Angola, LA — Glenn Ford, a man who spent nearly three decades on Louisiana’s death row has been finally freed after a court vacated his conviction in the 1983 murder case of Shreveport businessman Isadore Rozeman. Ford was convicted and sentenced to life in jail in 1984 by an all-white jury. He was 35 years old at the time, but is now 64 years old, and had been the longest serving death row inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
How did he get exonerated? Last year, undisclosed new evidence kicked off the start of the re-investigation, and it finally became clear that Ford was not even in the area when the murder occurred. A court order vacating Ford’s first-degree murder conviction and death sentence was then filed, and he was released immediately.
He commented to the media, “It feels good; my mind is going in all kind of directions. It feels good.” He added that he does harbor some resentment at being wrongly jailed. “I’ve been locked up almost 30 years for something I didn’t do,” he said.
His attorneys, Gary Clements and Aaron Novod, also commented via an official statement, “We are very pleased to see Glenn Ford finally exonerated, and we are particularly grateful that the prosecution and the court moved ahead so decisively to set Mr. Ford free.”
They added that his trial was “profoundly compromised by inexperienced counsel and by the unconstitutional suppression of evidence at his trial, including information from an informant, a suppressed police report related to the time of the crime and evidence of the murder weapon, which implicated the true perpetrator.”
Meanwhile, investigators say the search will continue to find out who really killed Isadore Rozeman.