In Louisiana, a parole board has set an October hearing for Fair Wayne Bryant, a 62-year-old Black man who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1997 theft of hedge clippers. Earlier this month, five white members of Louisiana’s Supreme Court upheld the sentence, saying it was permitted by a Louisiana “habitual offender law.” In a scathing dissent, the court’s only Black member, Chief Justice Bernette Johnson, blasted mandatory minimum sentences under the law as a “modern manifestation” of segregationist legislation passed after the Civil War.