NEW ORLEANS (AP) — There are bars on the windows here too, though they're the kind meant to keep people out, not in. The television is giant, the couch cushions plush, and the door opens whenever he wants it to.
The comfortable home in New Orleans' 7th Ward is the kind of setting Glenn Ford could only imagine when he went to bed every night — for nearly three decades — on Angola prison's death row. And when he finally took those first few steps as a free man last year, the convicted murderer-turned-exonerated poster child for a flawed justice system appeared poised to enjoy every moment of his long-awaited freedom.
But Ford is clearly tired and "kind of shaky" sitting at the kitchen table of that home last week. The 65-year-old was around an hour late for his interview, the delay a result of a longer-than-normal radiologist appointment. Dressed in a black, long-sleeved shirt, his black beanie cap rests atop a thinning face that illustrates the speed and efficiency with which cancer can ravage.
"I wake up in pain, right in the back of my throat," Ford says when asked to describe his average day. "It feels like my throat has been slit. Every time I eat something or drink something … it's a whole explosion of pain."
Life wasn't always this way.
Many years ago, back when Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, Ford was a California transplant living in Shreveport and working at a snack shop in the northern Louisiana city. Then Isadore Rozeman, the Shreveport jewelry and watch repair shop owner for whom Ford had previously performed yard work, was found shot to death inside his store. It was 1983.
By the time 1984 concluded, Ford was convicted of Rozeman's murder — a conviction his attorneys are now claiming, in recently filed federal lawsuits, was based on misleading testimony and evidence suppression on the part of police and prosecutors.
Ford maintained his innocence, but an all-white jury sentenced the African-American to death on Feb. 26, 1985.
"I didn't believe it would ever come to an actual charge," he said during last Tuesday's interview. "But after these people convicted me, everything was up in the air."
Life in the infamous penitentiary was "noisy," Ford said, and hectic. The 15 or so inmates on his tier became like family, their closeness a product of proximity and isolation and shared fate. Most of his day was spent inside his tiny cell, working on puzzles or drawing or listening to whatever music he could get his hands on.
Those few moments outside of the cell were filled playing cards, or chess with fellow death row inmates. He stopped going outside toward the latter part of his incarceration, saying the "so-called exercise yard" was small and "ridiculous."
The noise subsided on execution days. Everyone on death row knew when one of their own was escorted out of their cell and into something closer to the chamber. If they see their friend returning to his cell, Ford said, a sigh of relief is collectively shared.
"There isn't anyone on death row that actually wishes death on anyone that's actually on death row," he said.
Ford, at one point, had his own death date: Feb. 28 of either 1987 or 1988. He can't remember the year, but he recalls a judge was about to retire and "wanted to make sure I got an execution date" before his retirement from the bench. He came about a week from the date before it was nullified. Ford said the judge, in his haste, forgot that execution dates had to be set at least 45 days in advance, and the judge tried to get the job done in 28.
"To kill me in 28 days, they'd have to throw everything regarding the 45 days off the books," he says. "I didn't think I was that important."
This routine went on for years. He cut off contact with his family in California, Ford said, a difficult decision designed to spare them from any negative effects of his incarceration and to keep his mind focused on the task at hand: freedom.
"Credible evidence" of Ford's innocence came to the attention of two Caddo Parish prosecutors in late 2013, according to Ford's civil lawsuits. On March 10 of last year, prosecutors filed a motion to vacate his conviction.
Ford was playing chess with a fellow inmate — his cell neighbor — that morning when his attorney called to say his release was imminent. Believing the news was more of the same, Ford said he returned to his chess game. Even after Angola prison officials appeared at the cell door, he still focused on his opponent's next move. Only after a second official told him to pack his belongings did the reality set in.
"Everything got overwhelming at that instant," he remembered.
Photo albums, music and clothes were all he took with him — the rest to be divided among his death row family. It took 45 minutes, but felt like a day, before he walked out of Angola. He never once looked back.
What is the first move with freedom? "That's where the thought process went: what I wanted to do, then a million things pop up possibly that I can do, or that I'm free to do, like go close the door to just sit down and do nothing," he said. "I had choices that I never had in 30 some odd years. I had decisions to make that I never made. It was catch it as I go — try to keep up. That's where I've been for the past year, trying to catch up."
Shortly after he left Angola, a medical exam returned what would become a second death sentence: stage three lung cancer. It's now up to stage four, he says, and has spread to his bones. The daily doctor's appointments, the chemotherapy and radiation are meant to extend his life, not save it. One of his two recently filed federal lawsuits claims Angola officials and associated doctors knew he possibly had cancer back in 2011, but refused him any treatment while incarcerated.
A team of supporters has rallied around Ford, the house provided by Resurrection After Exoneration — started by a fellow exonerated death row inmate. He's scheduled to take a cruise with his sons next month, followed by a trip to California to visit his 17-plus grandchildren.
"I think we'll go camping or something," he says of the trip.
– by AP/ Reporter Jonathan Bullington with NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune
