Louisiana Justice: The Long Struggle of Gary Tyler

[struggle4progress]

26/08/06

by Joe Allen

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 ... 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.

.. 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 ...

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