An award-winning journalist, Kerry’s path began as a communication and journalism major at LSU and Nicholls State University where he cut his teeth in both print and radio news. He began working with Parole Project in 2017 as a volunteer to assist with media relations. He joined the staff as communications director in January 2018 and was named deputy director in July of that year.
Kerry was chosen as a Represent Justice Ambassador in 2019. The national organization turns stories of hope and redemption into action for justice reform. Kerry continues to produce as a freelance journalist. In 2019, he was a contributing author on “The Meaning of Life,” a book about the nation’s overuse of life without parole sentences.
In April 1990, Kerry was sentenced to life in prison for a crime he, his family, the victim’s family, and the investigating detective maintained he did not commit. Three days before Christmas 2016, Governor John Bel Edwards signed his commutation recommendation and Kerry was immediately released.
Five years into his incarceration he was hired as a staff writer for the nationally-acclaimed Angolite magazine and was named editor in 2001. Under his direction, the magazine’s reporting on the death penalty earned national recognition with the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award in 2007. In 2011, Kerry won the PASS Award for Journalism (now called the Media for a Just Society Award) from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency for the magazine’s coverage of juvenile life without parole sentences. The magazine also won three APEX Awards of Excellence for Magazine and Journal Writing and was a finalist for several other national journalism awards. Kerry’s 2011-2012 three-part series on the history of women in the Louisiana penal system received critical acclaim. Taking on subjects like human trafficking; aging, Alzheimer’s and dementia in prison; sentencing; pardons and parole policy; and more, the magazine became a resource for many top criminal justice and law programs in the country.