Gary Tyler Spent 42 Years on Death Row. Racism Put Him There.
Gary Tyler, 67, spent more than four decades on death row in one of the most notorious prisons in the country for a crime he didn’t commit.
In 1974, Tyler was one of a group of Black students bused into a formerly all-white Louisiana high school under court-ordered desegregation. When a white mob attacked their bus on October 16, a white boy was killed. Tyler became a suspect, was tried as an adult and convicted of first-degree murder by an all-white jury. Tyler received a death sentence and was sent to Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the country, at only 17.
Tyler’s case represents how racial discrimination and systemic injustice continue to infect our legal system. As a new ACLU report explains, the modern death penalty grew directly out of the racist legacy of lynching, and that history continues to shape who is charged, convicted, and sentenced to die today.
Since 1973, shortly before Tyler’s arrest, at least 200 people have been exonerated from death row. More than half were Black. Our research shows the same patterns again and again: official misconduct is the leading cause of wrongful capital convictions, especially for Black defendants; false testimony appears in nearly 70 percent of wrongful death-penalty cases; eyewitness misidentification contributes to more than one in five; and unreliable or discredited forensic evidence plays a role in about a third. These errors are compounded by juries that are disproportionately white – like in Tyler’s case – due to discriminatory jury selection, and by police, prosecutors, judges, and jurors operating under both implicit and explicit racial bias.
The human toll of each wrongful conviction is enormous. Tyler spent more than 40 years in Angola. During that time, his supporters and lawyers attempted to raise awareness about the racial discrimination that plagued his case. In 2016, 42 years after he was wrongfully convicted, Tyler was released from prison at age 57. Many people like Tyler are never released. Since 1976, at least 21 people have been executed even though they were very likely innocent.
Tyler’s memoir, Stitching Freedom, exposes the injustices in the American legal system, tracing his journey from his arrest and conviction as a teenager, through the brutal realities of Angola prison, to his eventual release and ongoing fight for justice. Tyler recently joined the ACLU to discuss how discrimination in the American legal system can lead to wrongful convictions and devastating sentences for the innocent.
ACLU: Your story shows how quickly a community’s fear and anger can turn into a demand for punishment. When you look back on the external pressure to “solve” the crime in your case, what do you see about how that pressure shaped what happened to you?
TYLER: At the time of my trial, white Americans in the South were actively pushing back against the freedoms the Civil Rights Movement were securing for Black Americans. That included busing Black children to white schools. White Americans felt they’d been personally targeted. This political environment directly impacted the outcome in my case.
For Black defendants like me, there was no benefit of the doubt or real due process. That’s why we had so many Blacks lynched and murdered. Any Black person who spoke up about mistreatment was automatically targeted and treated like a perpetrator. The police department would get a defendant and beat him, trying to get a confession.
Exacerbating the bias in my case was that, at the time of my arrest, Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke had been in Boston protesting busing with former Representative Louise Hicks, a staunch opponent of segregation. Duke saw what happened in my small Louisiana town as a chance to galvanize the white community to foment racial hatred and take vengeance. This meant a Black person accused of killing a white person was going to have to pay with his life.
ACLU: You’ve spoken about the misconduct and false testimony that led to your conviction. What do you think drives people within the system—police, prosecutors, even witnesses—to cross that line between mistake and misconduct?
TYLER: What drives far too many police and prosecutors is racial bias and wanting to hold onto power by criminalizing the innocent. In my case, they coerced the students on the bus to get them to say things that fit the police narrative. Officers preyed on the fears of adolescents, threatening long prison terms if these young people didn’t lie in their testimony. It was an abuse of power designed to protect the power they claimed for themselves. It was clear the priority was to reach a conviction, regardless of whether or not they had the right person.
ACLU: Our report points out that wrongful convictions are not accidents but predictable outcomes of bias and pressure. From your perspective, what changes—or reckonings—would have to happen before you’d call the system “just”?
TYLER: We need big, systemic changes to stop injustice and make a difference. Prisons shouldn’t be for warehousing people and making profits for big corporations. When I went to prison in 1974, there were 300,000 people in prisons across the country. Now there’s more than 2.2 million. The prison-industrial complex is about profiting off people’s free labor, imposing excessive sentences, and forcing people to confess in plea deals.
We need to mandate changes so due process is implemented across the board. There needs to be thorough investigations; vetting of police methods to stop coerced confessions and plea deals; fair and proper representation for the accused, not just a public defender who lacks experience and funds to effectively represent their client; and trials that are actually speedy. We need an end to the death penalty and excessive sentences, greater reliance on restorative justice. Importantly, juries need to be thoroughly vetted and chosen according to the racial make-up of the area to really be a jury of peers. Ultimately, we need a reimagination of the system from one that is designed for profit, utilizing human labor for pennies, to one that is a place for education, training, and rehabilitation.
ACLU: You spent more than four decades inside Angola, a prison built on the grounds of a former plantation. How did that setting shape your understanding of race, punishment, and the legacy of slavery in America?
TYLER: I didn’t know the prison was a former slave plantation when I got there. I also didn’t know about the convict leasing that took place after the Civil War, where states leased out prisoners, overwhelmingly Black men, to private businesses as a source of cheap labor. I didn’t know about the laws that allowed police to arrest Black people for so-called “vagrancy” just to force them to work, often for the same plantations that had enslaved them.
But I saw that the way Black Americans were treated when we were enslaved was replicated at the prison: guards were brutal, prisoners were forced to work in the fields to pick cotton for practically nothing, and prisoners were denied education. I saw how the prison allotted certain privileges to white prisoners, how cells and dorms and jobs were all segregated.
Older, politically-engaged prisoners helped educate me about these racist legacies, and about the need to inform the public about what had happened to me. They gave me books about class and race and the history of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery except for those convicted of a crime.
ACLU: In Stitching Freedom, you write about turning to quilting as a form of survival. How did creativity become a path to reclaiming your humanity when the system tried to strip it away?
TYLER: During my time at Angola, I joined a hospice program to support my fellow inmates, particularly those impacted by the AIDS crisis in the 80s. Quilting was a way for hospice volunteers to do something for the program. We had only meager donations. We wanted to meet the needs of the dying, give them decent things like a radio, soap, books and magazines, good food, pajamas and slippers. Once I realized that I could use applique in quilting, I started making quilts with artistic designs and themes like the rodeo, quilts that had a message and dealt with prison life. My friends called me Nyeusi Kuumba, or Black Creativity. I knew this was an avenue for me to keep my sanity and humanity, knowing it would bring a smile to those I made the quilts for and also tell a story.
After I got out, I wanted my quilts to reflect on the lives of those serving time in prison. I wanted to reflect my experience at Angola and my encounters with other people, and how my life transitioned into what it is today. I wanted to show defiance, and the humanity of those incarcerated.
ACLU: Now that you’re free and sharing your story, what do you hope people understand, not just about wrongful convictions, but about the human cost of a system that still carries those same roots of racial violence?
TYLER: The human cost is enormous. It is impossible to measure the psychological trauma and economic hardship imparted on the incarcerated, their families and their communities. This carceral system uses the labor of Black people for private profit and, at the same time, denies them effective medical attention, decent nutrition and access to a high standard of education that allows them to be employed once they’re out. People question the high rate of recidivism without realizing how it is related to the lack of economic opportunity and preparedness. Marginalizing people has devastating consequences and adds to the growing inequality that maintains poverty and great harm for children, families and communities.
Published November 21, 2025 at 01:53AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/93W6cxF
