Prisoners Louisiana

Presumed innocent, they shuffle into the sooty, granite fortress on Tulane Avenue every morning, ankles shackled, hands chained to their hips. Every evening, at least a dozen leave Orleans Parish Criminal District Court as felons, an exodus of the desperate, foolish, heartless and addicted. In one courtroom, Donald Smith is slapped with a 30-month prison term after being caught stumbling in the shadow of the Superdome at 1 a.

Federal officials denied allegations that they reneged on a deal to let a prison hostage-taker fly to Cuba with his accomplices in an uprising at the St.

The State Department said Sunday that Cuba has agreed to take the Cuban detainees who surrendered peacefully after holding hostages at a jail for nearly a week.

The Cuban inmates who took a jail warden and six others hostage to demand release ended their six-day standoff Saturday night with an apparent agreement to be sent back to Cuba.

It sounded improbable. Questionable, even. An inmate rodeo at Louisiana's legendary Angola prison, with murderers, rapists and robbers as the bull riders and broncobusters? Intrigued, author Dan Bergner and his wife drove the 45 miles from their home in Baton Rouge to the prison, a sprawling plantation of cellblocks, outbuildings and farm fields tucked into an oxbow of the Mississippi River.

Shareef Cousin, who at 17 became the youngest person sent to death row in Louisiana, will not be retried on charges he murdered a man in a holdup outside a restaurant in New Orleans' French Quarter.

Behind the gray, forbidding walls of the Louisiana State Penitentiary here, Gary Tyler's 16-year-old dream lies undiminished: to be freed of a murder he says he never committed, a murder that put him on Death Row despite what many legal experts believe was a deeply flawed criminal investigation and trial.

This may be the last time around for Dalton Prejean. Ten times before he has been given a reprieve from execution. His 11th appointment with the electric chair is Friday morning in the isolated Louisiana prison of Angola, located on a bend in the Mississippi River to the north of the state capital of Baton Rouge.