Calvin Duncan Comes to Kingsborough to Share His Journey to Justice—and His Fight to Defend It

Kingsborough Community College welcomed criminal justice advocate, attorney and author Calvin Duncan on Oct. 5 for a conversation with President Suri Duitch about the law, finding purpose in service to community, and our shared responsibility to correct harms and address injustice whenever we encounter it.

More than 100 students, faculty, and staff—not only from Kingsborough, but from campuses across CUNY—listened in rapt attention, many holding a copy of Duncan’s memoir, The Jailhouse Lawyer, which the College gave to all students in attendance.

Dr. Vanda Seward, director of Kingsborough’s criminal justice program, provided introductory remarks.

“I hope you leave here today understanding that justice-involved people are not separate from our community, they are part of the fabric of our community—yes, our community—and their success impacts all of us,” Dr. Seward said. “For anybody who believes their community is somehow exempt, this conversation is more for you than anybody else.”

The fireside chat served as a reunion of sorts for Duncan and Duitch—Duitch served as dean of Tulane University School of Professional Advancement and Duncan is a Tulane alum. The two met after he graduated and became friends.

“I have been wanting to bring Calvin to campus since I came to Kingsborough two-and-a-half years ago and I’m so excited to have an opportunity to do that today,” said Duitch, who began the conversation by asking Duncan to talk about the role Louisiana State Penitentiary, often referred to as Angola, played in the community where he grew up, New Orleans’s Ninth Ward. It was one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.  

Life Without Parole and a Life of Service

“As kids, we knew that one of two things were going to happen to us: We were going to wind up in prison at a young age or get killed,” Duncan said. He referred to a local saying among Ninth Ward residents: “I’m from the Nine and I don’t mind dying.”

But at 19, Duncan thought he had avoided both: He had joined the U.S. Department of Labor’s Job Corp, a free, career-training and education program, which had sent him to Oregon. That’s where he was living and working when a sheriff’s officer placed him under arrest for a murder back in the Ninth Ward, misidentified by the girlfriend of the man who had been killed. Prosecutors sought the death penalty.

Determined to prove his innocence, but without the resources to do so, Duncan began scouring newspaper articles covering high profile court cases because they often included snippets of legal strategy.

“I thought, these people are trying to execute me, so I need a law book,” he said. “So, I started cutting those newspaper articles and started creating my own lawbook.”

Knowing that a few newspaper articles weren’t enough to help him wage an effective defense, Duncan filed his first motion for an actual lawbook. The motion was granted. From that moment on, Duncan said, “I was a lawyer.”

While a jury didn’t impose the death penalty, Duncan was convicted and sentenced to life without parole. He was transferred to Angola soon after, where he found people with similar stories. Some, like him, were innocent; others lacked the resources for effective legal representation. Thus began his career as a jailhouse lawyer.

In case after case, he found the law was being misapplied. In this work, he also found his purpose.

“I thought, now I need to learn how to utilize these laws because people in authority are trampling on the rights and privileges and sense of decency among people that didn’t have that kind of power,” he said. “I had to develop that power by one means and one means only: Learn the law, not just to help myself, but to help other people.”

As time went on, he also noticed a pattern—he frequently had difficulty accessing the records of anyone convicted in Orleans Parish, the same criminal court district where Duncan himself was wrongfully convicted. He vowed to one day run for criminal court clerk to reform the office.

Innocence Project New Orleans (now Innocence and Justice Louisiana) secured Duncan’s release on Jan. 7, 2011. More than 10 years later, Calvin was fully exonerated on Aug. 3, 2021, when his conviction was vacated and the state dismissed all charges against him.

Once freed, Duncan continued helping wrongfully convicted people who were still incarcerated. He immediately set about earning his law degree. He enrolled in Tulane University just days after his release, earning an associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s degree in paralegal studies. He was finally exonerated in 2021 and in 2023, at the age of 60, he received his J.D. from Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.

In one of his most consequential cases, he helped develop the constitutional challenge to Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury verdict law, in Ramos v. Louisiana. The law allows a defendant to be convicted, even if one or two jurors disagree and was legal in only two states—Oregon and Louisiana, the state where he was born and imprisoned and the state where he was initially arrested. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 2020.

In 2025, Duncan was elected clerk of the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, the same court that wrongfully convicted him 40 years earlier. However, the victory was short-lived: he only served for three hours before Louisiana lawmakers abolished the office to which he was elected.

“It was the best three hours of my life,” he said. “Three hours and then it was taken away from me. They did what they did, I went back to work. Do you think I would just give up?”

Duncan’s federal lawsuit challenging the law that eliminated the position of Orleans Parish criminal district court clerk, which names as defendants Louisiana state officials, is ongoing.

After the talk, a long line of students waiting for Duncan to sign their books snaked around the College’s International Hall of Flags. Criminal justice major Ygen Santana Oquendo was in it.

She not only enjoyed hearing Duncan’s talk, she said it changed the course of her life.

Santana Oquendo had been having second thoughts about pursuing her dream of becoming a police detective—and was planning to switch her major to nursing instead.

“Criminal justice work can be dangerous,” she said, “especially when you’re a single mom.”

But when she heard Duncan offer advice during the Q&A portion of the event, she changed her mind.

“When he said believe in yourself and continue growing and keep going, that made me really realize I’m going to stay [in criminal justice],” she said. “He inspired me.”

She graduates this spring.