September 22, 2025
Kendall Harrison, now 31, continually maintained his innocence.
Kendall Harrison, a former high school quarterback at Edna Karr High School in New Orleans, has been acquitted of the murder of a Good Samaritan in 2012, a conviction that led to him being imprisoned for more than 13 years.
Harrison, now 31, continually maintained his innocence. He got the chance to prove it at a retrial earlier in September.
According to Fox 8, Harrison said that his first involvement in the case was after the police released a sketch of the alleged perpetrator that looked nothing like him. “No hair on the face, got a baseball cap on, but somebody called Crimestoppers and said that the sketch looked like me,” Harrison pointed out.
Harrison’s change of fortune happened when the State of Louisiana outlawed nonunanimous jury verdicts in 2018—a nonunanimous jury originally found Harrison guilty of the murder of Harry “Mike” Ainsworth—and he was awarded a retrial, seven years after his original conviction.
“Knowing that he’s sleeping every night inside of the cell and, every day I’m in a bed, it never was a good feeling,” Harrison’s father, Mike Willis, told the outlet.
Harrison, meanwhile, is still adjusting, as he told 4WWL News.
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“I’m still learning how to use my phone. That’s the hardest task for me right now, messing with this phone. I’ve been incarcerated over 5,000 days. That’s a lot of days. Five thousand days to be locked in a cell. It’s like you’ve been broken free of them chains. It’s a relief. I held my head up the entire time because I knew the God that I serve isn’t going to let me go out like that,” he told the outlet.
The lead attorney during his retrial, Scott Sherman, noted that the verdict was long overdue and that his client never should have been convicted in the first place, in part because the DNA evidence used in the case was faulty.
“From day one, we never did lay down and believe that he was guilty,” Willis said. “We have a broken system. Our tragedy, we don’t like it but maybe it had to happen for us to be the voice of the people today moving forward for the future to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted in an expansive report on the criminal justice system in Louisiana that its justice system is disproportionately harmful to Black people, in particular Black men.
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