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

Chapter 33
Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
I pace the cell to think. I pace to relieve tension. I lightly box the wall. My
knuckles 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

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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

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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”

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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 Miller’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,

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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