Freedom Is Everything | BONUS | Season 2: summary and key takeaways

In 1992, detectives from the Jefferson Parish Homicide Division raided the home of Glenn Davis's grandmother with guns drawn, searching for the teenager under his neighborhood nickname, Chocolate. Nancy Glass reports that the police were investigating a drive-by shooting connected to an alleged drug deal. Davis was an eighteen-year-old high school athlete who played football, basketball, baseball, and ran track, hoping sports would offer him a pathway out of his neighborhood. When his father paged him to explain that homicide detectives were searching for him, Davis insisted that he knew nothing about any killing.

Davis and his father chose to visit the homicide bureau together in order to clear his name. Inside the interrogation room, Detective Thermon questioned Davis about the murder and asked him to sign documents while speaking into a tape recorder. Sensing immediate danger, Davis refused to sign anything or speak on tape because he feared the recording could be manipulated to suggest a confession. He pushed the papers onto the floor and demanded that the officers either arrest him or let him walk out the door. The detectives placed Davis under arrest alongside his cousins, Larry Delmore and Terence Myers.

The prosecution built its entire case against the three young men on the uncorroborated statement of a single eyewitness who claimed to have seen them firing shots from a vehicle. Davis was only eighteen years old when he realized he had to find a way to avoid spending the rest of his life behind bars. All three cousins were tried together, found guilty of second-degree murder, and sentenced to mandatory life imprisonment without parole. The verdict provoked intense grief and disbelief among their family members gathered in the courtroom.

Larry Delmore experienced an agonizing emotional reaction during sentencing, shouting at the presiding judge that they were innocent. Court officers restrained Delmore and forced his head down so he would hear the judge impose the life sentence. Both young men were transported to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola to serve out their terms. Davis and Delmore were subjected to grueling field labor that Davis felt resembled historical slavery, digging roadside ditches and scraping dirt paths for miles under intense surveillance. Delmore felt completely broken by the injustice and admitted that he temporarily lost his faith and wished for death.

Davis eventually decided that he had to master the legal system himself if he and his cousins were ever going to prove their innocence. He applied to work as an inmate counsel in the prison law library, which allowed him to trade grueling agricultural work for legal research. Working alongside other incarcerated men, Davis assisted peers with their legal petitions while studying books on appeal procedures. During this time, another inmate looking over his trial paperwork noticed that the police report provided by his original defense attorney was suspiciously brief.

The inmate suggested that a normal homicide file could easily encompass hundreds of pages rather than the mere twenty pages Davis possessed. Davis followed this advice and sent a formal written public records request to the custodian of records in Gretna, asking for every document tied to his case number. To his astonishment, the authorities delivered a box more than a foot tall containing hundreds of pages of unreleased case materials. Davis spent weeks carefully reviewing documents his defense lawyer had never seen, realizing that the state had suppressed crucial evidence that could have persuaded the jury to acquit them.

Armed with the new evidence, Davis filed post-conviction relief petitions on his own behalf, but his initial applications were promptly dismissed by the state district court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Louisiana Supreme Court. Despite taking eighteen months to receive some of these rejections, Davis refused to quit and pursued federal relief. A breakthrough arrived when a federal judge issued an order stating that his claims had merit, prompting Davis to reach out to the Innocence Project in New Orleans. An attorney visited him at the prison and agreed to investigate his claims further.

The attorneys discovered severe flaws in the state's original prosecution, establishing that the key eyewitness had been positioned too far away to observe the shooting. Furthermore, the withheld records identified an alternate suspect named Derek Richardson, who had allegedly confessed to the homicide and driven a vehicle matching witness descriptions. Shockingly, Richardson had been represented on a separate matter by the very same attorney who defended Davis and his cousins, creating an undeniable conflict of interest. An appeals court ordered a hearing in 2004, though the hearing was delayed another four years.

In February 2007, after fourteen years of wrongful incarceration, a judge overturned Davis's conviction on the grounds that prosecutors had suppressed vital exculpatory evidence. Petitions for Delmore and Myers were granted the following year, leading to their full exonerations and state compensation payments of four hundred and eighty thousand dollars each. Tragically, Myers passed away less than two years after his release, cutting short his time outside prison walls. Davis observed that the state never offered an official apology, though he felt grateful simply to be alive and free.

Readjusting to society proved to be an ongoing process marked by lasting psychological trauma alongside deep joy. Delmore described the emotional whiplash of experiencing immense gratitude while occasionally falling into depressive states and replaying the trauma of prison. Both men found strength in rebuilding their family relationships and maintaining support networks. For Davis, true freedom encompasses everyday autonomy, such as traveling abroad, deciding when to open his refrigerator, and watching his own television, while keeping distance from anyone who might jeopardize the liberty he fought so hard to reclaim.