ANGOLA, La. — A 62-year-old man is free for the first time in 42 years after always maintaining that he was innocent of the killing for which he’d been given a life sentence.

Elvis Brooks walked past the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s guard tower and razor wire Wednesday to greet the younger brother who is providing an apartment and a job for him.

Aaron Brooks put his arm around the shoulders of his older brother, who smiled broadly as the two walked over to a group from Innocence Project New Orleans. The organization has represented Elvis Brooks since 2002.

On Tuesday, he accepted a plea agreement offered by prosecutors: if he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery, he’d get a sentence that would let him leave prison.

After 42 years in prison, plea agreement bringing freedom

A New Orleans man who has spent two-thirds of his life in prison for a killing he always denied committing has pleaded guilty to manslaughter and will be released.

Elvis Brooks, 62, has maintained that he’s innocent since his arrest in July 1977, shortly before his 20th birthday.

“I wanted my freedom,” he told reporters Tuesday, after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the death of Cecil Lloyd and to three counts of armed robbery at New Orleans’ Welcome Inn bar. “I’ve been locked up since 1977. I’m not getting any younger.”

Brooks had been serving a life sentence for murder. But evidence that would have cleared him, including fingerprints that weren’t his on two beer cans that the robbers had held, was withheld at trial, according to attorneys from the Innocence Project New Orleans.

Shackled and wearing his orange Louisiana State Penitentiary jumpsuit, Brooks said prosecutors offered the plea bargain Thursday while he was with his lawyers preparing for a hearing on that claim.

“It was a shock to me,” Brooks said.

In court, Brooks swore that he was pleading guilty because he was guilty.

“It is deeply unfair that an innocent man would be forced to choose between entering a plea to secure his immediate freedom and waiting years more in prison to prove his innocence through litigation,” IPNO attorney Charrel Arnold said. She said some of the organization’s cases have taken decades to resolve.

As requested by prosecutors, Judge Byron Williams sentenced Brooks to 21 years — the maximum in 1977 — for manslaughter and 42 years on each count of armed robbery, all to run concurrently and with credit for time served.

Brooks probably will be released Wednesday, IPNO spokeswoman Cat Forrester said.

She said he will be living with and working for one of his brothers, a restaurant owner in Alexandria.

Forrester said her organization has created an online fund and Amazon wish list for Brooks, who cannot ask for compensation for wrongful incarceration.

Another brother, 64-year-old Gregory Brooks, who is retired, and his wife, Wanda Brooks, were in the courtroom Tuesday to show support for Brooks, and to represent the rest of his living siblings — two more brothers and five sisters. His parents and three other siblings are dead.

“I don’t believe he is innocent — I know he is,” Gregory Brooks said, stressing the verbs.

Donna Andrieu, head of the appellate division of the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, said, “I think the district attorney was showing some mercy.”

Although three white witnesses at the Welcome Inn identified Brooks as one of two armed robbers, IPNO said his trial attorney wasn’t informed that neither of two black victims of a nearby bar holdup 30 minutes earlier had done so.

One of the white witnesses, who opened the door to the gunmen, knew Brooks as a neighborhood resident, said Andrieu.

She said prosecutors weren’t acknowledging any defects in the case.

“We’re acknowledging he’s 62 years old and still has an opportunity for a life outside the penitentiary,” she said.

Wanda Brooks said it’s a disgrace that her brother-in-law spent 42 years in prison.

“We always knew he was innocent,” she said.

She also said Elvis Brooks “wasn’t an angel” before his arrest, and his record probably hurt him at trial, “although truth was on his side.”

The judge noted that, when arrested in 1977, Brooks was on parole after pleading guilty in 1974 to felony theft.

Wanda Brooks said her brother-in-law is looking forward to his first meal in freedom and, when she asked, told her he’d like grilled shrimp and French fries.

She said she asked, “Not fried shrimp?” and was told, “No, I’m a diabetic.”

After decades of maintaining innocence, Elvis Brooks to be freed under deal; ‘I wanted my freedom’

Elvis Brooks, 62, walks out of Angola Penitentiary for the first time in 42 years on Wednesday, October 16, 2019.

Innocence Project New Orleans social worker Angelique Thomas, right, helps Elvis Brooks, 62, of New Orleans, figure out his paperwork upon his release from Angola Penitentiary on Wednesday, October 16, 2019. Brooks spent 42 years of his life in prison.

The Orleans Parish criminal courthouse (Ken Daley, NOLA.com 

• A 62-year-old man who left New Orleans as a teenager for a life in prison on a murder conviction will be released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola under a deal offered last week by Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office.

Elvis Brooks has always insisted on his innocence, but he formally accepted the offer of freedom while sitting shackled Tuesday morning in an Orleans Parish courtroom. He agreed to a guilty plea and a limited prison term tailored to achieve his immediate release.

The magic number was 42 years — two-thirds of his life. Brooks’ attorney said it’s likely he will be released Wednesday.

Brooks later told reporters from an empty jury box that he was too old and too eager to leave Angola to reject an offer of freedom. That offer came as a shock when it was presented to him at the prison on Thursday.

Brooks had always maintained his innocence in the July 1, 1977, armed robbery at the Welcome Inn, a Lower 9th Ward bar. Cecil Lloyd, a customer, was killed in the fracas.

Photos: After 42 years at Angola, New Orleans native Elvis Brooks regains his freedom

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Elvis Brooks talks at Angola

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But Brooks didn’t hesitate as he pleaded guilty Tuesday to manslaughter and three counts of armed robbery before ad hoc Criminal District Court Judge Dennis Waldron.

“It’s something I (didn’t) want to do, but I wanted my freedom. I’ve been locked up since ’77. I’m not getting any younger. I’d like to get out,” he said later.

Brooks was jailed just shy of his 20th birthday for the robbery and killing, in which two men armed with sawed-off shotguns ordered two beers to go at closing time and then robbed the place.

His attorneys now describe it as a bogus cross-racial identification, saying three white witnesses got it wrong when they falsely fingered Brooks, who is black, as one of the robbers. The bar’s owner said she recognized the shooter and identified Brooks in a photo lineup. A jury convicted him in a capital trial, though it declined to hand him a death sentence.

Advocates with the Innocence Project New Orleans filed a petition early this year for a new hearing, saying they’d uncovered evidence that prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence from Brooks’ trial attorneys.

Among that evidence was a note from a prosecutor in the case regarding a fingerprint test that police apparently conducted on two Falstaff beer cans that the suspected robbers had left at the Welcome Inn.

The note indicated that the three partial fingerprints taken from the cans did not point to Brooks. Only later was it learned that a prosecutor had penned that note, signaling evidence withheld from the defense, said IPNO staff attorney Charell Arnold.

Brooks also claimed that police and prosecutors failed to disclose another key fact: that three victims had reported an armed robbery that happened around the corner less than an hour before the fatal bar heist, and they did not identify Brooks as the perpetrator of that crime.

The same two New Orleans police officers responded to both robberies. IPNO investigators found a mention of the earlier armed robbery years later in the police file on the Welcome Inn killing.

The Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office has come under fire over a long history of convictions that were later overturned due to failures by prosecutors to reveal potentially key evidence to the defense. Much of the criticism has focused on the three-decade tenure of former District Attorney Harry Connick, under whose watch Brooks was convicted.

Brooks’ capital trial took place just three months after his arrest and lasted a day, his attorneys said. The jury convicted him despite the testimony of a dozen alibi witnesses.

Assistant District Attorney Donna Andrieu, chief of the DA’s appeals division, said Cannizzaro’s office was not conceding Brooks’ innocence or his claim of receiving an unfair trial, though it offered the deal to Brooks on the eve of a post-conviction hearing scheduled for Tuesday.

“I think the DA was showing some mercy here,” Andrieu said. “He’s served a long time. We’re acknowledging he’s 62 years old and he has an opportunity for a life outside the penitentiary.”

In a statement Tuesday, Cannizzaro said he “ultimately concluded that Mr. Brooks was worthy of new sentencing consideration” and believed him to be rehabilitated. Still, Cannizzaro insisted that Brooks committed the robberies and murder, that his conviction and sentence were solid, and that his office “did nothing then or now to deprive this defendant of a fair trial.”

By agreeing to plead guilty, Brooks is forgoing a claim to state money under Louisiana’s Innocence Compensation Fund.

“Mr. Brooks never sought a plea agreement. It is deeply unfair that an innocent man would be forced to choose between entering a plea to secure his immediate freedom and waiting years more in prison to prove his innocence through litigation,” said Arnold, his attorney, in a statement. “This situation is particularly unfair given that the state has known about the new evidence presented in this case since 1977.”

Brooks, who said he first wrote to lawyers for the nonprofit advocacy group in 2002, has held several jobs at Angola, most recently working as a night orderly. Cannizzaro said his office “spoke with a warden who gave a very strong recommendation” for letting Brooks go free. 

Brooks, one of nine living siblings, plans to live with a brother in the Alexandria area.

Andrieu said attempts by the DA’s Office to reach family members of the victims of the bar robbery and killing were unsuccessful.