I Fought The Law: Meghan Shapiro, "Sentences"

During the second half of our July 2016 storytelling event, “I Fought The Law,” we featured stories from three attorneys who shared an insider’s perspective of our complex legal system. Our last storyteller of the evening, Meghan Shapiro, moved to Louisiana in 2013 to practice death penalty defense law in a place with greater need than most. From 2010 to 2014, more people were sentenced to death per capita in Caddo Parish than in any other parish or county in the United States. Meghan has almost exclusively represented poor individuals charged with capital crimes or sentenced to death, a cause to which she has been heavily devoted since her teens. This story is about her first death row client.