Man Acquitted After Serving Over 13 Years For A Murder He Didn’t Commit
Kendall Harrison, a former high school quarterback at Edna Karr High School in New Orleans, has been acquitted of the murder of a Good Samaritan in 2012, a conviction that halted his life for more than 13 years. Harrison, now a 31-year-old man, has continually maintained his innocence and finally got the chance to prove it at a retrial earlier in September.
According to Fox 8, Harrison said that his first involvement in the case was after the police released a sketch of the alleged perpetrator that looked nothing like him. “No hair on the face, got a baseball cap on, but somebody called Crimestoppers and said that the sketch looked like me,” Harrison pointed out.
Harrison’s change of fortune happened when the State of Louisiana outlawed nonunanimous jury verdicts in 2018- -a nonunanimous jury originally found Harrison guilty of the murder of Harry “Mike” Ainsworth—and he was awarded a retrial, seven years after his original conviction.
Mike Willis, Harrison’s father, is thankful his son is back in the free world.
“Knowing that he’s sleeping every night inside of the cell and, every day I’m in a bed, it never was a good feeling,” he told the outlet.
Harrison, meanwhile, is still adjusting, as he told 4WWL News.
“I’m still learning how to use my phone. That’s the hardest task for me right now, messing with this phone. I’ve been incarcerated over 5,000 days. That’s a lot of days. Five thousand days to be locked in a cell. It’s like you’ve been broken free of them chains. It’s a relief. I held my head up the entire time because I knew the God that I serve isn’t going to let me go out like that,” he told the outlet.
The lead attorney during his retrial, Scott Sherman, noted that the verdict was long overdue and that his client never should have been convicted in the first place, in part because the DNA evidence used in the case was faulty.
“It is the right verdict. He should have been acquitted all those years ago. Slow justice is better than no justice, but at least we got there. But it is long overdue,” Sherman noted.
“From day one, we never did lay down and believe that he was guilty,” Willis said. “We have a broken system. Our tragedy, we don’t like it but maybe it had to happen for us to be the voice of the people today moving forward for the future to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted in an expansive report on the criminal justice system in Louisiana that its justice system is disproportionately harmful to Black people, in particular Black men.
As their report noted, “Although people of color are grossly overrepresented at every point of the criminal justice system in Louisiana, white individuals hold the power to influence Black citizens’ interactions with racial profiling, criminalization, and incarceration.”
The report continued, Clearly, the people with chief roles in Louisiana’s criminal justice system do not reflect the state’s demographic diversity, despite research that shows that diversity in these ranks increases public safety. ‘Out of Balance’ aims to expose the lack of diversity in Louisiana’s law enforcement – particularly its sheriffs and DAs – to begin to chart a path toward a system truly representative of the communities it serves, and a culture that produces different outcomes for people of color.”
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