Former jailhouse lawyer, now attorney, talks about his journey and the legal needs of the incarcerated

Attorney Calvin Duncan (right) talks at Marquette University Law School on Nov. 5, 2025, with the Lubar Center's Derek Mosley. Photograph by Margo Kirchner.

By Margo Kirchner

Calvin Duncan, author of The Jailhouse Lawyer, told law students and community members about inequalities in Louisiana’s criminal legal system and the numerous barriers faced by those in prison to establish innocence or prove constitutional violations.
 
Legal roadblocks for those incarcerated include the lack of appointed counsel after completion of an appeal and great difficulty in obtaining court and other records.
 
Now out of custody and an attorney, Duncan helps those incarcerated research and litigate their cases, and he is running for election as a court clerk with the intent to make records more easily obtainable.
 
Duncan recounted his story as jailhouse lawyer to licensed attorney in a discussion at Marquette University Law School with Derek Mosley, director of the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.
 
Along the way in his career, Duncan helped change laws in Louisiana and Oregon that allowed nonunanimous juries to convict a defendant.

At the time of Duncan's conviction, agreement by 10 of 12 jurors was sufficient for conviction. Duncan told the crowd that documentation showed the Louisiana rule was created to preserve white supremacy by making the votes of one or two Black jurors irrelevant.

In Ramos v. Louisiana (2020), the U.S. Supreme Court found that the right to a jury trial in the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous verdict to convict a defendant of a serious crime. Duncan, not then a lawyer himself, worked with attorneys on the case. 
 
Duncan stressed for Marquette’s law students that law schools provide “knowledge of the law and how to wield it.” He emphasized that half of the Bill of Rights protects people accused of crime, and that more people need to defend the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth amendments and protect those who cannot protect themselves.
 
Duncan spent more than two decades in prison for a murder he says he did not commit. He told the crowd that from the start of his time in custody, he focused on learning the law and helping his fellow residents with their legal matters. Immediately after his release in 2011, based on a new plea agreement, Duncan set his sights on becoming an attorney.
 
Duncan was just a teen and had moved from Louisiana to Oregon to work when he heard from a relative that police wanted to arrest him for murder. Duncan said he did not know what the matter was about. Although he had committed some shoplifting as a troubled younger teen in New Orleans following years of abuse as a child, he had not been involved in any homicide.
 
Two detectives found him in Oregon and arrested him. Duncan told the audience that he did not meet his attorneys until the day before trial. The prosecutor wanted the death penalty, but the jury disagreed and gave him life instead.
 
He was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola.
 
Incarcerated with men on death row, Duncan decided to learn the law, he said. Angola had a program to train “inmate counsel substitutes,” who could do most everything that lawyers could do except go outside the prison to conduct investigations.
 
His girlfriend sent him copies of cases, while he created his own law book comprising newspaper articles that discussed the law. He joked that he “always enjoyed when wealthy people got arrested,” because the newspaper stories about them would include discussion of the law.
 
As an inmate counsel substitute, Duncan wrote letters to obtain court and law enforcement records. He often was unsuccessful until Louisiana law changed in the 1980s to allow access to police reports and district attorney files. However, the requestor had to pay for the records.
 
Duncan said he donated plasma about twice per week to raise money to pay for records.
 
The Orleans Parish court clerk in particular was difficult to get records from. Other parishes were more cooperative.
 
Duncan maintained his innocence for more than 20 years. He obtained his release after the prosecutor in 2011 allowed him to plead guilty to the lesser crime of manslaughter. Duncan said he lied to the court and admitted the killing just to get out.
 
Duncan said that within a week of release, he was at Tulane Law School asking how to attend. It was news to him that he needed to get an undergraduate degree first. He then attended Tulane and received his paralegal certificate and bachelor’s degree.
 
He made it into his first choice of law school: Lewis & Clark, in Oregon. He said the first line of his application read, “I am so tired of illegally practicing law.”
 
Duncan was exonerated during his second year of law school. He said the officers who interrogated him had been investigated for corruption and altering evidence, and notes in the prosecutor’s file showed that a photo array shown to a witness included two white men (Duncan is Black).
 
Meanwhile, Louisiana passed a law allowing evidence of innocence to be presented to a judge, even in old cases. Duncan’s attorney from years before helped present Duncan’s case to a judge in 2021, and the judge and prosecutor reopened his case and dismissed it.
 
Duncan said that when he applied for compensation for wrongful conviction, the Louisiana attorney general said she would prosecute him for perjury for lying to the judge at his 2011 plea hearing if he pursued it. He dropped the request.
 
After graduating from law school in 2023, Duncan founded The Light of Justice, a program helping people in prison with their cases. 
 
He also decided to run to replace that New Orleans clerk of criminal court. Duncan said his opponent, backed by the attorney general, argues that he is a convicted murderer. But a prosecutor has “stepped up” and said he was exonerated. Debates have been heated.
 
Duncan’s talk was sponsored by the Lubar Center as well as Marquette Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice and Public Interest Law Society.

The Jailhouse Lawyer, co-authored by Duncan and criminal justice reform advocate Sophie Cull, was published in July 2025.