By: ROBERT STEWART
Verite News
August 27, 2025

After 34 years, Lashona Duhe is getting ready for her father, Keith Ezidore, to come home.

An appeals court overturned Ezidore’s 1993 second-degree murder conviction earlier this summer. If Ezidore, who’s still jailed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, can get out on bail, it will be the first time that Duhe will see him free in over three decades. Getting ready for his return means fixing up a bedroom, buying him new clothes and gathering ingredients for his favorite meals.

“I’m basically ready to cater to him,” said Duhe, 50. “To be in his presence, to be able to hug him, to just be able to, you know, lay my head on his shoulder.”

But Duhe is guarding herself and her family against unbridled optimism. Prosecutors and the courts could still bar Ezidore’s release.

“I’m trying to tell myself, ‘don’t get too excited, because it’s not set in stone,’” Duhe said. “It’s not 100% yet, you know? It’s still a fight.”

Ezidore was sentenced to life in prison in 1993 for the stabbing death of a 56-year-old businessman named Ralph Flowers in St. James Parish. However, after decades of maintaining his innocence and seeking post-conviction relief from prison, Louisiana’s 5th Circuit Court of Appeal overturned Ezidore’s conviction and sentence in July. A month later, the same court denied the Louisiana Attorney General’s office’s arguments in favor of reinstating the conviction.