Free Gary Tyler:
Thirty Years of Injustice
by Joe Allen
Joe Allen is the author of a three-part series on Vietnam, co-author
of "Leonard Peltier: Incident at Oglala Thirty Years On," (ISR
44, November–December 2005), and is a frequent contributor to the
ISR. The article is in the current issue of the September-October 2006
issue of the International Socialist Review.
GARY TYLER, at one time the youngest person on death row, turned forty-eight
years old this July. He has spent thirty-two of those years in jail for
a crime he did not commit. The case of Gary Tyler is one of the great
miscarriages of justice in the modern history of the United States, in
a country where the miscarriage of justice is part of the daily routine
of government business. "This case is just permeated with racism
all the way through it," declared Mary Howell, Gary's longtime attorney, "from
the initial event all the way up to the pardon process."
Yet, far too few people are aware of Gary Tyler's case, which in the
mid-1970s mobilized thousands across the country for his freedom and
led Amnesty International to declare him a political prisoner. Over the
last twenty years, hundreds of death row inmates and scores of others
have been exonerated for the crimes they were falsely convicted of by
racist and corrupt prosecutors. It's long past time that Gary Tyler should
have gone free.
In 1975, Gary Tyler, an African-American teenager, was wrongly convicted
by an all-white jury for the murder of Timothy Weber, a thirteen-year-old
white youth. Weber had been killed the previous year during an attack
by a racist white mob on a school bus filled with African-American high
school students in Destrehan, Louisiana. Tyler's trial was characterized
by coerced testimony, planted evidence, judicial misconduct, and an incompetent
defense. He was sentenced to death by electrocution at the age of seventeen.
On the first appeal of his conviction in1981, a federal appeals court
said that Tyler was "denied a fundamentally fair trial," but
refused to order a new one for him. During this same period, the Louisiana
death penalty was ruled unconstitutional. Gary Tyler's death sentence
was lifted and he was resentenced to life in prison. He is currently
incarcerated in Louisiana's infamous Angola prison.
Racism in the high schools
In 1974, the tensions created by the resistance
of whites to desegregation resulted in frequent clashes in which the
Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist organization, played a leading
role.
—Amnesty International
To understand the case of Gary Tyler, we must go back to a largely forgotten
episode in American politics—the battle over the desegregation
of public schools in the 1970s, and the eruption of racist violence that
occurred in reaction to it across the country. In 1954, the Supreme Court,
led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, ordered the desegregation of public
schools "with all deliberate speed." The ruling was seen as
a huge victory for the NAACP and those who advocated a legal strategy
for ending Jim Crow in the United States. However, white dominated, racist
local school boards in the South and the North (largely dominated by
the Democratic Party) were able to avoid implementing the court order
for years, if not decades. They did this through a variety of deceitful
methods that included, among other things, the use of busing to keep
schools segregated.
By the early to mid-seventies, the time had run out for most of these
local school boards, and the federal courts ordered them to come up with
plans to desegregate the schools. This almost always involved busing
Black schools kids from their largely Black neighborhoods into all-white
neighborhoods, where they often encountered racist mobs. In fact, some
of the most cowardly and despicable displays of racism ever captured
on film took place during this period of time. Boston was the worst example
of this, if only because the city had an undeserved "liberal" reputation.
When photos of the racist violence in Boston hit the front pages of newspapers
across the country and the footage was televised on the network news,
it shocked many people. White racist, mobs—led mostly by parents
and egged on by local Democratic Party leaders—attacked school
buses as they entered white neighborhoods with rocks and bottles. The
white mobs broke the windows of the buses and injured the terrified Black
school kids. The police, largely drawn from the same white neighborhoods,
stood by or dragged their feet and intervened too late to stop the violence.
Boston may have been the most famous example of the "battle over
busing," as the media called it, but it wasn't the only place where
racist violence occurred. The opposition to court ordered desegregation
spread across the country, particularly in such midsized cities as Detroit,
Michigan; Louisville, Kentucky; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Richmond,
California. Racist violence also spread to relatively isolated areas,
like Destrehan, Louisiana, where Gary Tyler was a student at the local
high school. The bigots tried to cloak their opposition to integration
by claiming that they were only opposed to "forced busing" and
were defending "neighborhood schools," but the open display
of Confederate flags and the racist filth spewed by politicians and "anti-busing" activists
revealed their real agenda. They were encouraged by unelected Republican
President Gerald Ford, who publicly supported them, and the Republican
establishment, which began to realize that busing, along with a host
of other issues, could be used to drive a wedge between the national
Democratic Party and urban, white voters. This political opportunity
was also not missed by Klan and neo-Nazi organizations, which recruited
members and organized openly. In Louisiana, David Duke—Grand Wizard
of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), who in his college years paraded
around in a Nazi uniform—placed himself at the center of the anti-busing
movement.
Plantation country
Coming back to the South, it was like taking me
out of the light and putting me into darkness
—Gary Tyler, 1990
Destrehan is located in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. It is part of
Louisiana's old plantation country that runs along the Mississippi River
between New Orleans and the state capitol Baton Rouge. While the plantations
are almost entirely gone, the elegant mansions built by slave labor remain
and are a major tourist attraction. "Plantation homes are to Louisiana
what the crown jewels are to England—each is a sparkling gem, in
an equally spellbinding setting, with a unique story attached," according
to one of Louisiana's tourist Web sites. "The unique story" referred
to is the Gone With the Wind version of history of the plantation South
commonly found in the former states of the Confederacy. What's missing
from this unique story is the tyranny and misery of slavery and Jim Crow,
and the persistence of racism that continues to dominate the lives of
its Black residents to this very day. Oil replaced agriculture as the
master of the Louisiana economy long ago. For the past seventy years,
the economy of St. Charles and the other surrounding parishes has been
dominated by the petrochemical industry, whose smokestacks and storage
bins dot the landscape. Many oil refineries were built on or adjacent
to the old plantations. Though a fabulously profitable industry, it has
provided very little employment over the decades for Blacks or whites
in the region.
Gary Tyler was born in New Orleans in 1958. In 1970, the Tyler family
moved to St. Rose, about twenty miles upriver from New Orleans. Destrehan
is a short five miles further north. His mother Juanita Tyler, worked
as a domestic servant, and her husband Uylos, a maintenance man who held
down three jobs simultaneously, worked to support a family of eleven
kids. When he was twelve years old, Gary left Louisiana to live with
his sister Ella in the Watts section of Los Angeles, now better known
as South-Central. "There," according to journalist Amy Singer, "he
was exposed to people and ideas that hadn't made their way to St. Rose:
the Black Panthers; activist Angela Davis; the antiwar movement. Tyler
attended rallies and began to develop a political awareness."
Gary returned to Louisiana two years later, in 1972, and was not at
all happy about it. "Coming back to the South, it was like taking
me out of the light and putting me into darkness," Gary lamented
many years later. Living in Los Angeles at the height of the Black Power
and antiwar movements was clearly exciting and interesting compared to
living in an isolated area of the country like St. Charles Parish. The "darkness"—we
can infer—was the grinding poverty and suffocating racism of small
town Louisiana life. This is when his scrapes with the law began. Gary
was arrested twice for burglary (one he says he's guilty of and another
he says he didn't do) and spent seven months in a juvenile institution.
He was also considered something of a radical; intelligent and outspoken,
and someone who demanded respect from persons in authority. Gary Tyler,
in short, was the type of young Black person that cops, particularly
white cops in small Southern towns, really despise; a police officer
years later would refer to him as a "smart nigger."
Bus 91
They were on the attack, man. It was panic.
—Terry Tyler, Gary's brother
When the crisis came at Destrehan High School, Gary Tyler already loomed
large in the minds of key members of the local sheriff's department as
a "troublemaker"; but the chain of events that led to his arrest
and persecution began years before October 1974.
The school authorities in Destrehan strongly resisted the pressure for
school integration during the 1960s. The federal courts ultimately ordered
the Destrehan authorities to begin desegregating their schools in 1968.
That, however, didn't put an end to the deeply ingrained racism of the
white residents or their resistance to school integration. Racist violence
continued for many years and appears to have escalated during 1974. According
to Amnesty International, "In 1974, the tensions created by the
resistance of whites to desegregation resulted in frequent clashes in
which the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist organization, played a
leading role." The Friday night football games became a scene of
frequent fights between the white and Black students of Destrehan High
school. On the evening of October 4, one such fight broke out between
Black and white students at the football game. The fight didn't end that
night. When Destrehan High School opened the following Monday (October
7), lunchtime fights between Blacks and whites continued, and several
people including a teacher were stabbed. Later at Gary's trial, Major
Charles Faucheux of the Destrehan Sheriff's Department testified that
he watched as "one of the Black students…ran to the highway
and probably about fifty white students chased after him." The
principal ordered Destehan High School closed and the Black students
evacuated.
Gary Tyler, who was a sophomore at the time, was suspended by the school's
assistant principal that morning, though he says that he wasn't involved
in the fighting, and was sent home. Fatefully for Gary, he was picked
up while hitchhiking home by Destrehan Deputy Sheriff V.J. St. Pierre
(who also happened to be Timothy Weber's cousin), who searched him, found
nothing, and took him back to Destrehan High just as Black students were
being evacuated from campus. Gary hopped on to Bus 91, along with sixty-five
other Black students, as it began to pull out of campus. Bus 91 was immediately
besieged by a white mob of 200 students (and by some accounts, non-students
and parents) throwing rocks, bottles, and screaming racist epithets.
Gary's brother Terry, who was also on Bus 91, described the terrifying
scene years later to journalist Adam Nossiter. "They were on the
attack, man. It was panic," Terry said. It was as if "you be
out on a boat, and the boat's sinking." Suddenly, one student on
the bus looked out the window and screamed, "Look at that white
boy with that gun." Seconds later the Black students hit the floor
of the bus after hearing a popping sound, believing that someone was
shooting at them. Outside the bus Timothy Weber fell to the ground wounded.
Deputy St. Pierre rushed him to the hospital, where he later died from
a gunshot wound.
The police stopped the bus, according to Patricia Files, another Black
student, stormed onto it, and went on a "rampage." They "started
treating us like animals." Then the police ordered all the Black
students off the bus and searched them. It should be emphasized that
no one from the white mob was stopped or searched by the police for weapons.
Police searched all the Black students on the bus and didn't find a gun.
Three deputies searched the bus several times and, again, no gun was
found. Then one of the sheriff's deputies began to harass Gary Tyler's
cousin Ike Randall about why he was wearing a .22-caliber bullet on a
chain. Gary said that there wasn't anything wrong with that, and was
arrested for "disturbing the peace." He was placed in a police
car and taken to the local substation of the St. Charles Parish Sheriff's
Department. Despite the fact that no gun was found on any Black student
riding on Bus 91, and no weapon was found on the bus, all of the Black
students were loaded back onto the bus and taken to the same sheriff's
substation. This was the beginning of Gary Tyler's long nightmare. Within
days of the death of Timothy Weber, a young David Duke, a rising star
in Klan and neo-Nazi politics in the United States, arrived in Destrehan
with what he called "security teams" to protect the white residents
from "black savages" and "murderers." He also laid
a wreath at a memorial for Timothy Weber. This was the beginning of David
Duke's sometimes peripheral but always nefarious role in the persecution
of Gary Tyler.
A legal lynching
The system worked fine. This is the prototypical
Southern legal lynching.
—Mary Howell
Soon after arriving in the police station, the threats and the beatings
began. According to Gary, St. Pierre returned to the police station and
screamed, "I'm getting the motherfucker that did it." A deputy
handed St. Pierre a blackjack and he started beating Gary while another
deputy joined in and began repeatedly kicking Gary in the back and legs.
They kept beating him and asking him who killed Weber. Gary told them
he didn't know. Yet, St. Pierre kept at it, "Nigger, you're going
to tell me something." Another sheriff's deputy entered the room
and warned them that people downstairs could hear Gary's screams. One
of those people was Gary's mother, Juanita, who came to the station after
hearing about the terrifying events at the high school and learning that
her sons had been taken there. After all the other students had been
released except Gary, she went into the station to look for him. "I
could hear the sounds of the beatings," she recounted in a 1990
interview. "It was like a smothered holler. The sounds of a person
hollering. Sounds of licks. Bam, pow." When she saw Gary later,
the aftereffects of the beatings were clear. "He was just trembling."
The cops weren't able to beat a confession out of Gary, but others began
to crack under pressure. The first was Natalie Blanks. She would eventually
become the key prosecution witness against Gary. She was also his unhappy
ex-girlfriend. Gary's arrest for murder was based on her statements to
the police. Blanks was a young woman with a lot of emotional problems
who had been undergoing treatment at a local mental health clinic for
several years. She also had a history of making false police reports,
including one that she was kidnapped, a claim that was investigated by
none other than Deputy Sheriff St. Pierre.
Another Black student on Bus 91 got a visit from the police that night.
Larry Dabney shared the same bus seat with Gary Tyler. "It was the
scariest thing that ever happened to me," he said in his affidavit. "They
didn't even ask me what I saw. They told me flat out that I was going
to be their witness. They started telling me what my statement was going
to be. They told me I was going to testify that I saw Gary with a gun
right after I heard the shot, and that a few minutes later hide it in
a slit in the seat. That was not true. I didn't see Gary or anybody else
in that bus with a gun."
Where did the gun that police claimed killed Timothy Weber come from?
How did they find it? After all, the police searched the bus for three
hours after the shooting and found nothing. Natalie Banks identified
where Gary was sitting and the police removed the seat from the bus and,
again, found nothing. Later, the police said they "discovered" the
gun—a .45 caliber automatic—stuffed inside the seat that
Gary was sitting on. According to Amy Singer, "A photograph of the
seat taken before they removed the gun shows an obvious bulge." The
gun had no fingerprints on it and was later identified as stolen from
a firing range that was used by St Charles Parish Sheriff's deputies.
What tied Gary to the gun? Gary wore gloves to school that day and they
were confiscated by the police after his arrest and sent to the Southeastern
Louisiana Regional Criminalistics Laboratory for testing. The gloves
were apparently misplaced for several weeks before the head of the lab,
Herman Parrish, finally claimed that he tested them and found gunpowder
residue on them. No independent testing was done because all the alleged
residue was used up by Parrish. In 1976, Parrish resigned from his position
at the crime lab after he was accused of lying about test results in
another case. The bullet that police claimed killed Timothy Weber was
never even tested to see if it ever passed through a human body. Everything
points to the likelihood that the police fabricated the gun evidence
against Gary Tyler.
Planted evidence, coerced testimony, and faked test results; all that
was needed was a compliant judge and jury, and the prosecutors certainly
got them. The presiding judge at Gary's trial was Judge Ruche Marino,
who was identified by some press accounts of the time as being a former
member of the White Citizens Council of Louisiana. In a region that is
25 percent African American, the trial impaneled an all-white jury. Gary
Tyler's inept defense attorney, Jack Williams, gave incalculable help
to the prosecution. His total pretrial preparation consisted of meeting
Gary once or twice and reading the grand jury transcripts. But this was
only the beginning of his blunders and missteps; his general incompetence
would plague Gary for years to come.
Judge Marino was consistently biased in favor of the prosecution. He
even instructed the jury that they could presume Gary guilty before their
deliberations. Gary's trial lasted five days and the jury deliberation
three hours before he was found guilty of first-degree murder, in November
1975. Under Louisiana law at the time, this was an automatic death sentence.
His date of execution was set for May 1, 1976. At seventeen, he was the
youngest person on death row in the United States.
Free Gary Tyler
Amnesty International believes that Gary Tyler was
denied a fair trial and that racial prejudice played a major part in
his prosecution. The racial and political context in which the offence
and prosecution took place brings the case under Article 1(b) of Amnesty
International's statute, by which the organization seeks a fair trial
for political prisoners.
—Amnesty International, 1994
Soon after Gary's arrest, the Tyler family, led by his mother Juanita,
threw themselves into organizing a campaign to stop his legal lynching.
They received the crucial help of veteran Louisiana Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activist and draft resister Walter Collins,
who helped set up a New Orleans-based Gary Tyler Defense Committee. Collins
and the Tyler family concentrated on getting Gary's supporters to fill
the court room during the trial, not only to show the judge and prosecutor
community support for Gary but also to counter the influence of the KKK,
who rallied outside for Gary's conviction. After an execution date was
set for Gary, there was an urgent need to turn the Free Gary Tyler Campaign
into a national effort. The campaign got a boost when Natalie Blanks
recanted her testimony, charging that the police had coerced her into
falsely testifying. Gary's new attorney, Jack Peebles, petitioned the
court for a hearing to allow for the new evidence to be heard. Unfortunately,
this meant going back to the very same Judge Ruche Marino. True to form,
Marino ignored Blanks' recantation and allowed Gary's conviction to stand.
However, Blanks' bombshell revelations, along with the obvious irregularities
of the trial, provided more than enough of a basis for a national campaign,
despite the fact that the national media mostly ignored the Tyler case.
The New York Times, for example, ran its first article on the Tyler case
in late March 1976, six weeks before his scheduled execution. One of
the groups that most enthusiastically took up Gary's case was the Red
Tide, the youth group of the International Socialists. The Red Tide was
a racially mixed, socialist organization that organized around high schools
in Detroit, a city experiencing the same kind of violent opposition to
school integration that had resulted in the persecution of Gary Tyler.
For many of the Red Tiders, Gary Tyler became a deeply personal symbol
of political persecution. In late April 1976, Gary's lawyers won him
his first victory. His execution was postponed, pending the outcome of
his appeals in the Louisiana state courts. Meanwhile, Free Gary Tyler
committees were being formed across the country. Juanita Tyler and Walter
Collins spoke before a packed meeting of 350 people on June 13, 1976,
demanding Gary's freedom in Detroit. The late civil rights activist Rosa
Parks was the main speaker and campaigned on Gary's behalf. She was later
joined by Reuben "Hurricane" Carter, the former boxing champion
who spent a decade in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The campaign
to free Gary peaked during the latter half of 1976, when over 1,500 marched
through New Orleans on July 24, and in November, when petitions with
more than 92,000 signatures demanding Gary's freedom were delivered to
Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards. Even the American Federation of Teachers,
which had a very mixed record on the issue of racism in the public schools,
passed a resolution in support of Gary Tyler. In July 1976, while Gary's
state court appeals were still pending, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
that the Louisiana death penalty was unconstitutional. Gary, along with
everyone else on Louisiana's death row, was spared.
While all of this was going on, Gary's tormentors turned their attention
to harassing members of the Tyler family and campaign supporters. Gary's
mother and father were fired from their jobs. On March 26, 1976, white "nightriders" (Klan
supporters if not outright Klansmen) shot and killed Richard Dunn, a
young Black man returning from a fundraising dance for Gary Tyler at
Southern University in New Orleans. (The gunman was later captured and
served ten years in prison.) Klansmen in full-dress uniforms drove openly
through the Tylers' hometown of St. Rose, while others, out of uniform,
stalked members the Tyler family around their community. While there
is no hard evidence that David Duke directed these activities, one cannot
help but notice that these activities bore a striking resemblance to
the "security" measures that he was calling for at the time.
Gary's brother Terry and Donald Files, an important defense witness,
were arrested on charges of burglary. The alleged burglary happened while
Terry was in Detroit speaking on his brother's behalf at a public rally
on May 16, 1976. Judge Marino set a $5,000 bond for each. In June 1976,
Marino once again held another of Gary's brothers, Steven, on $2,700
bond for a charge of "disturbing the police." On January 27,
1977, the police invaded Mrs. Tyler's home at gunpoint, arrested one
of her son's for robbery, and released him later without charging him.
Despite the constant harassment and death threats, the Tyler family and
the campaign persevered. Even at his high school, Gary's classmates (both
Black and white) organized the Gary Tyler Freedom Fighters.
The year 1977 was an important turning point in Gary's case—unfortunately
for the worse. On January 24, 1977, the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld
Gary's conviction. Short of a major breakthrough in the case, Gary was
looking at years in prison. During the course of the year, the national
campaign began to wane. Once the death sentence was lifted from Gary's
head, it became difficult to sustain the campaign. The initial urgency
to save him from the electric chair was gone, and the campaign was ill
prepared for what was going to be a long effort after the Louisiana Supreme
Court upheld his conviction. This was exacerbated by the decline of the
Left in the United States, in particular, the two organizations whose
members had been the most committed to Gary's campaign across the country.
Gary's lawyer, Jack Peebles, continued the legal fight, filing a petition
in 1978 for "biased instruction" by Judge Marino during Gary's
trial with the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In 1980,
the court ruled in Gary's favor. It seemed that finally Gary would get
some justice. However, the prosecutors appealed the decision. They were
again helped by Gary's first lawyer Jack Williams, who couldn't remember
why he hadn't objected to Marino's biased instructions at the trial.
As a result the court didn't order a new trial. "It is a shocking
thing there is someone in prison in this country for whom the courts
have said, ‘Your trial was fundamentally unfair, you've been denied
the presumption of innocence, but we won't give you a fair trial because
your lawyer can't remember why he didn't object,'" Mary Howell declared
in 1987. Since the late 1980s, Gary has made several efforts to get paroled,
but in each case they fell victim to Louisiana's racial politics. The
most serious effort came in 1989–90, when the pardon board voted
3 to 2 to recommend that Gary's sentence be commuted from life to sixty
years, with eligibility for parole after serving twenty years. This was
forwarded to then Democratic Louisiana Buddy Roemer, who rejected the
pardon board's recommendations. Facing a serious fight for the governor's
office from David Duke—Klansman now turned Republican, who garnered
hundreds of thousands of votes in his campaigns for Louisiana governor
and U.S. senator on a thinly disguised racist program—Roemer didn't
want to be outflanked on the right.
The most serious effort came in 1989–90, when the pardon board
voted 3 to 2 to recommend that Gary's sentence be commuted from life
to sixty years, with eligibility for parole after serving twenty years.
This was forwarded to then Louisiana governor, Democrat Buddy Roemer,
who rejected the pardon board's recommendations despite receiving petitions
with 12,000 signatures calling for Gary's pardon . Why did Roemer reject
a pardon for Gary? One can speculate that Roemer expected to face David
Duke in his upcoming bid for reelection in 1991—Klansman turned
Republican, who garnered hundreds of thousands of votes in his 1990 campaign
for U.S. senator on an openly racist program. Despite his effort to outflank
Duke, Roemer was easily defeated in a three-way race. Duke would later
be defeated by the notoriously corrupt Democratic candidate and former
governor, Edwin Edwards.
Three decades on
I emphatically and unequivocally maintain my innocence
as I did in 1974 and hope that one day justice will eventually prevail
in this matter.
—Gary Tyler
I just wish for the day he could be home. It's been
so long.
—Juanita Tyler, Gary's mother, May
24, 2006
For the past three decades, Gary Tyler has been incarcerated at the
Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The 18,000-acre penitentiary,
nick-named "the farm," is the largest maximum security prison
in the country, housing 5,000 men. The Angola prison population is 75
percent Black, and 85 percent of those sentenced there will probably
die there. Angola is built on a former slave plantation and has been
running continuously since the end of the Civil War. Along with other
infamous prisons in the South (like Mississippi's Parchman Farm), "it
is hard not to see…the entire penal system simply as revenge against
Blacks for the South's defeat in the Civil War." Even to this day,
slavery casts a long shadow over the Southern penal system, especially
Louisiana's. Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the country.
For every 100,000 residents of the state, 816 are sentenced prisoners.
Blacks make up 32 percent of Louisiana's population, but they constitute
72 percent of the state's prison population. While the life of prisoners
inside of Angola is little better than slavery. Gary, for example, spent
many years in solitary confinement because he refused to pick cotton
for 3 cents an hour.
How is it possible that, given all the evidence of his innocence and
the blatantly racist nature of his frame-up, Gary Tyler is still in prison?
Gary's case takes us straight into the heart of darkness of the Louisiana
criminal justice system. Powerful political forces have conspired to
keep him behind bars. Both racism and political persecution have played
their part. In 1990, the Louisiana attorney general argued against a
pardon for Tyler, because he has "demanded that he be allowed to
correspond with socialist and communist publications like the Socialist
Worker." Gary Tyler is a political prisoner and nothing less than
a serious fight by those who are outraged and want to support him will
win Gary his freedom.
There has been a great reversal in the rights of death row prisoners.
According to author David Lindorf
The Supreme Court, and the Clinton administration's 1995
Effective Death Penalty Act have combined to make it almost impossible
to appeal cases based upon new evidence. Any appellate defense lawyer
will tell you that in both capital and non-capital cases, the highest
court, and the appeals courts, too, generally only will grant new trials
where there has been a procedural error. They don't give a damn about
new evidence, recanted witnesses, etc. Those kinds of things, that actually
prove innocence or corrupted trials, have to be beyond overwhelming to
win a new trial.
The draconian character of the legal system in capital cases has only
gotten more pronounced since the so-called war on terror under George
W. Bush.
Yet the last decade has also seen a sea change in public attitudes towards
the criminal justice system. Hundreds of innocent people have been released
from prison, after it was shown that they were innocent or received unfair
trials. But far too many remain in prison. "Don't forget about Gary
Tyler because there are thousands more like him," declared Terry
Tyler, Gary's older brother. Hurricane Katrina has ripped the mask off
of racism and class oppression in this country generally, and in Louisiana
in particular. While the tens of thousands of mostly Black, working class
and poor residents of New Orleans fight to return to their homes and
rebuild their shattered lives, they will continue to be confronted by
the forces of racism and class oppression that seek to turn the city
into a jazz and blues version of Disneyland. Louisiana's already racist
and corrupt judicial system will be increasingly put at the disposal
of creating this "new" New Orleans. In all of these upcoming
battles, the fight to free Gary Tyler should be part of them. Gary Tyler
should not be forgotten.
Thanks to Larry Bradshaw, Paul D'Amato, Michael
Letwin, David Lindorff,
and the Tyler family for their help in writing this article. This article originally appeared in the September / October
2006 issue of International Socialist Review |