rape charge they had. We called that cleaning the books. It was a common
practice by the police then and is now. Everybody knew about it. To the
police it didn’t matter if the DA was able to prosecute the charge or not. The
police just wanted to wipe their books clean. The DA’s office didn’t mind;
they could use the additional charges to intimidate guys and pressure them to
take plea deals instead of going to trial. Innocent men took plea deals all the
time and went to prison versus lying around in the parish jail for two or more
years waiting for a trial.
The night they cleaned the books on me
I had been picked up for an
armed robbery. On February 13, 1969, Frank, a friend of ours named James,
and I walked from Frank’s apartment around the corner to Tony’s Green
Room to rob it. Someone outside saw us walk in holding guns and called the
police. Midway through the robbery the police came in and started shooting. I
heard Frank scream. He was shot in the face. In all the commotion, I hid my
gun and pretended I was a customer. When the police told everyone to leave I
walked out the door and went home.
Frank’s girlfriend, not knowing I had been with Frank, called me,
distraught, asking me to go to the hospital with her.
She told me Frank had
been shot. I ran to her house on foot because I’d left my Thunderbird in front
of the apartment building that Frank lived in. On the way, I formulated a plan
to go with her to the hospital, find out where Frank was, and go back later to
break him out. I went inside the apartment to get her. We walked outside and
to the car. When I opened the car door police rushed out from behind parked
cars and out of the alleyway with their guns drawn. James had given the
police my name and the description of my car. After the police arrested me,
they took me and Frank’s girlfriend back into her apartment. They put me in
the bedroom and her in the kitchen. While some of them were beating me and
kicking me in the bedroom I could hear the others in the kitchen threatening
to take her children, asking her what she knew about the robbery. She was
crying and telling them she didn’t know anything about it.
The police took me to central lockup. Upstairs they put me in a room and
questioned me about the robbery. I denied knowing anything about it and told
them a story about how I was just there to help Frank’s girlfriend get to the
hospital. There were four or five detectives in the room. First one of them hit
me in the head with a big leather book. After I’d been hit on my head several
times while continuing to deny
anything about armed robbery, one of the
detectives came up behind me and put a plastic bag over my head, twisting it
at the end so no air could get inside. When I was about to pass out they took
the bag off. After doing this over and over they gathered around me and
picked me up in the air and beat me around my body and in between my legs.
Although I was in great pain I still denied knowing anything about the armed
robbery. The next day I was transferred to the parish prison and that’s when I
found out I had been charged with armed robbery and other charges,
including theft and several rapes.
The DA dropped all the charges against me
for lack of evidence except
the armed robbery at Tony’s Green Room. All those other fake charges
stayed on my record though. As years passed I thought about having them
expunged but I kept putting it off. That decision would haunt me decades
later. I was offered a plea deal for the robbery at Tony’s Green Room. If I
pleaded guilty I’d get 15 years but would only have to serve half that—seven
and a half years. I didn’t take it. I knew that if
I held out for a trial I was
taking a risk. Judges were known to add extra time in sentencing men who
were found guilty, to discourage other men from going to trial. But I didn’t
want to go back to Angola for one year, much less seven and a half. If there
was a chance I didn’t have to go, I wanted to take it. I met the public defender
who was representing me once before my trial. I was found guilty.
Afterward the DA’s office charged me as a habitual felon, which meant
they could enhance my sentence. The state of
Louisiana passed one of the
first “three strikes, you’re out” laws in the country, except in the city of New
Orleans it was more like “one strike, you’re out” under the habitual felon law.
If you had even one felony conviction in New Orleans and got a new charge,
your sentence could be increased if you were found guilty, up to life in
prison, even for nonviolent crimes. I knew when I was sentenced I’d be
thrown away. That’s what we called it.
