Justice Administered Under Confederate Flag in Caddo Parish

In May 2009, Shreveport, Louisiana resident Carl Staples entered the Caddo Parish courthouse to report for jury duty. When asked if he could serve as a juror in the capital case of Felton Dorsey, Mr. Staples expressed how it made him feel to be asked to serve under the confederate flag:

“[the flag] is a symbol of one of the most . . . heinous crimes ever committed to another member of the human race, and I just don’t see how you could say that, I mean, you’re here for justice, and then again you overlook this great injustice by continuing to fly this flag which . . put[s] salt in the wounds of . . . people of color. I don’t buy it.”

Referring to the position of the flag outside the front of the courthouse, Mr. Staples added: “This is no flag in a museum.”

Social historian Eric Brock agrees. In a submission to the Caddo Commission in 2002, Mr. Brock explained:

“There appears to be no reason to have placed the flagpole and Confederate flag on this monument and, hence, on the Courthouse Square at this time except as part of Shreveport’s own role in resistance to the above-mentioned social changes then sweeping the region.”

Caddo Parish has one of the highest rates of death sentences in Louisiana, responsible for eighteen defendants sentenced to death in the State – fourteen of whom have been African-American men. Tim Lyman’s recent study of homicide cases in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, documents the way the death penalty is administered across racial lines.  Lyman’s results showed that there was “a less than one-in-ten-thousand chance that the prosecuted cases were a racially random sample drawn from the homicide group.”

 

For an historical account of the Caddo Courthouse flag, see Death and Dixie: How the Courthouse Confederate Flag Influences Capital Cases in Louisiana, by Cecelia Trentacosta and William Collins.

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