What ProPublica Found About Post-Conviction Review in Louisiana

By Mrs. Eileen Hunter — about the author. Originally published on the first version of this site; republished August 2026.

ProPublica reported that for years, judges of Louisiana’s Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal routed prisoners’ pro se post-conviction petitions to a single staffer who stamped them for denial without judicial review — a practice acknowledged in a 2007 suicide note left by the court’s central staff director, Jerrold Peterson. ProPublica’s reporting on Louisiana post-conviction review is here.

To be plain about what this does and does not show: Mr. Hunter’s case was not in the Fifth Circuit. His appeals ran through the Second Circuit, and no filing of his was part of that scandal. We cite it for a narrower point: pro se post-conviction review in Louisiana has failed before, systemically and invisibly, and it took a whistleblower’s death for anyone to learn it. That is context — not proof — for why we ask readers to look at the record of this case themselves rather than assume the process caught everything.