Glenn Ford — 30 years on death row, then 15 months free

Glenn Ford spent nearly 30 years on Louisiana’s death row for a 1983 murder he did not commit, was released in March 2014 after the state conceded the case against him had collapsed, and died of cancer roughly fifteen months later — the longest-serving death-row prisoner in the United States to be fully exonerated before his death. Ford, a Black man, had been convicted in 1984 by an all-white jury in Shreveport for the killing of Isadore Rozeman, a 58-year-old jeweler and watch repairman for whom Ford did occasional yard work. The case has become a study in how a stacked jury, a defense unequipped to mount one, and suppressed evidence pointing to other men can combine to send an innocent person to death row for three decades.

The outcome is documented and final. Isadore Rozeman was found shot in the back of the head in his Shreveport shop on November 5, 1983. Ford, known to be near the store and identified by witnesses, was charged with first-degree murder; his court-appointed lawyers had no experience trying a jury case, one of them an oil-and-gas attorney. He was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to death. In 2013, an informant told prosecutors that another man, Jake Robinson, had admitted to the killing — information consistent with evidence the state had never disclosed to Ford’s defense.

On the strength of that disclosure, Ford’s legal team moved to vacate, and in March 2014 a Caddo Parish judge overturned the conviction. Ford walked out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on March 11, 2014, after nearly three decades inside. He was soon diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Louisiana then denied him the compensation owed to the wrongfully convicted, a judge reasoning that he was not “factually innocent” because he had allegedly known of or profited from the crime — a denial that drew a remarkable public apology from the prosecutor who had convicted him.

This dossier centers Glenn Ford as the wronged party. The system failures — a racially exclusionary jury, a defense without the means or experience to test the state’s case, and the concealment of evidence implicating others — are the mechanism. Jake Robinson is named only as the man the later record implicated, consistent with the prosecution’s own basis for vacating the conviction.