The contact visit was completely different from sitting behind a steel mesh screen. We were taken to an open room with tables and chairs. They removed our handcuffs and leg irons. My first contact visit in 15 years was around Christmas that year. My mom came with my brother Michael, my sister Violetta, and her oldest daughter, Nelyauna. There was no natural flow at first. I didn’t feel comfortable. I had forgotten what it felt like to be physically close to people. I was used to talking with the partition between us. There was no hugging with the screen between you and a visitor. You couldn’t even really see the eyes of the person across from you clearly.
It was a strain for me to stay within the flow of my first contact visit. When my mom put her hand on my leg it brought back a flood of memories. I became a kid again. I had to fight off crying. When they were getting ready to leave I had an intense wave of longing that went through me, a desire to leave with them. Everyone started to hug me and I didn’t know what to do. I’d always been able to kiss my mom through the screen, touch fingers with Michael and everybody, but hugging, for the first time in 15 years, was totally foreign to me. (Later, King would say he felt the same. “It felt totally, absolutely strange,” he said. “I didn’t know how to hug. It was sadder than sad. I realized how much I’d missed.”) It took me months to really enjoy contact visits.
We were at Camp J for more than two years, long after the renovations in the old building were complete. During my civil trial against David Ross, testimony came out that CCR and Death Row inmates had been moved to Camp J in violation of the consent decree. After state officials got involved we were moved back to CCR in 1989.
Chapter 32
Maturity
I feel safe even in the midst of my enemies, for the truth is all powerful and will prevail.
—Sojourner Truth
I believe life is in constant motion. Even in the prison cell, with the numbing repetition of the same day over and over. Even trapped on a tier with 14 other personalities I couldn’t get away from—the one who is constantly complaining; the one who smells bad. Even with the constant noise and when the pain of not being able to leave my cell was too much to bear. (I cried. I cried a lot of times after the tier was locked down so no one could see.) Even with the fear that one day I would go insane like so many others I’d witnessed. I saw life as constantly changing and I allowed myself to change.
By the time I was 40 I saw how I had transformed my cell, which was supposed to be a confined space of destruction and punishment, into something positive. I used that space to educate myself, I used that space to build strong moral character, I used that space to develop principles and a code of conduct, I used that space for everything other than what my captors intended it to be.
In my forties, I saw how I’d developed a moral compass that was unbreakable, a strong sense of what was right or wrong, even when other people didn’t feel it. I saw it. I felt it. I tasted it. If something didn’t feel right, then no threat, no amount of pressure could make me do it.
I knew that my life was the result of a conscious choice I made every minute of the day. A choice to make myself better. A choice to make things better for others. I made a choice not to break. I made a choice to change my environment. I knew I had not only survived 15 years of solitary confinement, I’d honored my commitment to the Black Panther Party. I helped other prisoners understand they had value as human beings, that they were worth something. I could still remember the way it felt to be accepted by the Panthers in the Tombs, to see in their eyes that they valued me, that I was somebody to them, even though I was a prisoner with a 50-year sentence and I didn’t value myself. As a member of the Black Panther Party, I gave my word I would make it my duty to protect other prisoners, to teach them how to stay focused on life outside prison, to show them that they belonged in this world. I kept my word.
In my forties, I chose to take my pain and turn it into compassion, and not hate. Whenever I experienced pain of any origin I always made a promise to myself never to do anything that would cause someone else to suffer the pain I was feeling in that moment. I still had moments of bitterness and anger. But by then I had the wisdom to know that bitterness and anger are destructive. I was dedicated to building things, not tearing them down.
In my forties, I fully understood all that my mom had sacrificed to take care of her children. I felt all the love she had for us, and the love I had for her. Everything my mother ever said to me came back to me over the years. Lessons she taught me that I had lost in the arrogance of childhood became the foundation of my own wisdom. “Life’s got to be like throwing water on a duck,” she used to say. “It don’t stick.” I hadn’t known what it meant when I was a child but looking back I saw that she was telling me not to let the poverty and difficulties of my childhood define me. She was telling me to let the pain and circumstances of my life roll off my back. Her words came to me when I needed them, pushing me to understand their deeper meaning and find a way to keep going. “I used to complain about having no shoes,” she would say, “until I saw a man with no feet.” Her words encouraged me to focus on my strength instead of the agony of being separated from the world and feeling the heaviness of that. “When someone gives you lemons,” she always said, “make lemonade.”
In the novel Native Son, Richard Wright wrote, “Men can starve from a lack of self-realization, as much as they can from a lack of bread!” I never forgot those words. By the time I was 40 I’d read and educated myself enough to develop my own values and code of conduct. It started with the 10-Point Program of the Black Panther Party. In the years after the party broke up I expanded upon those values, I broadened my views on the struggle, and I found solace in the words of other great men and women who seemed to understand me and validate my life.
“If there is no struggle there is no progress,” Frederick Douglass wrote. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power cedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Malcolm X wrote, “Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.” Malcolm gave me direction. He gave me vision. The civil rights leader Whitney Young said of being black: “Look at me, I’m here. I have dignity. I have pride. I have roots. I insist, I demand that I participate in those decisions that affect my life and the lives of my children. It means that I am somebody.” There wasn’t one saying that carried me for all my years in solitary confinement, there were one thousand, ten thousand. I pored over the books that spoke to me. They comforted me.
In my forties, I was able to show my mom the man I’d become. I was able to thank her for her wisdom and the lessons of life she taught me and let her know she was my role model and my hero. I thanked her for the sacrifices she made for me and my sister and brothers. I apologized for putting her through so much pain in my youth and told her I appreciated everything she did for me. I always wanted to be a man my mother could be proud of. I was in prison, but I was able to show her that I had become that man.
By age 40 I had learned that to be human is to grow, to create, to contribute, and that fear stops growth. Fear retards the process of growing. Fear causes confusion and uncertainty. Fear kills one’s sense of self-worth. By eradicating fear on the tier, I learned that men can deal with each other better. They can get along. I wondered if in society, we could build a world in which we do not fear one another.
1990s
In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.
—Frantz Fanon
Chapter 33
Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
I pace the cell to think. I pace to relieve tension. I lightly box the wall. My knuckle
s have calluses on them from boxing the wall. I do push-ups on my fists. I don’t have deep thoughts. I’m practical. My needs are few so they cannot torment me by withholding anything. I don’t need anything. I get through the days the way I have done a thousand times before. Will this be the day I break? I push that thought away. Mind over matter. I keep moving so later I can sleep. Sometimes I can’t sleep. I work at it, try to understand why it’s happening. I listen to music. Music is a refuge for me. An escape. There are days when music saves me. I play it loud to drown out the background noise. I play it softly. I don’t dance to the music but sometimes I sway to it.
On February 11, 1990, the entire tier watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison on TV after 27 years. Mandela was an inspiration to me. Arrested for his political beliefs he spent 18 years on Robben Island, where he was forced to carry limestone rock back and forth from one end of a quarry to another. He and his comrades slept on beds of straw. Guards urinated next to them while they ate. Imprisoned for opposing the white minority rule and oppression of black people in South Africa, in his first public speech upon his release he spoke of the need to end the brutality of apartheid. “Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts,” he stated. “We call on the international community to continue the campaign to isolate the apartheid regime. . . . Our march to freedom is irreversible. We must not allow fear to stand in our way.” Mandela remained unbowed. He was an example and inspiration to me the whole time I was in solitary confinement. Sometimes it helped to think of people who had it much worse than I did and survived.
For years, Herman and I never appealed our convictions from the seventies. We didn’t think about appealing. We didn’t think it would do any good. King talked us into it. Since Herman’s attorney didn’t file an appeal in a timely matter after he was convicted in 1974, Herman had to file what was called an “out-of-time appeal.” In 1990, his application was granted. In the spring of 1991, King and I started working on my application for postconviction relief. Reading my court papers, King called down to me, “What happened to that motion you filed to quash the grand jury?” I told him I had no idea; I’d forgotten about it. “I see here where it’s open.” he said. “It was never ruled on. If that’s the case they’re going to have to give you a new trial.” By law judges are supposed to decide on the outcome of pretrial motions before trial. King sent law books down the tier for me to read so we could discuss my case. When one of us was out on his hour, he stood at the bars in front of the other’s cell to talk about it.
We raised two issues: One was that the court never ruled on my motion. The second was “ineffective assistance of counsel,” because, by failing to research my case, Charles Garretson hadn’t put forth the best defense required by law. He probably didn’t know about it. I’d forgotten about it. But that’s not an excuse in a court of law. Effective counsel is a constitutional right guaranteed by the 6th Amendment. He was obligated to research my case before we went to trial. King wrote the postconviction application for me by hand on a legal pad. We could have manual typewriters in those days, so he typed it out on onionskin paper, with carbon paper between the pages so we could retain copies. (Carbon paper was so rare on the tier that every page was used over and over again until it was almost white.) As he typed he passed sections of it down the tier for me to read. I filed it on September 17, 1991.
Herman’s appeal was denied at the appellate level in 1992 and the Louisiana Supreme Court denied review in 1993. I had better luck. On May 27, 1992, eight months after I filed, Judge Thomas Tanner of the 18th Judicial District Court in Iberville Parish reversed my conviction on the grand jury discrimination issue, agreeing that my attorney should have made an effort to have my indictment from the unconstitutional grand jury thrown out. The state appealed the judge’s decision and lost. I would get a new trial. I was ecstatic, not knowing I would have to wait six years for my trial. I believed they were deliberately delaying, hoping that they would mentally break me or I’d die, and then there wouldn’t have to be a trial.
Before I could be retried, I had to be reindicted. In March 1993, I was reindicted in the same place where I had been indicted 21 years before, the St. Francisville courthouse. In 1972, the grand jury had excluded women and African Americans. In 1993, the grand jury included blacks and women; one of those women was Anne Butler, the wife of former Angola warden C. Murray Henderson, the man who helped frame me. Not only was she on the grand jury, she was allowed to pass around a book that she and Henderson had written about Angola, which included a chapter about the Miller killing. It was not a journalistic account. Her “reporting” consisted of interviewing the former prison officials who made up the original story about me, Herman, Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montegut killing Miller in 1972.
According to Butler’s account I murdered Brent Miller with Herman Wallace and Chester Jackson. She admitted in her book that Gilbert Montegut had nothing to do with Miller’s murder and he was framed because prison officials wanted to blame the murder on “militants” released from CCR shortly before Miller was killed. She didn’t write about why her husband, the former warden, allowed Gilbert Montegut, an innocent man, to be tried for a murder he knew the man didn’t commit.
She didn’t write about the testimony of Chester Jackson and how radically different it was from Hezekiah Brown’s “eyewitness” account, even though Jackson supposedly participated in the murder of Brent Miller. Or how every single one of the state’s witnesses contradicted Brown’s testimony. She didn’t write about how the state’s witnesses had me running in different directions after the murder, wearing different clothing, with no blood on me. She didn’t write about how none of the state’s witnesses saw each other, even though they were all supposedly standing in the same area at the same time. She didn’t write about the bloody tennis shoes, which were found after Miller’s killing and which investigators—and her husband—knew about but hid from my defense and never had tested at the crime lab. (We only found out about them years later through a public records request.)
Anne Butler called the chapter about Brent Miller’s killing “Racist Pigs Who Hold Us Captive,” a phrase she said came from that letter prison officials claimed they “intercepted” the day before Miller’s killing. The intercepted letter, which was never brought up at my trial and which Deputy Warden Lloyd Hoyle appeared to have no knowledge of on the day Miller was killed when he spoke to the press, allegedly took credit for the attack on Mike Gunnells in the guard booth the day before Miller was killed and “promised other acts of unspecified violence,” adding that a “people’s court” was held and had “convicted” prison authorities of “extreme racism.” It was signed, “The Vanguard Army, Long Live the Angola Prison Involvement.”
She didn’t write about how prison authorities never identified the author of the letter, if it existed, even though they had handwriting samples of every prisoner on file, as well as access to every typewriter on prison grounds. If the letter existed, and had been written by a prisoner, they could figure out who wrote it. If it was linked to me or Herman it would have been brought up at our trials.
In her book Butler described Brown—a ruthless rapist—as “gregarious Hezekiah Brown” who had “light duty” because of a “weak ankle” and “made coffee for the guards.” She wrote he had been incarcerated for “relatively minor crimes” in Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas before coming to Angola, failing to mention his multiple aggravated rape convictions and the fact that he spent years on death row for one of his rape convictions. We heard a rumor later that initially Brown, who was free at the time of my indictment, refused to testify before the grand jury when he arrived at the courthouse, and that even though he’d been released from prison years before, a guard from Angola, his former “handler,” had to be called to reassure him and literally walk him into the grand jury room, which would have been illegal since nobody is supposed to enter a grand jury room but the district attorney and grand jury members.
About Mille
r’s killing Butler wrote:
Brent Miller’s mother recalled his telling her that once during a disturbance at Angola, other officers had given him a chain to use in subduing unruly inmates. “He said that the inmates were begging him not to hit them, and he said to me, ‘Mama, I wouldn’t hit one of them for nothing in the world, I just couldn’t do that.’” Now this fair-haired laughing baby boy who loved everybody, this high school football hero, this new bridegroom, lay dead on the floor, stabbed thirty-two times with at least two knives, his hands in death rigidly clenched into fists from trying to grab and fend off the sharpened blades.
She described Miller’s wounds in detail, stating that “during the mandatory autopsy, small medical sticks inserted into each wound for the purpose of photographic evidence gave the body a porcupine appearance.”
This inflammatory account was what the grand jury was allowed to read. Butler also wrote, incorrectly, that I’d been convicted of “theft” and “aggravated rape.” This was the story she was allowed to pass around to other grand jurors. In a subsequent memoir, she wrote,
The book was in great demand as the grand jury considered this case yet again, because with the passage of time nearly everybody had forgotten the little details that can be so important. The attorneys read the book; the witnesses read the book; even some of the jurors read the book. And who should be called for grand jury duty out of the 13,000 or so registered voters of the Parish of West Feliciana? Me. I asked the assistant DA handling the case if he shouldn’t excuse me from duty but he insisted that it was the right as well as the responsibility of every citizen to serve when called.
As expected, I was reindicted on March 17, 1993. When I was arraigned two public defenders were appointed to represent me at trial: Baton Rouge attorney Bert Garraway and Richard Howell from St. Francisville. They immediately submitted a motion to quash my indictment since Anne Butler had passed her biased, inaccurate, inflammatory version of Brent Miller’s murder around to other grand jurors. Judge Bruce Bennett refused the motion, writing, “There’s nothing wrong with a grand juror having some knowledge of a case, even if they happened to have written a book about the case.”
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