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

part in its demise. In the summer of 1972, Huey Newton, while attempting to
centralize activities within the party, called the members of the New Orleans
Black Panther Party chapter to Oakland and sent replacement Panthers from
Cincinnati to New Orleans. Nobody in the community trusted the people
from Ohio, who were all strangers. With the New Orleans Panthers in
Oakland, this gave the Schafers more power in our committee. From
documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from the FBI,
we learned many years later their job was to sabotage any attempt to raise
funds to get lawyers for us, and that’s what they did.
The black lawyers who visited from Baton Rouge disappeared when the
money did. The young white attorney Charles Garretson stuck with us,
agreeing to represent us even without being paid. Garretson was sincere and
well-meaning—more than 30 years after he represented us he wrote to my
attorneys offering to testify on my behalf at a new trial—but in 1973 he was
young and inexperienced. And he was up against a good ol’ boy network in
which virtually everyone knew everyone else or lived in the same
neighborhood, and all were determined to convict me, no matter what. He
didn’t have a chance.
My trial started in West Baton Rouge the day after jury selection in early
March 1973. (Herman, Gilbert Montegut, and Chester Jackson would go to
trial in 1974.) I was represented by Garretson, who took on my case pro
bono. Otherwise, I was alone. I knew I would be. My mom couldn’t afford to
come to Baton Rouge and even if she could she had no place to stay there.
When I arrived, the first thing I saw outside the courthouse was a group of
heavily armed prison guards from Angola and deputies from Iberville Parish.
Two armed deputies were standing on the roof. Inside, armed guards leaned
against the walls. The all-white jury was already seated when I entered in
shackles, flanked by two deputies. My restraints were removed at the defense

---

table. The prosecutors were John Sinquefield and Leon Picou.
The expert witnesses testified first. According to the coroner, Brent Miller
was stabbed 32 times around 7:45 a.m. on April 17, 1972. He died four
minutes later, at 7:49 a.m. He had wounds on his back, chest, sides, and leg.
His body was found in a pool of blood in the “day room,” the room just
inside the front door; prisoners passed through the day room of each dorm to
enter the sleeping quarters, where their bunks were lined up in rows. There
was a clear, identifiable bloody fingerprint on the door that didn’t match me,
Herman, Gilbert Montegut, or Chester Jackson. The fingerprint didn’t match
any of the investigators or the inmates who carried Miller’s body out of the
dorm. When the state police officer responsible for testing the print was
asked if he compared the fingerprint with the fingerprints of other prisoners
who lived on the walk, he said, “No, I did not.” There was no blood on any of
the beds or in the room where the beds were located. The other guard
assigned to the Pine dormitories that day, Paul Hunter, testified that when he
came back from the dining hall after breakfast he entered Pine 1 and found
Miller’s body lying on the day room floor. According to investigators, Miller
“appeared to have fallen against a table in the day room and onto the floor.”
A prisoner named Hezekiah Brown was the state’s star witness against us.
In his sixties and missing teeth, Brown looked like a harmless old man on the
stand but he was serving his third or fourth term at Angola for aggravated
rape. He was heavily involved in the sex trade at Angola, and a snitch known
for always currying favor. He shined the guards’ shoes in the lieutenant’s
office and prison lore said Brown was a courier for the drug dealers on the
walk. The drugs would supposedly be put in his shoeshine box while he was
in the control center and he’d bring them back to his dorm to be picked up.
He made coffee for the freemen. Everybody in prison knew you couldn’t
believe a word he said. (Decades later, former