Clarification

Two weeks ago, News of the Weird reported that all "appeals" by defendants without lawyers in one Louisiana state circuit had been automatically dismissed, for 13 years, without a judge's ever reading them. Uniquely, Louisiana has two ways for a defendant to seek to overturn a conviction: a "supervisory writ" and an "appeal." The treatment referred to in the News of the Weird story involved all 2,400 "supervisory writs." No accusation was made about how the Louisiana circuit's judges handled "appeals" that were not "supervisory writs."