average, incarcerated people under 50 last year cost the state about $24,600 annually, state figures show. A corrections official told a state Senate committee in 2018 that inmates over 50 cost taxpayers about three times what a younger inmate costs.
