Promise of Justice Initiative

The Promise of Justice Initiative is a New Orleans nonprofit law firm founded in 2012 that works inside Louisiana’s criminal legal system — freeing wrongfully convicted people, fighting the death penalty, and representing more than a thousand people convicted by non-unanimous juries. (Promise of Justice Initiative)

A nonprofit founded in 2012

PJI describes itself as a nonprofit organization “working to create positive change for people in the criminal legal system,” with its office at 1024 Elysian Fields in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Promise of Justice Initiative) It marked its tenth year with an anniversary event on Saturday, November 12, 2022, at which founding board member Andrea Armstrong served as emcee. (Promise of Justice Initiative) There, PJI honored Mercedes Montagnes — an integral part of the organization since its 2012 inception — as its outgoing executive director; former executive director Sarah Ottinger and founding board member Judge Calvin Johnson were also part of the evening. (Promise of Justice Initiative) The organization’s current site names Samantha Kennedy as executive director. (Promise of Justice Initiative)

The Corey Williams case: a partnership with the MacArthur Justice Center

PJI’s most documented victory is the release of Corey Williams, secured by Amir Ali and his team at the MacArthur Justice Center “in partnership with the Promise of Justice Initiative.” (Take Care) Williams was an intellectually disabled teenager, three weeks past his 16th birthday, when he was arrested in Shreveport in 1998 for the murder of a pizza deliveryman — a young man so disabled he had suffered severe lead poisoning and was known in his community as a “chump” who would take the blame for things he did not do. (Equal Justice Initiative; Take Care)

Questioned through the night, Williams gave the police a confession — oblivious to its significance, he told the officers he was “ready to go home and lay down” — and that confession carried the case. (Take Care) There was no physical evidence against him, and three other suspects had been identified: fingerprints on the murder weapon, the victim’s blood on clothing, and pizzas and the victim’s money found in a dumpster near the suspects’ house. (Death Penalty Information Center; Equal Justice Initiative) Prosecutors suppressed evidence — including recordings of witness interviews — and used one of the older suspects, Chris Moore, as their only witness against Williams. (Death Penalty Information Center)

Williams was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. His death sentence was vacated about six years later, after the Supreme Court barred the execution of intellectually disabled people in Atkins v. Virginia (2002). (Death Penalty Information Center) But the conviction stood for two more decades in Caddo Parish, where district attorneys Hugo Holland and his successor Dale Cox were responsible for 75% of Louisiana’s death sentences between 2010 and 2015; Holland was later investigated for withholding evidence and forced to resign. (Death Penalty Information Center; Equal Justice Initiative)

The turning point came with a cert petition filed in March 2018, led by Amir Ali, and a remarkable amicus brief from 44 former state and federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials — including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey — urging the courts to grant Williams a new trial. (Death Penalty Information Center; Equal Justice Initiative) Rather than defend his predecessors’ decisions, District Attorney James Stewart agreed to release Williams in exchange for a guilty plea to lesser offenses. (Death Penalty Information Center; Equal Justice Initiative) Williams walked free on May 22, 2018, after more than 20 years in prison, pleading guilty to manslaughter and obstruction of justice. (Death Penalty Information Center) The deal came at a real cost: because he pleaded guilty to crimes tied to the offense, Williams was left ineligible for state compensation for his wrongful conviction. (Take Care)

Jim Crow juries: from Ramos to 1,049 clients

PJI was “one of the counsel for Mr. Evangelisto Ramos in the U.S. Supreme Court.” (Promise of Justice Initiative) On April 20, 2020, the Court decided Ramos v. Louisiana, holding that Louisiana and Oregon had been convicting people with split jury verdicts in violation of the Constitution — and that Louisiana’s law was a Jim Crow law designed to silence the voices of Black jurors and convict more Black people. (Promise of Justice Initiative)

Since that decision, the small law office has partnered with more than 750 lawyers “from Seattle to Singapore” to represent 1,049 men and women who remained in prison on unconstitutional non-unanimous-jury convictions. (Promise of Justice Initiative) Two years to the day after Ramos, the Louisiana Supreme Court was set to hear argument in Reddick v. Louisiana on the fate of 1,500 people still incarcerated with Jim Crow jury convictions. (Promise of Justice Initiative)

Abolition work: Crawford, clemency, and the numbers

PJI’s stated mission is the abolition of the death penalty, which it frames as “a legal racist relic of the lynching that terrorized Black people in the south throughout the 19th and 20th century.” (Promise of Justice Initiative) It uses multipronged tactics — advocating repeal, taking legal action to stop executions that are likely to be scheduled, and supporting the families of people on death row and families harmed by violence. (Promise of Justice Initiative)

An early test of that work was Rodricus Crawford’s case. Crawford was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death after his one-year-old son, Roderius, died in 2012 — the boy had been suffering from pneumonia, and bacteria in his blood indicated the death was due to sepsis. (Promise of Justice Initiative) After more evidence called the prosecution’s case into serious question, the Louisiana Supreme Court reversed Crawford’s conviction on November 16, 2016, following lead counsel Cecelia Kappel’s oral argument. (Promise of Justice Initiative) The Caddo Parish District Attorney’s Office then announced it would not retry Crawford, and PJI’s release — quoting associate counsel Ben Cohen — framed the case as one “about injustice and the disproportionate use of the death penalty in Caddo Parish.” (Promise of Justice Initiative)

In June 2023, PJI led a coalition supporting a mass clemency effort: 56 of the 57 people on Louisiana’s death row filed petitions asking then-Governor John Bel Edwards and the Board of Pardons to commute their death sentences to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. (Promise of Justice Initiative) The effort was defeated by an alliance of state officials and outside lobbying forces, but PJI says the project “forced a wide-reaching conversation on the death penalty in Louisiana,” drawing in victims, survivors, faith leaders, and death-row exonerees. (Promise of Justice Initiative)

The data PJI cites to justify that fight is stark: Louisiana, it says, leads the nation in death-row exonerations, with over 80% of death sentences since 1976 reversed on appeal and nine people exonerated following wrongful capital convictions since 1999. (Promise of Justice Initiative) It reports that 42 of the 57 people under a death sentence are people of color, including 38 Black people, in a state whose population is only 33% Black. (Promise of Justice Initiative)

The fight has grown more urgent. PJI’s attorneys and co-counsel had led the court fight in Hoffman v. Jindal that prevented Louisiana from executing anyone from 2012 until the case was dismissed in 2022, but a federal judge reopened it in February 2025 — and March 2025 marked the first execution in Louisiana in 15 years, with Jessie Hoffman gassed to death at Angola prison. (Promise of Justice Initiative) The state had added nitrogen gassing as an execution method in an early-2024 special legislative session. (Promise of Justice Initiative)

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim PJI’s 501(c)(3) tax status or identification numbers, which were not verified. It does not repeat the “largest post-conviction-relief campaign in Louisiana history” framing from a PJI announcement page whose exact URL could not be recovered this session, using instead the verified figure of 1,049 represented people. It does not assert that the Elysian Fields address is current beyond the dated pages that carry it, and it names no single founder, since no source verified one. The death-penalty statistics are PJI’s own reported figures, presented as such, and the profile makes no claim about the outcome of Reddick v. Louisiana beyond the scheduled May 2022 argument.