Glenn Ford left the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La., in 2014. His conviction in a murder case was vacated after he spent 30 years in jail and on death row. (Associated Press)

District attorney races are often fiercely competitive.

For starters, the candidates are lawyers, temperamentally inclined enjoy a good bout of non-lethal combat. And chief prosecutor jobs (most of which are elected) don’t come open all that often. That’s part of the reason that, in major metropolises and tiny rural hamlets alike, the DA’s name is often one that a lot of people know.

But in Caddo Parish, La. (population: 253,00, biggest city: Shreveport), there is a district attorney’s race that seems utterly suited for something straight out of a Jim Crow period piece about justice, bias and Southern politics. And although this might sound like an oxymoron, this could also be a relatively gripping story about campaign finance.

What’s happening in Caddo centers around Glen Ford, a black man convicted of murder, sentenced to die then locked away in solitary confinement for 30 years before a court declared him innocent and set him free. There would have to be a mention of the fact that the until-recently predominantly white Caddo sentences more people to death, per capita, than any other place in the country. And 77 percent of those who have been so condemned over the last 40 years were black.

Any retelling would spend some time — probably too much time if produced by Hollywood — on a white and deeply apologetic junior prosecutor who now admits, decades later, that ambition and narcissism helped produce a horrific miscarriage of justice. He also staked the jury with white members and knocked blacks out of contention. He has asked the state bar for punishment.

One of the remaining central characters would have to be Dale Cox, Caddo’s interim DA, appointed after the parish’s elected prosecutor was discovered dead in a Shreveport hotel room. (No foul play is suspected.) Cox, who is white and in possession of a central-casting kind of Southern drawl and an affinity for the death penalty, is resolute that Ford’s case does not indicate a single ill in Caddo Parish.

Cox believes the state owes Ford nothing. Nothing at all. To hear Cox tell it, nothing illegal happened. Nothing immoral happened. In fact, the system worked. Cox doesn’t know why that junior prosecutor has even apologized. Louisiana should, according to Cox, execute more people. And hey, at least Ford made it out of prison alive.

This is all precisely what Cox has said publicly, most recently on last weekend’s “60 Minutes.”

But Cox has already (i.e. before “60 Minutes” but shortly after the New York Times ran a story titled, “The Prosecutor Who Says Louisiana Should ‘Kill More People’“) bowed out of a special election scheduled for Oct. 24. So six people are seeking Caddo’s DA seat.

Hungarian-American financier George Soros looks on during a session at the World Economic Forum annual meeting on January 27, 2011 in Davos, Switzerland. (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)