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

Angolite
editor Billy Sinclair
wrote about Brown to one of my lawyers: “I was on death row
 
with Hezekiah
Brown; in fact, on the same tier with him. He was, and remained up till the
day he died, a ruthless, pathological liar. He was a petty snitch on death row
who repeatedly fed free people false and fabricated information about other
condemned inmates just to receive extra coffee and food. He bartered
information for personal gain.”)
Brown lived in the Pine 1 dormitory and testified that he saw the murder.
He said he was alone in the dorm when Brent Miller entered for a cup of
coffee and sat on Brown’s bed, which was at the end of the row, closest to the

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entrance to the day room. Brown testified that he was leaning down to plug in
the coffeemaker when I walked into the dorm with Herman Wallace, Gilbert
Montegut, and Chester Jackson. All of us had handkerchiefs over our faces,
he said. All of us were carrying weapons. He said I grabbed Miller from
behind and “jugged” him in the back with a knife and the others began
stabbing him, then we dragged him off the bed to the day room, where we
continued to stab him. Afterward, he said, I “ran out” of the dorm followed
by Herman, Jackson, and Montegut, leaving Brown alone with Brent Miller’s
body, and the door slammed behind us. “When I heard the door slam,” he
testified, “I knowed they was gone, well I—I don’t know what made me
move but I moved and went [to] the door.” He said when he opened the door
of the dorm the wind “made me come to my senses” and he realized he had
his pajamas on. When asked how far he got before he realized he was
wearing his pajamas and turned back, he testified, “Oh I didn’t get—I didn’t
get out from under the—I didn’t get out of the door good, you know, and then
I come back in.”
Brown testified that when he turned away from the door to go back inside
and change out of his pajamas and passed by Miller, “he was laying there,
that’s when the last breath went out of his body.” Brown testified he changed
into pants and a shirt, walked past Miller’s body again, and left the dorm.
Outside he made a right, he said, to go to the blood plasma unit (located
behind the clothing room just inside the snitcher gate), “straight as a bee
martin to his hole.” When asked who else was on the walk after Brent Miller
was killed, he said he didn’t see anyone on the walk. When asked the color of
the handkerchief around my face, Brown testified, “It could have been red, it
could have been blue.” He settled on blue.
On cross-examination, Brown admitted that when he was first questioned
by officials he gave them a different story. He first told investigators he was
at the blood plasma unit the entire time. A “few days later,” he conceded on
the stand, he was awakened at midnight and brought to a room with Deputy
Sheriff Bill Daniel, Warden C. Murray Henderson, and “the administration.”
There, authorities told Brown they “knew” he was in Pine 1 during Brent
Miller’s murder, he said, and “they told me everything that happened.” That’s
when he gave a new statement to officials, telling officials that I killed Brent
Miller with Chester Jackson and Herman Wallace. He did not mention
Gilbert Montegut in the statement he gave that night but added Montegut to a
third statement he gave authorities later. Brown testified that nobody

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promised him anything in exchange for his testimony.
Joseph Richey, the prisoner I had prevented from raping a young prisoner
in RC, also testified against me. He said he was standing in his dorm, Pine 4,
which was across from Pine 1, when he saw Brent Miller walk into Pine 1.
The next thing he saw, he said, was Leonard “Specs” Turner run out of the
dorm, followed by me, Herman, Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montegut,
contradicting “eyewitness” Brown who never mentioned Leonard Turner.
Richey testified that our faces were not covered, contradicting Brown again.
Asked if I ran left or right when I exited he said he didn’t know, but that on
my way out the door I ran into a wagon used to pick up trash that was sitting
on the walk. Richey said that when Hezekiah Brown followed us out of Pine
1, he was wearing blue pajamas and “moving as fast as possible on his [bad]
leg” down the walk toward the dining room before he stopped, turned around,
and went back into the dorm, again contradicting Brown, who said he didn’t
leave the dorm in his pajamas but turned around in the doorway to change
after opening the door, when the wind “made [him] come to [his] senses.”
Richey went on to testify that after Brown returned to his dorm, Richey was
still watching the dorm when he saw Brown emerge after he’d changed his
clothes. He said he himself then walked into Pine 1 and, when he saw the
body of a fallen security officer with multiple stab wounds, he didn’t turn
around and run away but walked up to Brent Miller’s body and stood there
“for a minute and a half,” then left the dorm and walked to the side of Pine 1,
lit a cigarette, and “waited” for security to find Miller’s body.
A prisoner named Carl Joseph “Paul” Fobb, who worked in the scullery
with me and was almost completely blind in 1972, also contradicted Brown
(and Richey). He testified that he was “on the side” of Pine 2 dorm when,
“about 8:05 a.m.,” (16 minutes after the coroner said Miller died), he saw me
go into Pine 1, alone, and about “five, ten minutes” later I came out of Pine 1,
alone, with a rag in my hand which I threw into the Pine 4 dorm, across the
walk from Pine 1, where Joseph Richey, according to Richey’s testimony,
would have been standing. (Paul Fobb testified he didn’t see Richey that
morning. Richey testified he didn’t see Paul Fobb.) No “rag” that I had
supposedly thrown was ever introduced as evidence at my trial. Fobb said he
didn’t see Herman, Chester Jackson, or Gilbert Montegut and he didn’t see
Hezekiah Brown. He said that I was the only person he saw leaving the Pine
1 dorm after Miller was killed and that he was “stunned” to see me, an odd
choice of words since at that time he wouldn’t have known a freeman had

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just been killed. He testified I was wearing a blue prison shirt and a white T-
shirt underneath it. He also testified there was no blood on me when I left
Pine 1.
Fobb, who acknowledged he was completely blind in one eye from
cataracts, conceded on the stand that he was “injured” in his other eye. On the
stand, he attempted to describe two rambling statements he had given nine
months after the murder on the reason I supposedly killed Miller. (He gave
the statements nine months after being moved from a dorm to a harsh
cellblock.) He testified he witnessed “two or three” altercations between me
and Brent Miller and that he saw Miller “carry me out” of Pine 4 because I
wasn’t allowed to be there. He said he overheard me tell an unnamed “fall