Marty Stroud was 33 years old when he fought to have Glenn Ford sentenced to death. He was relatively new in his role as assistant district attorney in Caddo Parish, La., when Ford was indicted on a charge of first-degree murder for the 1983 killing of a watchmaker in Shreveport.
“The case took about a week and a half,” Stroud recalls now. Ford, a black man before an all-white jury, was convicted and sentenced in 1984. He remained on death row for three decades.
Last year, Ford was declared free and was released from prison. His attorneys said he was sentenced because of questionable testimony and inexperienced defense.
Stroud said he knows now that Ford was innocent and that Ford’s trial “was fundamentally unfair.” He knows Ford faces an advanced cancer diagnosis and the state is not paying Ford for the decades he lost.
“When he was exonerated last year, I was thrilled,” Stroud, 63, said Friday. “I thought that justice had been done.”
Stroud read in the Shreveport Times about Ford’s problems getting the state to pay him. He began working on a letter to the editor of the newspaper. All of the things that had bothered him about the case, and all of the things about the case that had built over the sleepless nights, went into the letter.
“I’m not one to write letters or get on soapboxes or anything like that,” Stroud said. “But I felt that in this particular case, I had a unique view of what had happened since I actually was there.”
The result, which totals more than 1,500 words, was published online Friday by the Shreveport Times and circulated on social media. In the letter, Stroud apologized for his role in taking away 30 years of Ford’s life. He says he was “arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself.”
Even though he hoped the letter would prompt some discussion about the death penalty, he said he is surprised by the reaction beyond Shreveport.
“I knew it would probably stir some people up around here, but I never realized it would gain so much attention with other folks in other parts of the country,” Stroud said. He has been called by CNN and other outlets who want to hear more about the story. “I’m a little bit stunned by that.”
