Why a Black man from Louisiana is serving a life sentence for stealing hedge clippers

A Louisiana man will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, according to a decision last week rendered by the state Supreme Court. His crime? Trying to steal hedge clippers from another person’s home in 1997.

In a 5-1 verdict, the court left intact the life sentence given to Fair Wayne Bryant, 62, all but closing off his final chance at reducing it. According to Louisiana law, the crime of attempted simple burglary carries no more than 12 years behind bars, but because the 1997 offense was his fourth felony, Bryant, who is Black, received a life sentence in 2000.

The justices declined to review the sentence, which was upheld by the state appeals court in 2019, according to the decision. One justice recused himself.

The Louisiana Supreme Court decision has sparked an outcry, and experts say the harsh punishment is hardly unique in a state that mandates that sentencing for a fourth felony be no less than 20 years in prison.

“There are hundreds of thousands of individuals who are in American prisons in Louisiana, in Mississippi and Florida and California, around the country, who have similar stories,” Nicole Porter, director of advocacy at the Sentencing Project, told Yahoo News.

The court’s ruling is also notable for the sharp dissent from Chief Justice Bernette Johnson, the only Black justice on the court and the first African-American to become its chief justice.

“This man’s life sentence for a failed attempt to steal a set of 3 hedge clippers is grossly out of proportion to the crime and serves no legitimate penal purpose,” Johnson wrote.

Bryant, who was 38 at the time of the crime, was accused of stealing the clippers from the carport at a man’s home in Shreveport in January 1997, according to the 2000 appellate decision. A police officer later found Bryant along with a pair of hedge clippers in a van that fit the description of the suspect’s vehicle. The homeowner identified Bryant as the person who was in his carport and said the clippers were his. Bryant said the clippers belonged to his wife.

Bryant was sentenced to life because of four prior convictions, one of which was an attempted armed robbery. All his convictions, Johnson wrote in her dissent, involved a theft of some kind. “Such petty theft is frequently driven by the ravages of poverty or addiction,” she wrote, “and often both.”

In her dissent, which was first reported by the Lens, a nonprofit news organization in New Orleans, Johnson said habitual offender laws are the modern manifestation of “Pig Laws,” which she defined as measures passed in some Southern states after Reconstruction that sought to re-enslave Black Americans by introducing extreme sentences for petty theft.

“Pig Laws undoubtedly contributed to the expansion of the Black prison population that began in the 1870’s,” Johnson wrote.

In the PBS project “Slavery by Another Name,” historian Khalil Muhammad says Pig Laws “focused on enhancing penalties for what had once been a misdemeanor — [it] now becomes a felony.”

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“It explains the level of punitiveness around robbery and burglary offenses and other property offenses in the United States,” Porter told Yahoo News.

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