Charles Amos spoke candidly about the crime he committed.
Against a black backdrop in front of a single camera at Louisiana’s Angola prison, 25 years after it happened, he spoke of his remorse, his rehabilitation and how prison had changed him.
“There’s so many things that I could’ve done better,” he said. “And now that I see it, how much better life could be … it hurts. I could be a blessing or a benefit in the lives of so many people. But the system don’t want to give me that opportunity.”
Amos was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 1995, incarcerated since the age of 20. In his booking photo he stares down the lens, almost childlike, with piercing brown eyes. More than two decades later, the graying borders on his hair and beard are testament to how much time has passed.
Louisiana, America’s most incarcerated state, has sentenced people to life without parole at the highest rate in the country. Over half of those incarcerated, like Amos, were convicted of second-degree murder, sweepingly defined under state law and mandatorily sentenced to life.
The vast majority of these inmates, mostly men and disproportionately Black, have not been heard from in public since they were locked away for the rest of their lives.
Amos’s on-camera interview was part of a groundbreaking new venture, the Visiting Room, an oral history project and website launched on Monday. It broadcasts interviews with more than 100 Angola inmates filmed while serving life without parole. All have been incarcerated for over two decades, and most were convicted of second-degree murder.
Their stories intertwine narratives of bleak prison violence, reflections on childhood and family, and a longing for mercy. In Amos’s case the interview helped unlock a pathway to freedom, in an extraordinary story of forgiveness, which would lead to an embrace with his victim’s father earlier this year in the same courtroom where he was convicted.
•••
It was July 1993 when Amos shot and killed his childhood friend, Sean Butler. It happened in a split second, a blazing row over a handgun and a moment of impulsive rage.
Amos had grown up in uptown New Orleans, where he was physically and emotionally abused by his stepfather. He had left school at the age of 11, and left his family home when he was 12. At the time of the shooting, he was battling drug and alcohol addiction.
He did not meet his court-appointed defense lawyer until the day of the trial, he recalled. One of his attorneys left the courtroom for almost two hours during testimony (the trial lasted less than a day). At sentencing his lead lawyer, who was later disbarred twice for ignoring clients and stealing payments, offered no argument against the life sentence.
“I was functioning illiterate and I didn’t know what was happening during the course of the trial,” Amos said in an interview. “I thought I was winning when all the while I didn’t stand a chance.”
His experience is far from exceptional among the Visiting Room’s rows of interviewees, many incarcerated at a young age, in an era when chronic poverty, aggressive prosecution and an overburdened court system led to ballooning incarceration rates.
“Life without parole in Louisiana is really an abstraction,” said Dr Marcus Kondkar, a sociology professor at Loyola University and one of the project’s co-creators. “Even academics who study it think of it as a structural problem but still don’t tie it to an individual’s life. With this, we wanted to create a real cultural encounter.”
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the population of lifers incarcerated in Louisiana surged after the state abolished clemency laws that created pathways to release after 10 years and six months. Commutations became more complex and increasingly rare. Also contributing to the surge was a 1972 supreme court decision that temporarily ended the death penalty, and the expansion of the number of offenses, from two to seven, that were mandatorily punishable with life without parole.
All occurred against a backdrop of conservative political policy and media coverage, restricting prisoners’ rights to clemency and humane conditions. The lurch towards such sentences occurred across the US, but the rates have soared highest in Louisiana.
The statistics speak for themselves. In 1972, there were just 193 people serving life sentences in Louisiana. In 2022 there are more than 4,000 – about 14% of the state’s entire prison population.
“These sentences have been normalized and the statistics bear that out,” said the historian Reiko Hillyer, author of the forthcoming book A Wall is Just a Wall. “The people who pushed for life without parole and mandatory minimum sentences also pushed for legislation curtailing prisoners’ rights to litigate against inhumane conditions, rights that were hard won during the civil rights movement.
“The same language was used nationwide to curtail furloughs and conjugal visits, which conservatives portrayed as extravagant indulgences. The language helped the free public imagine those convicted of crimes as permanent incorrigibles who did not deserve humane treatment and instead should be permanently disposed of.”
The proliferation of life without parole sentences in Louisiana has left behind an increasingly ageing prison population. In 2015 the average age of a state prisoner was 36 years; now it is 41, according to the Marshall Project. More than half of the state’s lifers are over 50 years old. The annual cost to the state for incarcerating an inmate under 50 is just under $25,000 but balloons to more than $77,000 once an individual reaches 50. Recidivism rates plunge among those released in older age.
Angola’s first prison graveyard was filled many years ago and a second is nearing capacity. A prison hospice program, captured in a documentary on the Oprah Winfrey network, is staffed mostly by life-sentenced volunteers.
Among the Visiting Room’s most poignant interviews is with Sammie Robinson, 81 years old at the time he speaks, and incarcerated since 1953. Dwight D Eisenhower was the US president then, it would be another 16 years before the first moon landing, and Jim Crow segregation was legal in the state. Robinson was 17 years old.
With his head held in his hands, he speaks about the violence he experienced during Angola’s notorious years as America’s most brutal prison. He sustained third-degree burns across his body during a prison fight when he was set alight using lighter fluid.
“When I came, they were wicked,” he said of the prison staff back then.
“I need to be out,” he says, shaking his head seemingly in disbelief. “I could go somewhere and make me a living.”
Robinson was Angola’s longest-serving inmate. He died in 2019, while still in prison, at the age of 83. He had spent 66 years inside; the video is the last interview he ever gave.
The futility of his sentence is perhaps exemplified by the fact that it relates to a murder that occurred while he was in Angola, during a prison fight two years after he was first incarcerated. The conviction that initially sent him to prison was later reversed and dismissed after it emerged he had been given no legal counsel at all at trial.
“Man, if I hadn’t been there for that [charge], I wouldn’t have been here and had to kill that dude,” he is quoted as saying in an obituary published in the prison’s newspaper, the Angolite.
•••
“When I watch Sammie’s interview, I just feel extreme sadness. He got old in there, and he never had a chance to get out. The door just slammed on him,” said Calvin Duncan, a former Angola inmate who partnered with Kondkar to curate the Visiting Room project.
The project began as an academic collaboration between Kondkar and Duncan, who spent 28 years on a life without parole sentence after being wrongly convicted. He became a famed jailhouse lawyer, assisting many fellow inmates with their claims, and returned to the prison to assist Kondkar in the interview process.
They selected a representative sample of inmates serving life without parole: overwhelmingly and disproportionately Black, convicted of second-degree murder and incarcerated for more than 20 years. They conducted interviews over a two-year period. But it became clear in the first round of interviews that Duncan, who knew many of the men so intimately already, affected their subjects’ ability to speak freely, so Kondkar sat alone with each inmate.
“Part of prison means not showing weakness. You go through life like that. You could be in prison for 20 years and nobody would ever see you cry,” said Duncan. “You hold this stuff in all your life because there’s nobody to actually share it with. This was the first opportunity they had to feel comfortable.”
Many of the men break down during their conversations.
Hannibal Stanfield was 19 at the time of his offense in 1988 and had spent 28 years incarcerated at the time of his interview. He remains incarcerated.
“It’s a lot of pressure and stress being in a hopeless situation,” he says. “Waking up every day and not knowing whether you’re going to die in prison. To take a human being basically and just take the worst decision he ever made and hold him responsible for it for the rest of his entire life and not even consider that he may have changed.
“It’s a death sentence – it’s a slow death.”
Kuantay Reeder, incarcerated since 1993, speaks openly about his fear of dying inside.
“You can hear men wake up from their sleep from having nightmares, knowing they’re going to die here. I had those nightmares. But I trick myself into believing that I’m going to get out. And that’s what I wake up for,” he says.
“You see people die every day. And you wonder if you’re ever going to become that person. If you’re going to ever get out. You don’t know.”
Reeder, who was 19 at the time he was charged with second-degree murder, was exonerated last year after 28 years inside.
•••
Like many others in the project, Amos talks in detail about how, through sheer will, he turned his life around inside. Shortly after arriving in prison, he learned to read by taking two-hour literacy classes and studying after hours in the dormitory. It was followed by a GED qualification and then a bachelor’s degree in Christian ministry.
“As I started to learn, it became so enjoyable,” he recalled in an interview. “Book after book was intriguing, and I said: ‘I should have been doing this.’ I was supposed to be educated. I was supposed to be a thinking man. But I was so traumatized as a youth.”
He became a prison tutor and later a traveling preacher, working between prisons across the state. He took culinary classes. Finally, he became a prison librarian, lobbying to deliver as many reading materials to inmates as possible.
But still, the prospect of dying inside gnawed away at him.
“Men were hanging themselves. Men were cutting their wrists. And it’s because so many men were learning and educating themselves and they still weren’t going home.”
In 2014, he joined the prison television station, filming and producing content. And a few years later he met Kondkar.
During his interview, Amos says he had heard through family that his victim’s father, Wilbert Wilson, had indicated an openness to forgiving him for his crime.
Kondkar found Wilson still living in New Orleans, now in his early 70s. He showed him the film.
Sitting in his small home in the city’s seventh ward, Wilson recalled the moment he watched Amos appear on screen for the first time, now a grown, middle-aged man.
“It brought tears to me, just seeing him,” he said. “I couldn’t focus, it hurt me to see it. The question kept coming back to me: why?”
Wilson had known Amos as a child. He had grown fond of him and had offered help in escaping his abusive stepfather by allowing him to sleep at his home on occasion. Amos had also assisted Wilson after he was shot in his own home, leaving him paralysed on his left side.
“I knew he had a good heart,” Wilson, now 75, said. “But I could see he was disturbed by something, that something in his life wasn’t right.”
As the video began to roll, a weight began to lift. Wilson saw how Amos’s life had changed; the qualifications he had earned in prison, his faith in God. He decided to back Amos’s application for sentence commutation.
“I prayed, and said: ‘Lord, I’ve got to get this hatred off my heart. It’s a miserable feeling. You can’t function right. So I forgave.”
The number of commutations signed by Louisiana governors has plummeted since the legislative reforms of the 1970s, amid mounting conservative political pressure. The Republican governor Bobby Jindal, who served from 2008 to 2016, signed just three in his entire tenure.
But Amos’s petition was granted by the state’s Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards. His sentence was reduced to 99 years with parole eligibility, meaning he would remain in prison but had a shot of release at a later date.
Earlier this year, the case was re-examined by a newly created civil rights division in the New Orleans district attorney’s office. Attorneys explored the circumstances of the shooting, that Amos had not set out that evening with intent to kill Sean Butler. They acknowledged Amos’s appalling legal representation at trial, and recommended his conviction be downgraded to manslaughter.
Wilson supported the entire process, and met Amos in person for the first time in a court session before the post-conviction hearing, facilitated by the district attorney’s office. They embraced, and Amos explained for the first time what had transpired that night – how the argument had quickly gotten out of control and he opened fire in a spontaneous moment, triggered, he believed, by the abuse he suffered as a child. He once again expressed unmitigated remorse.
•••
Amos was released from Angola in April. On his second day of freedom he visited Wilson as a free man, and now sees him at least once a week. They play chess together. Amos prepares his food sometimes. And Amos’s sister, Judy Bell, works as Wilson’s live-in carer.
“Even though my son is gone, and he [Amos] took my son away,” Wilson said, as they sat in his living room side by side. “I feel like I got a son I can count on too. I feel Charles will be there for me. What Sean would have done, I think Charles would do it for me.”
Such stories, advocates argue, should underscore the need for Louisiana to revisit the cases of thousands of other reformed inmates held for decades under life without parole sentences.
“The state legislature should pass laws that allow for the parole eligibility of individuals who have reached the age of 50 or have already served 25 years,” said Hillyer. “There must be a way to allow for review.”
Kondkar argued the purpose of the Visiting Room is not to advocate a particular policy outcome, but to allow people to see the inhumane consequences of a longstanding policy.
“It’s such an incredibly severe punishment that we disproportionately give to very young people whose brains haven’t fully developed,” he said.
“I think that the way we do life sentences in this country, but particularly in Louisiana, with the ease with which we can turn all kinds of things into a life sentence, creates something that in most parts of the world would be considered cruel and unusual.”
