Fair Wayne Bryant has already spent more than two decades in prison for allegedly stealing a pair of hedge clippers, and he only has the rest of his life to go—a sentence the state of Louisiana, deems fit for the crime.
Bryant was stopped by Shreveport, police, and told that his vehicle resembled one used in a recent home burglary. They found hedge clippers in his van, which he insisted he belonged to his wife. However, the 38-year-old made one confession to the officers that may have cost him his freedom: Bryant said after his vehicle broke down, he entered a nearby carport in search of a tank of gas. Bryant was handed down a life sentence, and despite several appeals, the Louisiana Supreme Court still believes justice was served.
Last week, the Supreme Court denied Bryant’s request to review his case. This sentiment was then backed by six of the seven justices, according to ‘The Lens NOLA.’ The lone Black judge was the only one to disagree. Chief Justice Bernette Johnson said Bryant’s sentence was a result of Louisiana’s harsh habitual offender laws, calling it a “modern manifestation” of the “Pig Laws” that were crafted to keep Black people impoverished during the Reconstruction era.
“Mr. Bryant has already spent nearly 23 years in prison and is now over 60 years old,” Johnson wrote in her dissent. ”If he lives another 20 years, Louisiana taxpayers will have paid almost one million dollars to punish Mr. Bryant for his failed effort to steal a set of hedge clippers.”
In the years following Reconstruction, Johnson explained, Southern states began to introduced extreme sentences for crimes such as petty theft that criminalized recently freed, Black people. “Pig Laws were largely designed to re-enslave African Americans,” she said. These sentences then allowed forced labor, causing the South’s Black prison population to explode beginning in the 1870s.
The pig laws later evolved into what we know today as habitual offender laws, which allow prosecutors to seek a harsher sentence for a lesser crime if the defendant has previous convictions. According to ‘The Lens,’ almost 80 percent of the Louisiana prison population under the habitual offender laws, are Black.
Of course, Bryant is one of them. Because he already had four prior felony convictions, his life sentence verdict was legal under Louisiana statutes at the time. Though Bryant challenged the sentence as unconstitutionally excessive, the judges denied his appeal. After two more appeals, Bryant’s motion finally made it to the higher courts, before again being denied. Still, he claims he received an illegal sentence and should have been appointed a lawyer during a resentencing hearing. The Louisiana Supreme Court disagreed, all but Johnson, “This man’s life sentence for a failed attempt to steal a set of hedge clippers,” she wrote, “is grossly out of proportion to the crime and serves no legitimate penal purpose.”
