Sorry doesn’t cut it.
A Louisiana man who served 30 years for a murder he didn’t commit rejected an apology from the prosecutor who put him away.
“It happened,” Glenn Ford said in an emotional meeting arranged by ABC’s Nightline. “I’m sorry I can’t forgive you. I really am.”
Attorney Marty Stroud had previously issued a mea culpa in a stunning letter to the editor for the Shreveport Times, but he wanted to apologize in person for his win-at-all-costs prosecution in the flawed 1984 case.
“I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself,” Stroud wrote in his letter to the editor. “I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning.”
Stroud, who was 33 years old in 1984, admits he didn’t pursue information that could have cleared Ford in the fatal shooting of Shreveport watch dealer Isadore Rozeman.
Ford, who did yard work for Rozeman, was convicted on meager and misleading evidence.
Stroud now admits he took advantage of a defense team that had never handled a criminal case, and he worked to pick an all-white jury to sit in judgment of the black defendant.
When he managed to secure a death sentence, the young hotshot met his colleagues out for celebratory drinks.
“That’s sick,” Stroud wrote.
Ford was finally released in March 2014 after a judge found there was credible evidence to prove he wasn’t involved in Rozeman’s death.
Stroud came forward after the state refused to pay Ford $330,000 as compensation for his lost years.
“Glenn Ford deserves every penny owed him under the compensation statute,” Stroud argued.
The timing of Ford’s release was bittersweet. He has been diagnosed with fatal lung cancer and has just months to live.
He’d grown gaunt and too weak to rise from his chair by the time of his face-to-face meeting with Stroud.
“I thought about this for a long, long time,” Stroud said as Nightline’s cameras rolled. “I want you to know that I am very sorry. It’s a stain on me that will be with me until I go to my grave.”
Ford, who has said he wants to focus on his health rather than revenge, still isn’t ready to bury the hatchet.
“Alright, but it still cost me 31 years of my life, and then nothing at the end but death,” Ford said in the Nightline segment. “Because they give me from six to eight months to live.”
The awkward encounter ended with Stroud wishing Ford well. The exonerated murder convict did the same.
