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

Chapter 38
My Trial, 1998
I recognized Malik sitting with my brother as soon as I walked into the
courtroom. We both had gray in our hair now. Everyone else, except for my
family and my childhood friend Ernest, was a stranger: Geronimo Ji-Jaga’s
wife, Ashaki Pratt, was there, as well as Luis Talamantez, former Panther
Gail Shaw from Sacramento, and several activists from New Orleans. I hated
that I had to sit with my back to everybody during the trial. During recesses, I
turned and spoke to people, even though I wasn’t supposed to. Some guards
kept trying to get between us but I felt such an overwhelming gratitude for
these people that I kept turning to acknowledge them, to meet their eyes and
nod my head to thank them.
From the first moments of my trial it was clear my lawyers Bert
Garraway and Clay Calhoun were no match for Julie Cullen. No fewer than
five lawyers from the DA’s office sat on the prosecution’s side every day.
My attorneys were underprepared and outmaneuvered in every way. Cullen
used every dirty trick she could to establish doubt of my innocence and to
cover up the truth. She also made inflammatory statements about the Black
Panther Party and about Brent Miller’s murder. Miller had 32 stab wounds,
including a 5¾-inch stab wound that punctured his trachea from the top of his
left shoulder, allowing blood to get into his lungs, which is what killed him.
Cullen asked the coroner if Miller felt pain before he died. “Yes,” the coroner
said.
The guard who found Miller’s body said there was “a lot of blood” and
Miller was lying in a pool of blood. In spite of that, Cullen got the coroner to
say it was possible that Miller could sustain the stab wounds that killed him
seated on Hezekiah Brown’s bed (which is where Brown swore Miller was
sitting when he was surrounded by four men and attacked) and not bleed on
the bed. Miller could have “jumped up” from the bed immediately, the

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coroner said, resulting in “no blood” on the bed. Nobody asked how he could
have been pulled off the bed to the floor behind where he was sitting, which
is what “witnesses” testified, without ruffling the bedcovers.
Prosecutor Cullen told jurors I killed Brent Miller because I hated white
people and that my affiliation with the Black Panther Party proved that I
advocated violence against white people. The murder of Brent Miller, she
said, was a “hate crime,” a “racially motivated Black Panther murder.”
To help her paint the picture of my supposed racism and militancy,
Cullen told jurors about the letter I wrote—that authorities had apparently
lost, because the letter was never produced—to former Panther Shirley
Duncan from CCR in 1972, in which I wrote that white racists should be
killed and I spelled America with three 
k
s. Since Cullen didn’t have the letter,
she called the former classification officer who worked at Angola at the time
to review a note he wrote to the warden 
about 
the letter. From reading that
note he described the letter, testifying that Shirley Duncan was removed from
my visitors list after I wrote the letter. The letter was supposedly bad enough
to remove a visitor from my list but the classification officer never wrote up a
disciplinary report on me for writing the letter. (His memo to the warden
about the letter was also dated seven months after Duncan was actually
removed from my list.)
After Hezekiah Brown’s testimony from my 1973 trial was read to jurors
in full (by a police officer sitting in the witness stand), Cullen called John
Sinquefield, the DA who prosecuted me in 1973, to the stand. Sinquefield
was allowed to describe Brown’s “truthfulness,” demeanor, and alleged
sincerity when he questioned Brown back in 1973, saying that Brown
“testified in a good strong voice, he was very spontaneous, he answered
questions quickly and he was very fact-specific.” Continuing, Sinquefield
said, “I was proud of the way he testified. I thought it took a lot of courage.”
Garraway didn’t object.
Furthering their narrative that I was a racist who hated white people
Sinquefield testified he was in the courtroom in New Orleans the day I
entered in 1970 after being gassed while wearing restraints and I raised my
fists, saying, “Look what these racist fascist pigs have done to me.”
Since we couldn’t question Hezekiah Brown on the stand about the lies he
told, we had to try to show through the testimony of other witnesses that
Brown had lied. We put former warden C. Murray Henderson on the stand,

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and he testified that immediately after Brown “told us his story” about me,
Herman, and Chester Jackson he was transferred to the more comfortable
“dog pen” to live. Henderson acknowledged that he requested that Brown
receive a carton of cigarettes each week in exchange for his “help” in the
Miller murder and that he sent a letter to the governor asking the governor to
pardon Brown. He sent another letter to the trial judge asking for a
recommendation for Brown’s pardon and offered to appear before the pardon
board on Brown’s behalf. Brown’s clemency advertisement, he said, came
from prison funds. (In those days prisoners had to place ads in local papers
when asking for a pardon, to give the community a chance to react.) When
Brown’s sentence was commuted to “time served” in 1986 he had more than
$900 in his prison account, even though, Henderson testified, Brown didn’t
have a job, suggesting that Hezekiah Brown was also paid in cash for
testifying against us. “He didn’t earn money at Angola,” Henderson said. “He
had no relatives or anybody that came to see him.” Henderson also
acknowledged that when Hayden Dees sent two prisoners—Joseph Richey
and Paul Fobb—to the very comfortable police barracks in exchange for their
testimony against me, it was not with his permission and, he confessed, it was
“outside the scope of a normal investigation.” The state police barracks was
reserved for the most privileged inmates in the state prison system. Prisoners
there worked as servants at the governor’s mansion.
On the subject of Gilbert Montegut, who was placed at the scene of the
murder by Hezekiah Brown but found not guilty at his trial with Herman in
1973, former warden Henderson admitted, “In my presence he [Brown]
never, ever named Gilbert Montegut.” Former captain Hilton Butler also
admitted on the stand that he didn’t think Montegut was present for Brent
Miller’s killing. This hadn’t stopped either of them from allowing Montegut,
a man they knew was innocent, to go to trial and possibly be convicted and
sentenced to life in prison.
Former captain Wyman Beck repeated the testimony he gave at Herman’s
trial: that he saw Montegut at the hospital the morning of Miller’s murder. A
former prison hospital worker also testified he saw Montegut in the hospital’s
bullpen on the morning of the murder and that after he heard that Montegut
was charged with murder he discussed it with Beck, who “didn’t think he
[Montegut] could have been involved,” at which point his testimony was cut
off by Cullen’s objection. The hospital worker testified that he and Captain
Beck agreed that “it would be pretty difficult for Montegut to be involved in

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[the murder] and be in the hospital at the same time.” Meanwhile, Joseph
Richey testified that after he “saw” me run from the dorm he “saw” Gilbert
Montegut exiting Pine 1 after the guard’s murder, “walking at a pace that
made me think he was late for chow.”
Former captain Hilton Butler took the stand and testified he recalled
being interviewed by Anne Butler and C. Murray Henderson about the Miller
killing for their book, but he “wasn’t sure” if he said “you could put words in
Hezekiah’s mouth.” The judge wouldn’t allow us to play the taped recording
of Butler saying that. My attorney read what he said to the jurors. The state
knew there was no physical evidence linking me to the murder, so Julie
Cullen presented a new, purposefully confusing theory—that the bloody
fingerprint left at the scene of Miller’s murder that didn’t match me, Herman,
or anyone officials accused of the murder wasn’t really a fingerprint. An
“expert witness” who worked in the State Troopers department testified the
fingerprint was a “partial palm-print,” undermining the significance of the
fingerprint not matching me, even though it was deemed “strongly
identifiable” in 1972 and 1973. The fact that the bloody fingerprint left at the
scene of Miller’s murder didn’t match mine—along with the fact that
deputies and prison officials never tested that print against every prisoner
who was on the walk the day Miller was killed—might have exonerated me
in the eyes of the jury. Prosecutor Cullen knew that. She intentionally
muddied the waters. And she didn’t inform my lawyers about her new
“partial palm print” theory until right before the expert took the stand on the
day of the expert’s testimony, a violation of courtroom procedure. She told
the judge she had not received a written report on the palm print theory. Later
her own expert testified that she had told Cullen about the theory the previous
year, in 1997.
I told Garraway to ask the judge for a mistrial on grounds of prosecutorial
misconduct. The court denied the motion, ruling that we should have had our
own fingerprint expert in court who could have disputed Cullen’s witness. He
reminded Garraway that state funds had been available to us for that.
Cullen repeatedly used underhanded tactics to confuse the jury. Through
her line of questioning she revealed the substance of evidence the judge had
ruled inadmissible. For example, she wanted jurors to see an unsigned,
undated statement handwritten by a former Angola captain the night after
Miller was killed that the judge ruled inadmissible. The statement was
attributed to Leonard “Specs” Turner and was supposedly given to former

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Angola captain C. Ray Dixon the day before Turner was to be paroled. She
put Turner on the stand and he testified he didn’t make the statement. While
she questioned Turner, Cullen essentially revealed the contents of the
statement.
My attorneys didn’t object once. This exchange has been edited to show
Cullen’s tactic, with other questions she asked in between removed.