By the time my trial came up in 1973 our support committee was nonexistent. The fund-raising had stopped; the money disappeared. To us, inside, it seemed that everybody had moved on. Not until 1975, when someone sent me an article about Gi and Jill Schafer, did I learn the Schafers were FBI informants who deliberately broke up our support committee. They were paid $16,000 a year to infiltrate, disrupt, and destroy the SDS at LSU, acting as spies and agents provocateurs, making up stories to create mistrust among the students and antiwar protesters, and shaming many of them into taking more extreme actions than they wanted to, which led to their arrests. As a side project, they took on the Angola 4 support committee and played a part in its demise. In the summer of 1972, Huey Newton, while attempting to centralize activities within the party, called the members of the New Orleans Black Panther Party chapter to Oakland and sent replacement Panthers from Cincinnati to New Orleans. Nobody in the community trusted the people from Ohio, who were all strangers. With the New Orleans Panthers in Oakland, this gave the Schafers more power in our committee. From documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from the FBI, we learned many years later their job was to sabotage any attempt to raise funds to get lawyers for us, and that’s what they did.
The black lawyers who visited from Baton Rouge disappeared when the money did. The young white attorney Charles Garretson stuck with us, agreeing to represent us even without being paid. Garretson was sincere and well-meaning—more than 30 years after he represented us he wrote to my attorneys offering to testify on my behalf at a new trial—but in 1973 he was young and inexperienced. And he was up against a good ol’ boy network in which virtually everyone knew everyone else or lived in the same neighborhood, and all were determined to convict me, no matter what. He didn’t have a chance.
My trial started in West Baton Rouge the day after jury selection in early March 1973. (Herman, Gilbert Montegut, and Chester Jackson would go to trial in 1974.) I was represented by Garretson, who took on my case pro bono. Otherwise, I was alone. I knew I would be. My mom couldn’t afford to come to Baton Rouge and even if she could she had no place to stay there. When I arrived, the first thing I saw outside the courthouse was a group of heavily armed prison guards from Angola and deputies from Iberville Parish. Two armed deputies were standing on the roof. Inside, armed guards leaned against the walls. The all-white jury was already seated when I entered in shackles, flanked by two deputies. My restraints were removed at the defense table. The prosecutors were John Sinquefield and Leon Picou.
The expert witnesses testified first. According to the coroner, Brent Miller was stabbed 32 times around 7:45 a.m. on April 17, 1972. He died four minutes later, at 7:49 a.m. He had wounds on his back, chest, sides, and leg. His body was found in a pool of blood in the “day room,” the room just inside the front door; prisoners passed through the day room of each dorm to enter the sleeping quarters, where their bunks were lined up in rows. There was a clear, identifiable bloody fingerprint on the door that didn’t match me, Herman, Gilbert Montegut, or Chester Jackson. The fingerprint didn’t match any of the investigators or the inmates who carried Miller’s body out of the dorm. When the state police officer responsible for testing the print was asked if he compared the fingerprint with the fingerprints of other prisoners who lived on the walk, he said, “No, I did not.” There was no blood on any of the beds or in the room where the beds were located. The other guard assigned to the Pine dormitories that day, Paul Hunter, testified that when he came back from the dining hall after breakfast he entered Pine 1 and found Miller’s body lying on the day room floor. According to investigators, Miller “appeared to have fallen against a table in the day room and onto the floor.”
A prisoner named Hezekiah Brown was the state’s star witness against us. In his sixties and missing teeth, Brown looked like a harmless old man on the stand but he was serving his third or fourth term at Angola for aggravated rape. He was heavily involved in the sex trade at Angola, and a snitch known for always currying favor. He shined the guards’ shoes in the lieutenant’s office and prison lore said Brown was a courier for the drug dealers on the walk. The drugs would supposedly be put in his shoeshine box while he was in the control center and he’d bring them back to his dorm to be picked up. He made coffee for the freemen. Everybody in prison knew you couldn’t believe a word he said. (Decades later, former Angolite editor Billy Sinclair wrote about Brown to one of my lawyers: “I was on death row with Hezekiah Brown; in fact, on the same tier with him. He was, and remained up till the day he died, a ruthless, pathological liar. He was a petty snitch on death row who repeatedly fed free people false and fabricated information about other condemned inmates just to receive extra coffee and food. He bartered information for personal gain.”)
Brown lived in the Pine 1 dormitory and testified that he saw the murder. He said he was alone in the dorm when Brent Miller entered for a cup of coffee and sat on Brown’s bed, which was at the end of the row, closest to the entrance to the day room. Brown testified that he was leaning down to plug in the coffeemaker when I walked into the dorm with Herman Wallace, Gilbert Montegut, and Chester Jackson. All of us had handkerchiefs over our faces, he said. All of us were carrying weapons. He said I grabbed Miller from behind and “jugged” him in the back with a knife and the others began stabbing him, then we dragged him off the bed to the day room, where we continued to stab him. Afterward, he said, I “ran out” of the dorm followed by Herman, Jackson, and Montegut, leaving Brown alone with Brent Miller’s body, and the door slammed behind us. “When I heard the door slam,” he testified, “I knowed they was gone, well I—I don’t know what made me move but I moved and went [to] the door.” He said when he opened the door of the dorm the wind “made me come to my senses” and he realized he had his pajamas on. When asked how far he got before he realized he was wearing his pajamas and turned back, he testified, “Oh I didn’t get—I didn’t get out from under the—I didn’t get out of the door good, you know, and then I come back in.”
Brown testified that when he turned away from the door to go back inside and change out of his pajamas and passed by Miller, “he was laying there, that’s when the last breath went out of his body.” Brown testified he changed into pants and a shirt, walked past Miller’s body again, and left the dorm. Outside he made a right, he said, to go to the blood plasma unit (located behind the clothing room just inside the snitcher gate), “straight as a bee martin to his hole.” When asked who else was on the walk after Brent Miller was killed, he said he didn’t see anyone on the walk. When asked the color of the handkerchief around my face, Brown testified, “It could have been red, it could have been blue.” He settled on blue.
On cross-examination, Brown admitted that when he was first questioned by officials he gave them a different story. He first told investigators he was at the blood plasma unit the entire time. A “few days later,” he conceded on the stand, he was awakened at midnight and brought to a room with Deputy Sheriff Bill Daniel, Warden C. Murray Henderson, and “the administration.” There, authorities told Brown they “knew” he was in Pine 1 during Brent Miller’s murder, he said, and “they told me everything that happened.” That’s when he gave a new statement to officials, telling officials that I killed Brent Miller with Chester Jackson and Herman Wallace. He did not mention Gilbert Montegut in the statement he gave that night but added Montegut to a third statement he gave authorities later. Brown testified that nobody promised him anything in exchange for his testimony.
Joseph Richey, the prisoner I had prevented from raping a young prisoner in RC, also testified against me. He said he was standing in his dorm, Pine 4, which was across from Pine 1, when he saw Brent Miller walk into Pine 1. The next thing he saw, he said, was Leonard “Specs” Turner run out of the dorm, followed by me, Herman, Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montegut, contradicting “eyewitness” Brown who never mentioned Leonard Turner. Richey testified that our faces were not covered, contradicting Brown again. Asked if I ran left
or right when I exited he said he didn’t know, but that on my way out the door I ran into a wagon used to pick up trash that was sitting on the walk. Richey said that when Hezekiah Brown followed us out of Pine 1, he was wearing blue pajamas and “moving as fast as possible on his [bad] leg” down the walk toward the dining room before he stopped, turned around, and went back into the dorm, again contradicting Brown, who said he didn’t leave the dorm in his pajamas but turned around in the doorway to change after opening the door, when the wind “made [him] come to [his] senses.” Richey went on to testify that after Brown returned to his dorm, Richey was still watching the dorm when he saw Brown emerge after he’d changed his clothes. He said he himself then walked into Pine 1 and, when he saw the body of a fallen security officer with multiple stab wounds, he didn’t turn around and run away but walked up to Brent Miller’s body and stood there “for a minute and a half,” then left the dorm and walked to the side of Pine 1, lit a cigarette, and “waited” for security to find Miller’s body.
A prisoner named Carl Joseph “Paul” Fobb, who worked in the scullery with me and was almost completely blind in 1972, also contradicted Brown (and Richey). He testified that he was “on the side” of Pine 2 dorm when, “about 8:05 a.m.,” (16 minutes after the coroner said Miller died), he saw me go into Pine 1, alone, and about “five, ten minutes” later I came out of Pine 1, alone, with a rag in my hand which I threw into the Pine 4 dorm, across the walk from Pine 1, where Joseph Richey, according to Richey’s testimony, would have been standing. (Paul Fobb testified he didn’t see Richey that morning. Richey testified he didn’t see Paul Fobb.) No “rag” that I had supposedly thrown was ever introduced as evidence at my trial. Fobb said he didn’t see Herman, Chester Jackson, or Gilbert Montegut and he didn’t see Hezekiah Brown. He said that I was the only person he saw leaving the Pine 1 dorm after Miller was killed and that he was “stunned” to see me, an odd choice of words since at that time he wouldn’t have known a freeman had just been killed. He testified I was wearing a blue prison shirt and a white T-shirt underneath it. He also testified there was no blood on me when I left Pine 1.
Fobb, who acknowledged he was completely blind in one eye from cataracts, conceded on the stand that he was “injured” in his other eye. On the stand, he attempted to describe two rambling statements he had given nine months after the murder on the reason I supposedly killed Miller. (He gave the statements nine months after being moved from a dorm to a harsh cellblock.) He testified he witnessed “two or three” altercations between me and Brent Miller and that he saw Miller “carry me out” of Pine 4 because I wasn’t allowed to be there. He said he overheard me tell an unnamed “fall partner,” that “I have fifty years,” and that I was “going to fix that little bitch,” referring to Miller. He testified it was my idea to create a kitchen workers’ strike as a diversion for the freemen in order to pull guards away from the walk that day so that I could kill Brent Miller. “Well, this was the plot,” he testified, “for to get the free mens from off of the walk, for to give him a chance to do what he have to do and bring them back to prowl.” This testimony echoed the “theory” that Warden Henderson gave reporters the day after Miller’s killing, nine months before Henderson got Fobb’s statement.
Sitting at the defense table everybody looked like a liar to me, but Paul Fobb stood out as the most surreal liar. Everybody knew that man couldn’t see. One of my witnesses would testify to that, about how Fobb was always running into things. (Years later my attorneys had an expert review Fobb’s eye surgeries before 1972 as well as his medical records and she said his eyesight was so bad at the time of Miller’s killing he couldn’t have identified a person who was 30 or 40 feet away.) He could not have identified me running out of the Pine 1 dorm, much less tell whether or not I was wearing a white T-shirt under the button-down prison shirt he said I was wearing. By saying that I, alone, was the only one who ran out of Pine 1 that day he contradicted the state’s star witness, Hezekiah Brown, and also Joseph Richey. Fobb said I didn’t have blood on me after I supposedly just stabbed a man 32 times by myself. The kitchen workers’ strike didn’t “pull guards” from the walk. Standard prison protocol posted one guard from each unit in the dining hall during meals and one on the walk, directing traffic or sitting in the guard booth.
Paul Fobb’s testimony to the contrary, I had no beef with Brent Miller. I knew who he was from walking past him and I knew of the Miller family, but I never had a conversation with him. Prisoners weren’t supposed to enter each other’s dorms but they sometimes went in and out for short periods of time. Some freemen weren’t bothered by it; some were. I never got a write-up (disciplinary report) for going into a dorm. (If the freemen were following protocol the doors to the dorms would be locked at all times when prisoners weren’t coming and going for work or meals, but they usually didn’t lock the doors.) Brent Miller never talked to me. I never talked to him. He never threw me out of a dorm. He never wrote up a disciplinary report on me.
Most illogical of all, to me, was Fobb’s testimony that I was somehow constantly talking about a “plot” to kill a guard loud enough for him to hear it. How was it that he happened to hear all these conversations I supposedly had with my so-called “fall partner”? If I wanted to hurt or kill a freeman I wouldn’t have talked about it loud enough to be heard over the banging pots and running water in the scullery. I wouldn’t have talked about it after a shift sitting among white and black prisoners I didn’t know or trust. I wouldn’t have talked about it anywhere near Paul Fobb.
Also, I wanted to ask the jury, even if I did have the power to orchestrate a kitchen workers’ strike when I wasn’t even there, how would I know in advance that the guards who would supposedly be “pulled from the walk” wouldn’t include Brent Miller? Guards did not hang out in prisoner dorms. How would I have known that Brent Miller was in Pine 1? Indeed, later, prison officials and the state of Louisiana used the fact that Miller was in the dormitory that morning as a reason to deny his wife benefits and compensation for his murder.
It wasn’t shocking to me that Fobb lied. What bothered me was the idea that the jury would take him seriously. I had a similar thought about Hezekiah Brown. Nobody in prison would be stupid enough to attack and kill a security guard in front of one of the biggest snitches in Angola and leave him alive.
Once I had hope. Then I saw how the contradictions of the state’s witnesses didn’t seem to matter to the jury. I saw how everyone who participated in the trial—prosecutors, lawyers, judge, guards—all seemed to know each other beyond a professional role. Based upon their conversations and interactions it was easy to see the personal friendships between some of them. When the jury was in the room they went through the motions of a trial. When the jury was out of the room they laughed and talked together in various parts of the courtroom. Some of them ate lunch together. I wondered if they were all working together to convict me.
None of the other guards on the walk that morning, at the snitcher gate, or directing traffic or in their booths were called to testify that they saw me, Herman, Chester Jackson, or Gilbert Montegut on the walk. None of them were called to corroborate that they saw any of the state’s witnesses who claimed to be there.
On the day Brent Miller was killed I was wearing what I wore most days, blue jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and rubber boots that I needed for my work in the scullery. At my trial Bill Daniel, who was deputy sheriff in St. Francisville at the time, testified that he took a green army jacket, blue pants, and brown lace-up shoes from me, which were entered as evidence.
All the state’s witnesses had me wearing something different. Hezekiah Brown, who first said he didn’t really remember what I was wearing, testified I was wearing “penitentiary clothes,” which meant blue shirt and blue pants. Brown was the only witness who said I had a handkerchief or scarf around my face. Joseph Richey testified I was wearing a “state-issue blue button-up shirt and state-issue dungarees” and “no jacket” and “definitely nothing” cove
ring my face. Paul Fobb, who was legally blind, somehow “saw” that I was wearing a white T-shirt underneath a button-down state-issue blue shirt, and “state jeans.” He said that I had no handkerchief covering my face entering or leaving Pine 1. He, alone, testified that I was wearing a hat over my Afro.
The spot of blood on the green jacket the deputy said I was wearing that day was so small it couldn’t be typed. There was a stain of blood on the blue pants and one on the brown shoes; both stains were so small the crime lab couldn’t determine if the blood came from a human or an animal.
A handmade knife with several layers of tape as a handle was entered as the murder weapon. The guard who found the knife under Pine 1 said it was covered in blood when he found it. A crime lab forensics expert testified that when the lab received the knife there were fewer than three drops of blood on it, not enough to type the blood. There was no evidence linking it to Brent Miller’s murder. I find it strange that there was never enough blood on any of the items introduced into evidence to tell if it was human or animal blood, or determine if it was my blood or Brent Miller’s blood or the blood of any of the other men charged.
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