It was late October, only a week after Fair Wayne Bryant walked out of Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Bryant’s freedom had not been preordained. The 63-year-old was more than two decades into a life sentence for breaking into a carport storeroom in Shreveport. Bryant’s arrest stemmed from a police search of a van he was riding in where hedge clippers were found. The owner of the home said that the hedge clippers belonged to him; Bryant denied taking them and Bryant’s cousin said they were his.
He had been intermittently incarcerated since he was a young man.
Bryant was previously convicted, and sentenced to 10 years in prison, for the 1979 attempted robbery of a cab driver during which an accomplice shot the driver. He was then convicted in 1987 for the theft of multiple telephones, a remote control, and “a robot” from RadioShack, and sentenced to two years of hard labor. In 1991, he was sentenced to 18 months of hard labor after forging a $150 check. Then, in 1992, he was sentenced to four years for another burglary.
The now-infamous life sentence, covered everywhere from the Guardian to CNN, was a result of Caddo Parish district attorneys invoking the state’s habitual offender statute—in August 1997 and again in February 2000.
Read Full Article »