The conviction reached in the greatest sham trial these united states have ever known remains intact. It may remain intact forever, or nearly so. This is despite a complete lack of physical evidence, testimony given by witnesses all of whom later recanted, and long-term public outcry.
The convict is a man named Gary Tyler, and his case may be the most prominent example of government racism in the 20th (and now the 21st) century.
In 1975, two decades after Brown v. The Board of Education, Destrehan High School was to be integrated. The tensions resulting from this activity resulted, as might be expected, in fights between students. This prompted the school’s administration to cease the day’s indoctrination activities and send the black students home. Their bus was attacked by more than a hundred whites upset about the integration. One of them, a thirteen-year-old boy named Timothy Weber, was shot and mortally wounded. The police chose then-sixteen Gary Tyler as the victim of their “investigation,” and at that moment, his fate was sealed.
The investigation of Weber’s death found no gun in the black students’s bus or on the ground outside; perhaps the prosecution would have us believe that Gary Tyler threw the bullet with his hands. Tyler was beaten (that is, tortured) by the police in an attempt to force him to confess. Other witnesses, too, reported police intimidation.
The dishonorable subhuman David Duke of the KKK arrived in Destrehan, ostensibly to bring security in to protect white citizens against violence. I assert that he may have had ulterior motives for visiting, and implore the reader to draw his own conclusions.
Gary Tyler was tried as an adult and sentenced to death by electrocution. He was saved from this fate only because Louisiana’s capital punishment law was declared unconstitutional in 1977, and he was sentenced again, this time to life in prison.
Tyler’s case was appealed and his conviction overturned. The state appealed that appeal, and had him convicted again. In 1989, the Louisiana Board of Appeals ruled in favor of a pardon, but the spineless Republicrat governor Buddy Roemer declined to pardon him, fearing that such an act would cost him reelection. (He lost anyway, coming in third behind fellow loser David Duke and the alliteratively-named former governor and perennial racketeer Edwin Edwards.) Since then, his cause has been championed by journalists, celebrities, and organizations like Amnesty International.
Gary Tyler’s plight is not unheard of. It ought to serve as a rallying cry for all those who oppose the oppressive nation of the government (in)justice system. It ought to cause riots in the street, not occasional protest songs and news articles. Every democratically elected Louisiana Governor since 1975 (representing the will of their people, remember) should be publicly shamed for their failures to pardon him.
There is no conclusion to this essay, no call to action or argument. I have proven no thesis, and convinced you, reader, of no new philosophical idea. If anything, this is an illustration of one more government clusterfuck, one more unintended consequence of the state. There may be many more such clusterfucks in the legal system; many more men, black, white, or azure may rot in prison despite their innocence, their cases kept out of the public eye by obscurity and misfortune rather than fault of their own. Some may disagree with me as to the legitimacy of most modern laws, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who publicly favors holding in cages for life persons who’ve broken no laws. If there’s a possible state-sponsored solution to this institutional evil, I’d love to hear it.