The Daily Beast has a lengthy piece on an incarcerated man who may be innocent. The man, Arizona Batiste, has been locked up for 21 years for the murder of Leonardo Alexander. Batiste says he shot Alexander, who had followed him into his home with a gun, in self-defense. But Batiste was scared, he says, of what he had done and went into flight mode. He dragged Alexander out of the house and into a field behind the home. Batiste says he took Alexander’s gun and his own and passed them on to someone else to get rid of them. Here’s where things begin to go awry.

One gun is discarded (Alexander’s) and one gun ends up being held onto (Batiste’s). Batiste turns himself in the next morning and takes them to the person he gave the guns to. Only Batiste’s is found. The gun belonging to Alexander had been thrown into a lake. The sheriffs actually found Alexander’s gun, but they never told anyone about it, and Batiste’s claim of self-defense doesn't work—sorta. The jury voted 10-2 for conviction. In Louisiana, that doesn’t equal mistrial, it equals guilty.

This story would be fascinating if it wasn’t so tragic, so true, and so commonly replicated in other cities and towns across the country. Charges of conflict of interest (one of the first officers to the scene was related to the victims) and the withholding of evidence by the prosecution are also prominent features of this story. But what is probably the most outrageous part comes once Batiste gets a new lawyer to look into the case and they are made aware of the existence of the deceased’s gun: