The following article appeared Mar. 6 on pslweb.org.
“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
Gary Tyler has spent 32 years in U.S. prisons for a crime he did not commit. An African American, Tyler was convicted of killing a white teenager after being attacked by a white mob when he was 16.
But none of the evidence in the case points to Tyler’s guilt. It never has. The state of Louisiana and the U.S. criminal justice system railroaded Tyler into prison. His case is widely considered to be a gross miscarriage of justice.
To understand Tyler’s case, one must review it in its historical and political context.
Twenty years after the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered the desegregation of public schools, the issue still was very much at the forefront of society. There was a struggle to implement desegregation in the 1970s all over the country. Many cities and towns, especially in the South, suffered from continued racist violence in reaction to the desegregation attempts. The white ruling class was trying to maintain its power over African Americans.
Many of the violent attacks were led by the Ku Klux Klan, in coordination with the police. The situation in Destrehan, La., was no different. David Duke, the KKK’s one-time imperial wizard, was widely admired there at the time.
As a bus of Black students left Destrehan high school on Oct. 7, 1974, a mob of over 200 whites viciously attacked them. The mob terrorized the Black students, throwing bottles and rocks at them and yelling racist slurs. The racist violence stopped suddenly after a gunshot was heard.
A 13-year-old white teenager named Timothy Weber had been wounded in the head. He died hours later.
Following the shooting, the Black students were taken off the bus by cops and each was searched and interrogated. The bus was also searched. No weapons were found.
Nobody in the white mob was searched. The Black students and other witnesses have said that they all ducked when they heard the shot, that it could not have come from the bus and that nobody was armed.
The driver of the bus insisted that the shot did not come from the bus. He said that it came from someone outside the bus who was firing on it.
Despite this, Tyler, a 16-year-old, was arrested for allegedly disturbing the peace.
According to the white deputy who made the arrest, Tyler talked back to him. But when Tyler asked whose peace he had disturbed, the deputy retorted curtly, “mine.”
Tyler was to become the scapegoat of the racist capitalist state, although he committed no crime.
False charges, manufactured evidence
Tyler was severely beaten after being taken into custody and later charged with murdering Weber. During his trial, evidence against Tyler mysteriously began to appear.
Investigators suddenly “found” a .45-caliber pistol. Although there were no fingerprints on it and it turned out to have been stolen from a firing range used by the sheriff’s deputies, it was used as evidence in Tyler’s case. Later, the gun disappeared.
The police said they found the gun on the bus, despite the fact that the initial search had turned up nothing.
The police also unearthed witnesses who alleged that Tyler had been the gunman.
This was clearly fabricated. The main witness, Natalie Blanks, Tyler’s former girlfriend, was an emotionally troubled teenager who had been under the care of a psychiatrist. She had a history of reporting phony crimes to the police, including a false report of a kidnapping.
She and every other witness who fingered Tyler in his trial later recanted. They also all charged that they had been terrorized into testifying falsely by the police.
An affidavit from Larry Dabney, who was seated next to Tyler on the bus, was typical. He said his treatment by the police was the “scariest thing” he had ever experienced.
Dabney said, “They didn’t even ask me what I saw. They told me flat out that I was going to be their key witness. … 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 I had seen him 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.”
But the jury was exposed to all of the fabricated evidence. The presiding judge at Tyler’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, a front for the KKK.
Tyler was promptly convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.
He was spared electrocution when the Supreme Court declared Louisiana’s death penalty unconstitutional.
But Tyler has already paid with his life. In 2007, Tyler will turn 50 while sitting in the state penitentiary at Angola, where he is serving out his sentence of life without parole.
Tyler’s longtime attorney, Mary Howell, articulated the unfair, racist nature of the case. “This case is just permeated with racism all the way through it, from the initial event all the way up to the pardon process.”
Racist system
It is especially telling that Tyler is jailed in Louisiana’s Angola prison.
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 operating since the end of the Civil War.
Under the capitalist system, prisons are concentration camps for the working class and oppressed peoples. Their primary aim is to keep those oppressed and exploited incarcerated so that they cannot fight back against the system.
Their overarching societal function is illustrated clearly by Tyler’s case. Although he was framed and the evidence used against him has been repudiated, he still sits behind bars.
But a long-running campaign by Tyler’s family and anti-racist activists kept this case in the media spotlight. The campaign’s most recent victory has manifested in a series of February 2007 articles in the New York Times by columnist Bob Herbert. In them, Herbert painstakingly exposes the racist treachery behind Tyler’s imprisonment.
And Amnesty International has renewed its call for Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco to pardon Tyler immediately.
The capitalist system has attempted to make an example out of Tyler. But, in so doing, it has allowed itself to be exposed as racist and rotten to the core. Winning freedom for Tyler would be a victory for all workers and would strike a blow against this unequal system.
Free Gary Tyler now!
For more information on Tyler’s case visit http://www.freegarytyler.com/.
Gary Tyler, in a photo from the 1970s
