Published on: Monday, October 19, 2020

A Louisiana man serving a life sentence for stealing a pair of hedge clippers in 1997 was paroled on Thursday, after spending more than two decades in prison for his crime (article available here). That act of simple burglary wouldn't normally lead to a life sentence. But over the previous two decades, Fair Wayne Bryant had committed four other felonies. Under Louisiana's "habitual offender" law (also known colloquially as "three-strikes laws") for people with multiple felony convictions, he was given a life sentence for theft of the hedge clippers.

Since 1997, the 63-year-old Black man has been locked up in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola — the largest maximum-security facility prison in the United States, named in part after the former slave plantation it replaced. On Thursday, he was finally able to walk out of Angola on parole.