Vol. 80/No. 21      May 30, 2016

 

Gary Tyler, framed up in 1974, walks free from Louisiana prison

 
Gary Tyler, 57, walked free April 29 after almost 42 years locked up in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. He had spent his first nine years in solitary confinement, initially on death row.

At age 16, Tyler was framed up on charges of killing a Caucasian youth during a racist attack on a busload of Black high school students who were part of a desegregation program in Destrehan, Louisiana.

As the bus carrying Tyler and other Black students attempted to leave school on Oct. 7, 1974, it was surrounded by a brick-and-bottle throwing mob. A shot rang out. Timothy Weber, 13, standing across the schoolyard with his mother, was fatally shot.

The police searched the students and the bus for more than three hours. When Tyler protested the cop harassment, he was arrested for “disturbing the peace.” When he refused to confess to killing Weber, he was beaten by the cops.

The police coerced testimony against Tyler from fellow students, who later recanted. Police eventually located a gun in Tyler’s seat, despite having found nothing during the first search. The gun had been stolen from a police firing range used by the very cops who arrested Tyler and were investigating the case. No fingerprints were found on it, nor was any testing done on the bullet.

Tyler was convicted of murder by an all-white jury in 1975 and sentenced to death. At 17, he was the youngest person on death row in the United States. Over decades, Tyler unequivocally maintained his innocence. His mother, Juanita Tyler, helped lead campaigns for his freedom that won support around the world, up to her death in 2012.

“There’s a lot of space in between when Gary Tyler went to prison and his release. What didn’t change was his ability to see an injustice,” Norris Henderson, executive director of Voice for the Ex-Offender in New Orleans, told the Militant in a phone interview May 16. Henderson is also founder of a program to help former inmates once they leave prison.

“Gary was exposed to the Angola Three,” Henderson said, referring to Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King, who were held in solitary confinement in Angola prison for decades after organizing prisoners to fight against dehumanizing conditions. The last of the three, Woodfox, was finally released in February.

“Death row and solitary were on the same tier of the prison,” Henderson said. The Angola Three “looked out for Gary, helped him navigate his situation. They helped him to become the individual he is today — just as they have educated all of us.”

“We thank the people whose work has helped us to be able to witness this,” he added.

No pardon, no new trial

In 1976, Tyler’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. Under Louisiana law, a pardon is required in order to get paroled from a life sentence. Three times the parole board recommended his release, but the governor refused. In 1990 Gov. Charles Roemer cited Tyler’s failure to complete his high school equivalency test as a reason, but Tyler had repeatedly requested entrance into Angola’s educational programs and was told they were full. The same year, the state attorney general argued against a pardon on grounds that Tyler had “demanded he be allowed to correspond with socialist and communist publications such as Socialist Worker.”

Tyler never got a new trial. In 1980, the U.S. Court of Appeals vacated his conviction and ordered a retrial on the grounds that the judge’s instruction to the jury to find that Tyler had “intended the natural and probable consequences of his act,” made the trial unfair. When the state appealed, the same court reversed its order for a new trial, but maintained that the judge’s instructions were unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on appeal.

In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down mandatory life terms without parole for juveniles. The decision said that they should have the right to argue for parole or to be resentenced. Authorities in Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania said the ruling was not retroactive, and refused to apply it to Tyler and 1,100 other workers behind bars. In January this year the Supreme Court ruled that the decision was retroactive.

This led to an April 29 resentencing hearing where Tyler accepted a plea bargain of 21 years for manslaughter, having already served twice that time, walking out of court free at last.  
 
 
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