After a quarter-century behind bars, Brandon Jackson is preventing again towards Louisiana’s final Jim Crow legislation.
In 1997, Brandon Jackson was convicted for a criminal offense he stated he didn’t commit. An Applebee’s restaurant exterior of Shreveport, Louisiana was robbed for $6,500. No person was injured. There was no bodily proof connecting him to the crime.
At trial, two jurors voted to acquit him. In 48 states, it will have been a mistrial, and he might have walked free, however Louisiana’s Jim Crow-era legal guidelines, designed to lock up Black defendants, allowed for nonunanimous jury convictions. Jackson was sentenced to life.
Conviction opens within the days after Brandon Jackson has been launched on parole after 25 years in jail. The movie follows Jackson as he grapples with the agoraphobia, paranoia and alienation borne of a quarter-century of unjust imprisonment.
The menial work accessible to him triggers reminiscences of the slavery-like situations at Louisiana’s infamous plantation prisons. He struggles towards a parole system that calls for greater than $11,000 in charges and sends officers to his dwelling earlier than daybreak. He concludes he’s “free however not free”.
Over time, he finds group in a assist group for previously imprisoned folks, and a way of goal advocating to reverse Louisiana’s final Jim Crow legislation.
Conviction is a portrait of 1 man’s quest to regulate to life on the skin and assist the greater than 1,500 folks he left behind in jail with nonunanimous, Jim Crow convictions.