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Chapter 42
King Leaves the Belly of the Beast
In December 2000, we got the incredible news that King was granted a new
trial by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
ruling on a habeas corpus petition written by Mandeville attorney Chris
Aberle. Chris had been with King for a while. He was appointed to represent
King by the U.S. Fifth Circuit back in the early 1990s and wrote his appeal
on the federal district court’s denial of his habeas corpus relief. When that
appeal was denied Chris volunteered to help King get back into federal court.
King always described Chris’s next habeas corpus petition as “a work of art.”
His hearing that December was attended by dozens of A3 supporters. The
court granted King habeas relief, ruling that he made a showing of innocence
and that a constitutional violation had been committed in his trial.
Now the state was up against a wall. Prosecutors had no way to reindict
King for the murder of August Kelly. The actual murderer had testified that
he alone killed Kelly. There was never any physical evidence linking King to
the murder and the prosecution’s witness who testified against King at his
1973 trial recanted in the late eighties, admitting he had lied on the stand
because authorities had threatened him. Prosecutors offered King a plea deal.
If he pleaded to “accessory after the fact” they would give him a sentence of
time served and he could leave Angola. King didn’t want to take a plea. It
was a lie. He wanted to be exonerated at a trial. But we all had just seen what
had happened at my trial. Herman and I urged him to take the plea and get
out, to go home. He didn’t want to leave us behind. He didn’t want us to be
shorthanded. I would have felt the same way but I wanted him to leave.
“Man, you gotta go home,” I told him. “If one of us is free, all of us are free.”
King thought about it. Eventually he told us he decided to take the plea.
When he got to the courtroom on the day he was to be released, February
8, 2001, he was told the state changed the plea. Now the plea being offered
was “conspiracy to commit murder.” I believe the prosecutors used the lesser
plea to lure him to court before they gave him the plea they planned to give
him all along. It was a deliberate and duplicitous ploy to get King to the
courthouse, where his family and friends were outside, waiting to bring him
home. He’d already gone through the soul-searching required to take the first
plea. Now this was a different lie. He was innocent. In the end King chose
freedom over justice. Standing at the defense table he was told to raise his
right hand to be sworn in. King raised his left hand. He took the plea. After
court he was taken back to Angola to get the paperwork for his release and
pick up his property. Herman was living on his tier and they said their good-
byes. The tier sergeant allowed King to come onto my tier to say good-bye to
me. King and I had lived on the same tier for 17 years. He had always been a
stabilizing force for me. Most guys only talked about what was going on in
prison; they couldn’t see any further. King and I had wide-ranging
conversations about philosophy and life, our political beliefs, world events,
books we’d read, Supreme Court rulings, presidential elections, sports. We
knew each other’s weaknesses and strengths, our habits and ways. When he
got to my cell door we hugged through the bars.
If King had started a new life—a life he deserved—and never looked
back, Herman and I would have been happy for him. But he did something
else. He met with our grassroots support committee and planned actions. He
traveled with former Panther Althea Francois to universities to talk about us
and speak out against solitary confinement. He planned a trip to speak in
Europe with former Panther Marion Brown. Within three months of being
locked in a cell 23 hours a day for 29 years, King was in New York City,
telling our stories at the Black Panther Film Festival. Later that month he was
back at the front gates of Angola, this time shouting through a megaphone,
surrounded by supporters protesting solitary confinement and the injustice
that Herman and I were facing.
On June 28, 2001, Scott Fleming argued Herman’s PCRA before
Commissioner Rachel Morgan of the 19th Judicial District Court in East
Baton Rouge. In Louisiana, appeals in state court can go before a
commissioner who reviews the case and writes a preliminary opinion before a
judge gets the case. King was there with two busloads of supporters. He held
a press conference on the steps of the courthouse, explaining to reporters how
the state suppressed evidence that could have proved Herman’s innocence.
The commissioner recommended Herman get an evidentiary hearing with
respect to the suppressed exculpatory and impeachment material that had
come to light at my trial—the fact that Hezekiah Brown was paid for his
testimony, among other things. He would have to wait years for that hearing.
That summer, using the recipe he perfected in prison, King started
making bulk orders of his praline candy to raise money for A3 campaigns and
for his travel. He called the candy Freelines. A friend donated large cooking
pots for him to use; another friend created a package label that included the
message
FREE THE ANGOLA
3.
King would spend the next 15 years in courtrooms, at press conferences,
on the state capitol steps, at hearings, in lecture halls, at protests and marches,
in bookstores, at radio stations, at universities, and in the British Parliament,
telling people about me and Herman, standing against the abuses of solitary
confinement, and fighting for our freedom. “I am free of Angola,” he often
said, “but Angola will never be free of me.” Wherever King went, support for
us grew; people got involved. At every event people who were desperate
about their own loved ones in prison or in solitary confinement approached
him. He always took the time to talk to them. He perceived each family’s
struggle, each prisoner’s struggle, as if it were his own. King always said
being in prison was like being in a tunnel and freedom was the light at the
end of the tunnel. Once he got out of prison, he told me, he discovered he was
in a new tunnel and there was another light in the distance. “I think the
struggle is unending,” he told a reporter. “Actually, it’s always beginning.”
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