If I made a deal I’d have freedom. But I’d never get justice. My lawyers reminded me if I lost at trial I wouldn’t get justice or freedom. I was almost 69 years old. It had taken 18 years in court to get to this point, a new trial. In his ruling, even Judge Brady asked if I had another 18 years in me if I was convicted at trial again. I kept thinking of Michael. He had never asked me for anything, but now he was asking me to take the plea deal. I thought of my mom, who had wanted so badly to see me walk out of prison. I thought of my daughter, who I wanted to know. I had spent my life teaching men to take a stand for what’s right. Would I be letting them down? I had lived my life as an example to everyone around me. I paced and slept and read that week. I’d always prided myself on facing difficult decisions head-on. I made a decision. I called my lawyers and told them I would make a deal for freedom.
By pleading nolo contendere I wouldn’t be innocent in the eyes of the law. But I knew I was innocent. The struggle inside me didn’t go away. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about breaking my word to take that plea.
I sat in my cell and waited for a week. George, Billy, and Rob had to coordinate several parties to get agreement on the details of the deal: the judge, the DA’s office, the attorney general, the lawyers. It was my understanding the Miller family had to be involved; how they felt had to be considered.
Ultimately, the deal was for me to plead to manslaughter, and Louisiana tacked on a burglary charge in order to compute the punishment to match the exact amount of time I had been held in prison. As part of the deal, King and I settled our civil suit with the state. (Herman’s family had already settled years before, after he died.) A date was set. By pure coincidence, it was my birthday, February 19, 2016. That morning they put restraints on me and took me to the 20th Judicial District Court in St. Francisville. I stood before Judge William Carmichael. When he asked me for my plea on manslaughter and burglary, I replied, “Nolo contendere.”
After the court appearance, I was taken back to my cell and my restraints were removed. The door was closed and locked behind me. I’d already laid out the street clothes George had brought me but I didn’t change right away. I sat down on my bunk.
Brent Miller’s family was in the courtroom that morning. His brother Stan had stood before Judge Carmichael, speaking on behalf of the Miller family. Describing the pain of losing his brother he said, “A piece of our hearts has been jerked out of our bodies.” I understood how the Miller family felt double-crossed. I felt genuine sympathy for him in that moment, and then a flash of bitterness. I was being forced to take a plea for something I didn’t do. The Miller family pushed for us to stay in prison, even though they knew that no physical evidence linked us to the murder, not even the bloody fingerprint left at the scene. Even after it was revealed that there were bloody tennis shoes and inmates wearing bloody clothes and scratches on a prisoner that were never investigated, and that the inmate testimony against us was paid for, and even though none of the “witness” testimony matched up. Now I was being forced to choose freedom over the integrity of my word, which was everything to me. My word was my mother’s gift to me. For 44 years I survived by my word. My word kept me alive in the darkest darkness; it kept me safe, it kept me sane, it kept me human. Now I was breaking my word. I was innocent. Herman was innocent. Part of my heart had been ripped from me too.
I put on the clothes George brought me: black jeans and a black sweatshirt. I folded my jumpsuit and laid it on the bed. I was supposed to enter my plea, come back and get my things, and go. But there was a paperwork foul-up somehow, so my release was delayed. I stood at the window of my cell, looked outside, and waited. There were two news vans parked at the curb with satellite dishes on top. From now on, everything was unknown.
The door to my cell opened and a guard asked me if I was ready. He wasn’t carrying restraints. I picked up the plastic bags that contained my possessions and followed him down the hall to an office. The sheriff allowed my brother Michael to come inside while George and I waited for the paperwork to come through by fax from the DOC. We sat at a small table and talked. Michael was only 8 years old when he started visiting me in prison with my mom. When he was 18, he came alone and vowed he’d stay with me until the end. “Until I perish or you perish,” he promised. I looked at him now. He was smiling. My rock. Barring disaster my brother was in the visiting room every month. We had our brotherly clashes over the years. If I thought he was being irresponsible on the street or making bad decisions I told him. He never let it come between us. There was a light in his eyes today.
I turned to George and asked, “What time is it?” We’d been waiting more than an hour. George got up again to press the prison officials. Then, the paperwork came through.
Michael and I walked out the door of the jail together. I squinted in the sun. My knees buckled. He tightened his hold on me so I wouldn’t fall. Many of my friends had been waiting there to celebrate my release. Marina was there. Scott was there. So many of my local New Orleans friends and supporters had come. Tory had traveled from across the country to be there, and held her phone up so Gordon Roddick, on a video call, could watch me walk out of prison. I heard their cheers and I smiled and raised my clenched fist. Their faces were a blur. I got in my brother’s car. Michael, fighting tears, fastened my seat belt. He drove me directly to the graveyard in New Orleans where our mom is buried. It was closed. I wanted to climb over the wall but Michael wouldn’t let me. That evening he took me to an event in our old neighborhood hosted by my childhood friend, the activist Parnell Herbert. It was the same place, the Carver Theater, that I used to sneak into as a child. The event had been scheduled weeks earlier, before anyone knew I was to be released that day.
My one fear upon getting out of prison was that I wouldn’t be accepted in my community, in the African American community, in the Treme neighborhood, where I had grown up and did so much damage and harm. Parnell called me to the stage. Michael walked with me. As we made our way out of our seats and up to the stage people started clapping, then standing and cheering. King was called to the stage, along with Malik Rahim and others. There was a feeling of togetherness in the room I hadn’t felt in so long, a feeling of unity, a feeling of relief and victory for all of us, a feeling that we all shared. I was being welcomed back into my community. I was speechless, moved to tears. I raised my fist.
The next day Michael and I went to Walmart and bought almost every flower there. Longtime supporters and friends came with us. We took flowers to my mom’s grave. I felt the loss of her as if her death was fresh, as if she had just died. It was more painful than anything I experienced in prison. I told her that I was free now and I loved her. I went to my sister Violetta’s grave, in a different cemetery, and to the grave of her husband Michael Augustine, my oldest childhood friend. I went to Herman’s grave.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t go to bed. I sat up in a chair and dozed on and off. It was my second night out of prison. I looked at the watch on my wrist. Michael had given it to me back in the prison office. When George got up to talk to prison officials about the delay, I turned to Michael and asked, “What time is it?” He took his watch off and put it on my wrist, saying, “Yours now.”
Epilogue
My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.
—Huey Newton
My brother Michael took me home and I lived with him and his wife and son in their house for almost a year. I got medical care that I needed. In my mind, heart, soul, and spirit I always felt free, so my attitudes and thoughts didn’t change much after I was released. But to be in my physical body in the physical world again was like being newly born. I had to learn to use my hands in new ways—for seat belts, for cell phones, to close doors behind me, to push buttons in an elevator, to drive. I had to relearn how to walk down stairs, how to walk without leg irons, how to sit without being shackled. It took about a year for my body to relax from the positions I had gotten used to holding
while being restrained. I allowed myself to eat when I was hungry. Gradually, over two years, I let go of the grip I held against feeling pleasure, and of the unconscious fear that I would lose everything I loved.
Michael told me I needed to make new memories, and I did. I’d always dreamed of going to Yosemite National Park after seeing a National Geographic special about it years before in CCR. At the invitation of old friends and former Panthers Gail Shaw and BJ, I flew to Sacramento. Scott Fleming came up from Oakland to meet us and we drove to Yosemite together. We hiked to the falls I wanted to see, and we stayed in the park overnight.
I’ve been privileged to speak to law students around the country and to speak out in Europe, in Canada, and here in America against the abuses of solitary confinement. I was honored to meet Teenie Rogers, Brent Miller’s widow, who had the courage and character to speak out against our convictions. I met Deidre Howard, the foreperson who came forward with her misgivings about her grand jury experience, proving that Judge Brady was correct in his assessment that I would never get a fair trial in the state of Louisiana. Deidre and her sister Donna are taking steps to get Louisiana to create a guidebook for grand jurors, explaining their rights.
A great joy has been getting to know my daughter and her children. My great-grandchildren are my hope. The innocence, intelligence, and happiness in their eyes give me strength. I want to keep going for them, keep speaking out, keep fighting. I hope to leave them a better world than the one I had. I hope they can find the spirit of my mom, their great-great-grandmother, when they need her, as I did.
I bought a house. I’m still a news junkie and usually have news on the TV. I can still only sleep a few hours at a time. I am often wide awake around three a.m., when I used to get some “quiet time” in prison. Many people ask me if I ever wake up and think I’m still in prison. I always know where I am when I wake up. But sometimes I walk into a room in my house and I don’t know why, and then I walk into all the rooms for I don’t know what reason. I still get claustrophobic attacks. Now I have more space to walk them off. For peace of mind, I mop the floors in my home.
People ask me how America has changed in 44 years. I see changes, but in policing and the judicial system most of them are superficial. In 2016, the year I was released from prison, a black man named Alton Sterling was fatally shot by police while he was pinned to the ground by officers in Louisiana; a black man named Philando Castile was shot and killed at a traffic stop by police while he was reaching for his wallet in Minnesota, while his girlfriend screamed, “You told him to get his ID, sir”; a black behavioral therapist named Charles Kinsey, caring for an autistic man, was shot in the leg by police in Florida as he lay in the street with his hands up (later the chief of police stated the cop was aiming for the autistic man who was holding a toy truck that the cop thought was a gun); an unarmed black man named Terence Crutcher was shot and killed as he was walking in the middle of a street outside his vehicle in Oklahoma, obviously drunk or drug-impaired. That was just 2016. As I write these words, in March 2018, a 22-year-old unarmed black man named Stephon Clark was fired at 20 times—with 8 shots hitting him, mostly in the back—and killed by police officers in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento.
The officer who killed Terence Crutcher was acquitted and her record was expunged. The officer who killed Philando Castile was acquitted. Black people make up 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, but the year I was released, according to the Washington Post, 34 percent of the unarmed people killed by police were black males.
In 2016, according to the NAACP, African Americans were incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. The imprisonment rate for African American women was twice that of white women. Also according to the NAACP, nationwide, African American children represented 32 percent of all children who were arrested, 42 percent of all children who were detained, and 52 percent of all children who ended up in criminal court. Though African Americans and Latinos combined make up approximately 32 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 52 percent of all incarcerated people.
Racism today isn’t as blatant as it was 44 years ago, but it is still here, underground, coded. We have to make changes that are deeper, as a society. Without roots, nothing can grow. The systemic hatred of a human being based on his or her skin color or hair texture or cultural heritage or gender or sexual preference is pointless. These are trivial things; we are more alike than we are unlike. We will never advance as a species if we see each other as enemies based on race. Frantz Fanon wrote, “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” Can we shift the focus of our insecurities, fears, and anger from other races and work together to deal with the unfair distribution of wealth on this planet? Back in the seventies Huey Newton wrote, “Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach, then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded in the street to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.” This is happening right now in this country, in 2018, for all children of all races.
I have hope for humankind. It is my hope that a new human being will evolve so that needless pain and suffering, poverty, exploitation, racism, and injustice will be things of the past. I am thrilled to see young people obeying the call of their own humanity, even though it so often seems to come at a terrible price. The year of my release, quarterback Colin Kaepernick “took a knee” during the national anthem before National Football League games to protest and bring awareness of the deaths of black people at the hands of police and other social injustices. As his protest spread throughout the NFL, critics subverted the message of the players, ignoring the reason for the protest—to call attention to the very real problem of police violence against black people—and severely criticizing Kaepernick and the other players who took a knee during the national anthem for “not respecting the military” and “not respecting the flag.” Kaepernick was slandered by presidential candidate Donald Trump. He was abandoned by the NFL, exiled from the game he loved. Although he was considered one of the most gifted quarterbacks in the league, no team would hire him the next year. He put his career on the line to use his platform to speak for those who aren’t being heard. His efforts weren’t in vain. Because of his actions, taking a knee has come to mean something different now.
Another bright spot for me was to see how Black Lives Matter had spread: to meet youth in London and Paris who told me they are part of the Black Lives Matter movement in their countries, and to learn that the movement had spread to Brazil, South Africa, and Australia, among other places around the world. I can’t tell you how proud I was to meet Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, at a panel discussion.
I was heartened to hear that, as a result of the civil lawsuit that Herman, King, and I filed, there is now an oversight board that reevaluates decisions made by the reclassification board at Angola. Prisoners call it the “Woodfox board.” In early 2017, the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections partnered with the Vera Institute of Justice for a two-year study of Louisiana’s prisons, with the objective of reducing the use of solitary confinement. The Vera Institute program, called the Safe Alternatives to Segregation Initiative, had already been rolled out in Nebraska, Oregon, North Carolina, New York City, and New Jersey. I am encouraged by other actions. In 2018 the New Orleans activist group VOTE (Voice of the Experienced), formed by former prisoners, launched a “Stop Solitary” campaign in conjunction with the ACLU and others to end solitary confinement in Louisiana. The ACLU offers online tools and contacts for activists in every state to participate in Stop Solitary campaigns. In May 2018, after more than 40 years as a punitive place of torture at Angola prison, Camp J was closed. At its peak, Camp J held 400 prisoners in solitary cells for longer than 23 hours a day. Prison officials cited the deterioration of the building’s infrastructure as the reason for the closure rather than admit that Camp J was a form of solitary confinement and brutal treatment. The infr
astructure at Camp J had been deteriorating for decades.
Herman wanted our suffering to be for something, not in vain. He hoped knowing about his life, my life, and King’s life could somehow help change the way prisoners are treated; the way security officers are trained; the way biased police departments, DA offices, and courtrooms operate. When King and I are in public, Herman is with us as we speak out against solitary confinement. He’s with us as we educate people about political prisoners in America. One of our biggest concerns is that people do not realize that there are political prisoners in the United States, men who were set up by COINTELPRO and similar illicit actions decades ago and are still in prison: Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, Leonard Peltier, and many others, all repeatedly denied parole, denied release, denied justice.
Herman is with us as we call for people to come together and speak as one voice to demand congressional hearings on the clause in the 13th Amendment that legalizes slavery within prison walls. He’s with us when we ask people to understand that there are wrongful convictions in this country. We were the tip of the iceberg. Bias, prejudice, racism, laziness, and an aggressive “need to win” mentality on the part of district attorneys’ offices and others haunt our “halls of justice.” One hundred and thirty-nine wrongfully convicted people were exonerated and released from prison in 2017, according to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE). On average, each was incarcerated for a little over ten and a half years. Government officials—defined as police, prosecutors or other government agents—abused their authority in more than half of the cases.
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