How race shaped the South’s punitive approach to justice
Champ Napier is the exception.
From his birth in Prichard, Alabama, the third-poorest city in America, he faced an uphill climb just to stay out of poverty and prison. Mr. Napier remembers the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses on his schoolyard, white residents yelling obscenities at his school bus. The site of the last recorded lynching in 1981 is in nearby Mobile.
As a teen, he quit high school to sell drugs, thinking it was the fastest way out of poverty. When a drug deal went wrong, he shot a man six times. At 18, he was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder.
But 15 years inside Alabama prisons bred a determination to find a new path. And in 2015, more than 10 years after his parole, he became the first-ever Alabamian convicted of murder to receive a complete pardon. Now he works as a client advocate for the Mobile County Public Defender’s
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