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

Sinquefield:
Didn’t hear nobody hollering over there and begging for help?
Jackson:
No.
Sinquefield:
—or nothing like that in Pine one?
Jackson:
No, no.
Sinquefield:
Do you think you would have heard it if it went on?
Jackson:
I most certainly would have. So would three thousand others
approximately.
* * *
Sinquefield:
He didn’t sneak off at no time?
Jackson:
He couldn’t possibly have.
Sinquefield:
He didn’t go over there and commit no murder in Pine one there
while you wasn’t looking, huh?
Jackson:
He didn’t do it.
Everett Jackson was asked why he was no longer working on my case.
“He’s in one part of the prison and I’m in another,” he said. “I can’t see him
or hear from him, so consequently I can’t file it.”
On cross-examination, he stated he was moved to a cellblock from the
dorm after giving the statement that he was with me the morning of Brent
Miller’s murder.
Herbert “Fess” Williams, who lived in Pine 4, also testified for my defense.
He said he was there, on the walk, between 7:45 and 8 a.m. and did not see
me on the walk that morning and didn’t see any of the state’s so-called
witnesses who said they were there. Herbert Williams’s job was picking up
trash in the four Pine dormitories and he patrolled up and down the walk with
his trash wagon looking for garbage. On the morning of Brent Miller’s
murder, Williams testified, he didn’t leave Pine 4 on the first call-out for
breakfast. When the whistle blew for the second call-out, around 7:35 or
7:40, he testified, he left his dorm and walked toward the dining hall, looking
for his trash wagon, which he said wasn’t where he normally parked it, in the
grass next to Pine 4. He said the wagon wasn’t on the walk, in front of the
Pine 1 dorm (contradicting Joseph Richey, who said I bumped into the trash
wagon when I ran out of Pine 1), and it wasn’t anywhere else he could see so
he started walking toward the dining hall looking for it because sometimes

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crippled prisoners used it to get to the dining hall. On his way to the dining
hall, he testified, he ran into Hezekiah Brown coming toward him, holding a
plastic bag that contained sugar. He said he knew it was sugar because, “I
was trying to get it from him.” He said Brown was wearing “some kind of
pajama top.”
Williams testified that after he gave a statement to authorities that I
wasn’t at the scene of Miller’s murder he was put in the dungeon and then
“interrogated” four more times. In the dungeon, where he was in a single cell
with four or five other men and no bed, he had his teeth knocked out when
another prisoner “accidentally” elbowed him. Then he was put in a cellblock
where he was locked down 23 hours a day. When my lawyer, Charles
Garretson, asked him on the stand about his experience being “questioned”
by prison officials, Williams corrected him and said that he was
“interrogated” five times. He repeated several times that he didn’t see me on
the walk that morning, and he didn’t see Herman or Chester Jackson or
Gilbert Montegut. After the second time he was interrogated, “they locked
me up,” he said.
“Where did they lock you up?” Garretson asked.
“They locked me up in solitary confinement.”
“For how long?”
“I been there ever since. I’m there now.”
“You’re in solitary confinement?
“Yes, sir.”
Prosecutors Picou and Sinquefield objected and tried to get Williams to
say he wasn’t put in solitary confinement. Williams testified that he was
initially put in the dungeon for two or three weeks, then in the cellblock,
which, to him, was no different from the dungeon—or “solitary
confinement”—except in the cellblock he had a bed.
Picou then, out of the blue, asked Williams, “Do you know who I am?”
reminding Williams that he was district attorney for West Feliciana Parish,
which “covered Angola prison.” He then asked Williams again if he was on
the walk that morning. Yes, Williams said.
“And you were right there in the area?” Picou asked.
“I was right there in the area.”
“You did not go to breakfast.”
“I did not go to breakfast.”
“Everybody went to breakfast except for maybe one or two or three

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people; is that true?”
“I don’t know about the one or two; I didn’t go.”
“But you were there.”
“I was right there in the vicinity.”
“Who else—who else was there?”
“Had a white boy in that area.”
“What’s his name?”
“I don’t even know his name. He don’t even live there. He live up—he
live in the quarters up above us.”
The district attorney changed the subject. The white prisoner, who may or
may not have been on the walk the morning Brent Miller was killed, was
never mentioned again.
A prisoner named Larry Robinson testified he saw Hezekiah Brown at the
blood plasma unit at 7:45 in the morning, the exact same time Brown testified
that he was witnessing Brent Miller’s murder. When asked how he knew it
was 7:45 in the morning Robinson replied he had checked his watch because
he was trying to get out of fieldwork that morning and he was supposed to be
at the sally port at 7:45. Another witness for me, Clarence Sullivan, who
worked in the scullery, testified that Paul Fobb couldn’t see more than a few
feet in front of him and was always bumping into things.
At the end of my trial the jurors were told by the judge to “hold the State to
its burden of proof” and that “if the evidence did not establish beyond a
reasonable doubt” that I was guilty of killing Brent Miller, the jury had to
return a verdict of not guilty. As I sat there and looked at the jury, there was
no doubt in my mind that they would come back with a guilty verdict. They
deliberated less than an hour. The verdict was guilty. I would be sentenced to
life in prison. I remember thinking they would not break me. I wouldn’t let
them break me, no matter what.
After my trial, I was held at the courthouse until dark. They loaded me
into a prison van and two deputies sat on either side of me in the backseat
with shotguns on their laps. Two armed sheriffs sat in the front. None of them
said anything to me about where we were going but I could tell we were not
driving toward Angola. We were headed out into the woods. I wondered if
they were looking for a place to kill me. After some time, they pulled up in
front of the West Feliciana Parish jail. The two in front got out and in a little
while came back to the car. Nothing was said to me directly. After that they

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drove me to Angola. I don’t know if they had an official reason to take me
there or if they were just trying to scare the shit out of me.
“Baby, you all right?” my mom asked me on her first visit after I was
convicted.
I was back at Angola. We were in the visiting room of CCR. I lied to her
through the screen between us.
“Yeah, Mama, it’s OK. I’m going to be all right,” I told her.
I didn’t let any worries show on my face or in my actions.
“I’m going to get a new trial,” I said.
I didn’t believe I would get a new trial but I didn’t want to visit my pain
and suffering upon my mom or my family. When my family visited I always
went to great lengths to put my best face forward.
Back in my cell, I did the same. I’d been framed for murder, persecuted at
my trial, and wrongfully convicted. But I didn’t feel like a sacrificial lamb. I
felt like a member of the Black Panther Party. If anything, I had become more
of a revolutionary than I was before. In September of that year, 1973, I wrote
to a friend:
I view Amerikkka . . . and her lies, capitalism, imperialism, racism, exploitation, oppression, and
murder of the poor and oppressed people as being highly extreme. It is my opinion that anyone
who views these situations as anything other than extreme is a petty bourgeois or a capitalistic
fool!! History has taught us that revolution is a violent thing, but a highly necessary occurrence of
life. Revolution is bloodshed, deaths, sacrifices, hardships, nothing can and will change that. The
passing out of pamphlets is only a method of avoiding the unavoidable. It is the job of the
revolutionary forces in this country to manufacture revolution instead of trying to avoid it.

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