Gary Tyler, black, now aged 36, is serving a life prison sentence in Louisiana State Penitentiary. He was convicted in November 1975 for the murder of 13-year-old Timothy Weber, a white schoolboy who was shot during racial fighting in 1974. Tyler, who was 16 at the time of the incident, has consistently denied involvement in the crime. Since his trial, serious doubts have been raised about the evidence on which he was convicted. Nineteen years after his conviction he is again seeking a pardon.

Amnesty International is deeply concerned at evidence which suggests that a serious miscarriage of justice occurred either as a result of or exacerbated by his race and the racially charged atmosphere at the time of the events, the seriously deficient legal representation which Gary Tyler received at his trial before an all-white jury, and new evidence that has come to light over the years which suggests that Gary Tyler did not shoot the victim.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that schools should no longer be racially segregated: in order to integrate schools black students were taken by bus from their living areas to schools in white populated areas. However, the authorities of Destrehan High School strongly resisted this policy and only in the 1960s - and as a result of a Court Order - the school finally started the process of integration. In 1974, the tensions created by the resistance of whites to desegregation resulted in frequent clashes in which the Klu Klux Klan, the white supremacist organization, played a leading role.

On 7 October 1974 students at Destrehan High School, St Charles Parish, Louisiana, were sent home earlier than usual due to racial disturbances during the day. As the buses carrying black students back to their homes were leaving the school they were attacked by a group of 100 to 200 white people throwing stones and bottles at the buses.

Timothy Weber was standing near the buses with his mother who had come to collect him. A shot was heard and he fell wounded; he died a few hours later in hospital. A man standing next to him was slightly scratched in the arm, allegedly by the same bullet.

Gary Tyler was one of the black students on the bus from which the shot was allegedly fired. This was not his regular bus but he had got into it as the situation had become increasingly dangerous. There were some 65 students on the bus, well over its normal capacity.

The police, who had been called by the school principal, ordered the bus to park around the corner. All students were ordered to get off the bus and male students were thoroughly searched immediately; girl students were searched later at the police station. The bus was searched on two different occasions for over three hours by approximately seven policemen and no gun was found. The bus was then taken to the police station along with the students. Gary Tyler was taken in a police car as he had been charged with disturbing the peace (he had complained about the police harassment of a fellow black student).

At the police station the students were questioned and released. One of them, Nathalie Blanks, stated that she had been seating next to Tyler and had seen him fire a gun into the crowd; she indicated to the police the exact place where she had been seating. It was after Blanks' testimony that the police "found" a .45 automatic gun stuffed inside the seat, through a long, clearly visible tear in the seat. The seat had been previously searched, shaken and turned upside down several times and nothing had been found.

Gary Tyler was detained in the police station and reportedly badly beaten. However, he did not make any statement implicating himself in any way.

Gary Tyler was charged with first degree murder, a capital crime. The first degree murder charge meant that his case had to be tried in the adult criminal court rather than the juvenile court. A lesser charge, including second-degree murder, would have been tried in juvenile court given Tyler's young age. The most severe punishment imposed would have been juvenile supervision until the age of 21 at a juvenile detention facility.

Gary Tyler was tried by an all-white jury with members of the black community deliberately excluded from the jury. The prosecution relied mainly on the testimony of one girl student, Nathalie Blanks, who was in the same bus with Tyler. She testified to having seen Gary Tyler fire the gun but after the trial she recanted her testimony. Other students who also testified against Tyler have later recanted, saying that they were coerced by the police to making the statements.

Gary Tyler was represented by a white lawyer who specialized in civil cases. He spent a total of about one hour with Gary Tyler during the whole year previous to the trial. Furthermore, he did not interview witnesses, present any expert witnesses or conduct tests on physical evidence offered by the state; he failed to object to gross errors committed at trial. His failure to object to the judge's instructions to the jury meant that later appeals have been lost on this issue.

The forensic evidence presented by the prosecution was of questionable quality and did not clearly and definitely implicate Gary Tyler in the murder.

In order to get a conviction of first degree murder the state was required to prove that Tyler had acted "with a specific intent to kill or to inflict great bodily harm on more than one person". The slight injury suffered by the man standing next to Timothy Weber therefore became important.

Gary Tyler was convicted and sentenced to death on 14 November 1975.

Louisiana's death penalty law was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1976. In January 1977 the Supreme Court of Louisiana annulled the death sentence imposed on Gary Tyler as a result of this ruling. However, it affirmed his conviction for first degree murder. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without eligibility for parole, probation or suspension of sentence for a period of 20 years.

As a result of a new appeal the US Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, held in June 1980 that "Tyler was convicted on the basis of an unconstitutional charge" and that his trial had been "fundamentally unfair". The court reached this decision on a finding that the trial judge had erred when he instructed the jury to find that the defendant, Tyler, had "intended the natural and probable consequences of his act" ie to kill or inflict great bodily harm on more than one person.

After examining rulings in other cases the appeal court concluded that "the threshold issue for this court is whether the [judge's instruction] given here so infected the trial as to render it fundamentally unfair. We conclude that it did."

The court found that, as Tyler's lawyer had failed to object to the judge's erroneous instruction at the time of the trial, this error could not normally be redressed on appeal. However, they nevertheless vacated his conviction and ordered a retrial on the ground that the lawyer's failure to object was so serious that it led to a miscarriage of justice.

The state appealed against this decision and on 27 April 1981 the US Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit reversed its previous decision. It did not dispute that the judge's charge to the jury was unconstitutional and reiterated its view that the trial had been "fundamentally unfair" but reversed its previous decision to order a new trial on the issue of the defense lawyer's failure to object to the judge's instruction at the appropriate time.

The US Supreme Court subsequently declined to hear the case. [NB The US Supreme Court receives thousands of appeals each year but selects only some for consideration. Others are not reviewed by the court]

In 1989 Gary Tyler petitioned the Louisiana Board of Pardons (LBP) to be granted pardon. This was the only means by which he could have his sentence reduced to one which gave him the possibility of parole. In October 1989 the LBP heard testimony for several hours but postponed acting on the case to allow time for the state Attorney General's office to answer questions raised about key evidence used in Tyler's trial.

On 24 January 1990, however, Governor Roemer rejected the recommendation of the LBP. He argued that Gary Tyler had had a fair trial by all legal standards. This statement did not acknowledge the finding by the Court of Appeal in two decisions that Tyler had been "convicted on the basis of an unconstitutional charge" which had "infected the trial" to the point of rendering it "fundamentally unfair".

He added that Tyler had not made serious efforts towards rehabilitation because he had not enrolled in educational programs while in prison (a charge Tyler strongly rejects). In May 1991 Gary Tyler passed his exams to obtain a secondary education certificate (General Education Diploma, GED). He has been very involved in the prison Drama Club and has taken a printing course in the prison; he has been offered a job in a printing company in California to be taken up on his release.

A new application for a full pardon was filed on 27 February 1991. In it Gary Tyler requested clemency "because he is innocent of the charge against him, trial was fundamentally unfair and he was denied the presumption of innocence, the Courts have refused to take action because of an error made by his trial attorney and his trial attorney was unable to remember why he made the error...". The LBP considered the case and on 4 December 1991 it unanimously recommended to reduce Gary Tyler's sentence to 50 years and to restore the benefit of reduction for good behaviour making him immediately elegible for parole. Governor Roemer had two alternatives open to him regarding Tyler's case: to decide on the case (in favour or rejecting) or do nothing thus leaving the decision to his succesor, Edwin Edwards. On 13 January 1992, shortly before leaving office, Governor Roemer denied clemency to Gary Tyler. Unlike previous occasions he gave no reasons for his decision and refused to talk to the press about it.

Roemer's denial meant that Governor Edwards could not consider Tyler's case for one year. The rules of the LBP state that after a petition is denied the prisoner cannot re-apply until a year later. The Board would then consider the case and make a recommendation which would then go to the Governor. This process takes around a year to be completed.

In 1989 and 1991 Amnesty International wrote to the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Governor Roemer urging them to grant a pardon in the interest of justice.

Gary Tyler has applied again for a pardon to the Louisiana Board of Pardons. This is his third attempt to be granted pardon. The hearing before the Board is likely to take place in late January 1995. The Board's recommendation would go to Governor Edwin Edwards for final decision. Governor Edwards' term of office ends in March 1995.

Gary Tyler's original sentence included eligibility for parole after serving 20 years. However, the state of Louisiana is now contesting this issue and denying that he will be automatically eligible for parole in November 1995, when he will have served 20 years in prison. His attorneys are currently pursuing litigation on this issue.

There are still sectors in Louisiana's society that strongly oppose the granting of a pardon to Gary Tyler but, on the other hand, his previous application elicited support from, among others, church groups, members of the City of New Orleans Council, Louisiana Senators and the National Lawyers Guild.

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.

Write to the Louisiana Board of Pardons:
Pointing out that the US Court of Appeal, Fifth Circuit, held in two decisions that Gary Tyler had had a fundamentally unfair trial. However, his conviction was upheld on a technical point: that his trial lawyer had failed to present an objection at the right time (about the judge's instruction to the jury)

Urging the Louisiana Board of Pardons to make a unanimous recommendation in favour of granting a pardon to give Governor Edwards a clear signal to go along with the Board's recommendation

Point out that AI believes that grave doubts about his guilt remain 19 years after his conviction at the age of 16 and that the interest of justice would best be served by granting his petition for pardon.

Express sympathy for the victim and his relatives.

Write to Governor Edwin Edwards, using some of the points above:
call on him to grant a pardon to Gary Tyler, who has spent more than half his life in prison

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 studentsran 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 1989­90, 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 1989­90, 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 seethe 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 Lindorff,

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, which originally appeared in the print edition of the International Socialist Review.

Letters of support can be sent to:
Gary Tyler # 84156
Louisiana State Penitentiary
ASH-4
Angola, LA 70712