It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Chapter 21
Herman’s Trial, 1974
After my conviction in 1973, Herman wrote to the NAACP Legal Defense
and Educational Fund (NAACP LDF) about the fact that we were indicted by
a grand jury that excluded women and blacks. A lawyer from the NAACP
LDF named Norbert Simmons came to see him and agreed he had a claim.
He agreed to represent Herman on this issue and filed a motion to quash his
indictment. Judge Edward Engolio, of the 18th Judicial District Court,
granted the motion, which meant that everyone indicted by that particular
grand jury—26 people in all—were no longer indicted. At first, lawyers for
the state appealed the ruling. Then the state withdrew its appeal and
reindicted everyone who had been indicted by that particular grand jury
(except for me; since I had already been convicted I wasn’t on their radar).
There was another problem with the way the new grand jurors who reindicted
Herman, Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montegut were selected, but that
wouldn’t come to light until years later. Meanwhile, the motion I had filed
the year before on the same issue had still not been disposed of; but I was still
too new to the law to understand that all motions were legally required to be
ruled on before trial.
Herman, Jackson, and Montegut were tried together in East Baton Rouge.
Charles Garretson, who represented me, was their attorney. On the second
day of their trial Garretson, Herman, and Montegut were seated at the defense
table after a lunch break when Chester Jackson entered behind the prosecutor
and sat at the prosecutor’s table. He had turned state’s evidence, which, we
found out later, was his plan all along. According to state officials, he had
given authorities a statement implicating me and Herman in Miller’s murder
two days after Miller was killed. We had no idea. Garretson also had no idea,
and he had less than half an hour to compose himself before he had to
question the man he had previously been defending. The knowledge that they

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had broken Jackson and got him to agree to testify against Herman and
Montegut shook Garretson to his core. (Later, he would say, “[I] was in a
complete state of shock. . . . It took everything I could glean together to
maintain professionalism and sanity and intelligence to go forward after this
lunch break.”)
Jackson testified that he and I had walked toward the dining hall for
breakfast alone that morning and we had stopped before we got there “to
wait” for Herman. “After [we had spent] about 10 minutes” standing on the
walk, he said, Herman arrived and asked me if I had “the weapons.”
Prosecutor Ralph Roy, who was questioning Jackson, asked him, Didn’t he
mean “the weapon,” singular? Jackson changed his answer, saying Herman
asked about “the weapon.” He went on to say the three of us turned around
and went back down the walk, stepping off the walk between two Oak dorms
while Herman “scouted for a freeman to kill.” When Herman returned,
Jackson said, he told us there was “a man” sitting on a bed in Pine 1. He said
when we entered the dorm we all placed handkerchiefs over our faces and
that Brent Miller was on the bed, facing the “front of the building” (the
opposite from what Hezekiah Brown had said), talking to Hezekiah Brown.
Jackson said he didn’t enter the dorm right away but stayed back in the
day room, which he called “the lobby,” as Herman and I entered. Jackson
said he was “hiding” from Hezekiah Brown because, he said, Brown was his
“friend.” Jackson described the wall he stood behind as “solid concrete,”
which, he testified, he “can’t see through,” and yet from that vantage point
proceeded to say that he watched me pass by Miller after entering the dorm to
get behind Miller and grab him in a “mugger’s hold” and stab him in the front
of his body. (Brown said I stabbed Miller in the back.) Jackson testified that
after Miller was stabbed, he stood and tried to walk out the door but Herman
pushed him back into the sleeping quarters. At that point, Jackson said,
“everybody” started stabbing Miller, which was when Jackson said he
entered from the day room. Jackson said when he came up to us stabbing
Miller I handed him a knife and, on my orders, he stabbed Miller. Jackson
testified that while we were stabbing the guard, Leonard “Specs” Turner, who
had been in the back of the dorm, walked by us, exiting the building. Next,
Jackson said, Hezekiah Brown walked out the front door of the building
while Jackson was stabbing the guard, all of this contradicting Brown and
Richey and Fobb. Jackson estimated the struggle with Miller lasted “10 or 11
minutes.”

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He testified that when he left the building, “that’s when all the people
from the other dormitories came in Pine 1 and I just went and changed
clothes.” Jackson stated that when he, Herman, and I left Pine 1, I ran “down
the side” of Pine 1, and he and Herman walked over to Pine 3, diagonal to
Pine 1, where he took off his bloody clothes and put them in a trash can in the
corner of the dormitory. (Bloody clothes were never found in any trash cans
in any dorm after Miller’s killing, or if they were, they were never presented
as evidence.) Jackson said Herman found some fresh clothes “behind a bed”
and changed out of his bloody clothes. When asked what Herman did with
his bloody clothes Jackson replied, “He left them there,” then, “I can’t say
exactly what he did with them.” When the prosecutor prompted him with,
“He left with them?” Jackson changed his answer, “He left with them,” he
said, “out the door, you know, towards the door. . . . He had them in a
bundle.”
Not only did Jackson’s testimony contradict Hezekiah Brown’s testimony
in every way, but he contradicted the statement he gave authorities two days
after Miller was killed. In that statement (which we didn’t obtain until years
later), Jackson said he was going down the walk when he saw me and
Herman standing in the yard near the Pine dorms. He said I was wearing a
brown hat, “like a hunting cap,” over my Afro. He said he walked up to me
and Herman and after Herman walked away I told Jackson I was going to
“kill a pig.” Then Herman returned and said there was a “chump” sitting in
Pine 1. Jackson said he walked away toward the dining hall. A few minutes
later, he said, he heard screaming and circled back down to the walk to Pine
1. In the 1972 statement, Jackson went on to say he looked through a window
and saw me and Herman stabbing Brent Miller. And then he said he 
entered
the dormitory where Miller was being attacked and Herman pushed him to
the side as he and I left the building. Jackson said he then followed us out the
door. In this version, he didn’t stab Miller. He didn’t mention Gilbert
Montegut in either account.
Under cross-examination, Jackson testified that he was interrogated four
times between Miller’s killing on April 17 and the evening of April 19, when
he finally gave the statement in which he said he watched through the
window as Herman and I stabbed Brent Miller. During his first interrogation,
he told authorities he didn’t know anything. The next day, he said, he was
“picked up” and “put in the hole.” He testified he was questioned by Warden
Henderson, Captain Hilton Butler, and Deputy Sheriff Daniel. When asked if

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he’d been beaten he replied, “I got hit. . . . They had a tough meeting when
they first locked me up.” Inadvertently he indicated that he may have been so
badly “hit” that he’d needed a doctor. He testified that on April 19 he told his
lawyer to “go to the hospital, try to get me a doctor. . . . I told you how the
people harassing me.” When asked, on cross-examination, if authorities held
a weapon to his head during his interrogation, which is what Jackson told
Herman and Gilbert Montegut in the months leading up to the trial, Jackson
testified that he “never seriously” told them that.
Jackson didn’t mention Montegut once and the state prosecutors didn’t
ask about him, even though their star witness, Hezekiah Brown, placed
Montegut at the scene, stabbing Miller. When Garretson questioned Jackson,
he asked if Montegut had stabbed Brent Miller. Jackson replied, “Well, I
can’t say definite. I can’t give you no definite answer on that.” Jackson
testified that Montegut was not present with us on the walk and “not during
the struggle.” He denied the DA agreed to reduce his charges to manslaughter
in exchange for testimony, and, he testified, when prosecutors placed him and
Hezekiah Brown in a room together the day before Herman’s trial (which
Garretson discovered the first day of their trial), they “never discussed
nothing” about their testimony or what had happened the day of Miller’s
killing.
When Hezekiah Brown took the stand, he repeated the well-rehearsed
testimony that he gave at my trial—I came up behind Miller and pulled him
against me, stabbing him in the back; I ran out of the dorm with Herman,
Jackson,