Free Gary Tyler, Ossian Sweet, Clarence Darrow

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Freed Gary Tyler
Gary Tyler is free after 41 years in Angola prison. In 1974 he was 16, in a school bus attacked by some 200 furious whites raging against school desegregation. A shot was fired, a 13-year old white student was killed, and Tyler was the police pick for the shooter. No gun was found when the bus and the students in the bus, including Tyler, were searched; a gun, without fingerprints, was conveniently found in the bus hours later. The bus driver said there was no gun on the bus when it was first searched, and the shot came from outside the bus; the crowd wasn’t searched. The gun — which had been stolen from a firing range used by sheriff’s deputies — later disappeared from evidence. Four young “witnesses” at the trial later recanted their testimony and said the police forced them to lie. No evidence, sentenced to death.

There was a nationwide campaign for Tyler’s release in the 1970s. You can read his story here, and also in Democracy Now’s interview with Tyler’s mother and sister and the NY Times’ Bob Herbert, who had detailed the frame-up in a series of columns (“A Death in Destrahan” and “Gary Tyler’s Lost Decades”). The AP story on his release is “objective reporting,” and so doesn’t make clear the trial was “fundamentally unfair” (US Court of Appeals) and that Tyler maintained his innocence until he accepted a guilty plea in exchange for his release. The prison warden and three appeals boards recommended him for pardon; he did exemplary work as a prisoner in the hospice program and as president of the drama club.  We can contribute to the “Back-to-Life Reentry Fund” of the Liberty Hill Foundation, info at  http://freegarytyler.com/

Tyler was president of the drama club at Angola prison, where inmates produced this "Life of Jesus." Photo: http://castthefirststone-themovie.com/about-cast-the-first-stone/aboutuspage1-2/

Tyler was president of the drama club at Angola prison, where inmates produced this “Life of Jesus.”  Photo: “Cast the First Stone” documentary.

How Ossian Sweet stood his ground, defended by Clarence Darrow
Tyler was innocent, but suppose he had fired the shot while the bus was under attack. That would look to us a lot like a shot fired in self-defense … and that thought takes me to 1925 Detroit. A black doctor, Ossian Sweet,  moved into a white neighborhood, expecting trouble; family and friends armed themselves to defend the house. When hundreds in a maddened white mob attacked the house, shots were fired into the mob from the second floor, and one man was killed, another wounded. Naturally it was the Sweets and their friends who were arrested and put on trial.

Dr Ossian Sweet.

Dr Ossian Sweet arrested in 1925 with 10 friends and family after defending his house against a racist mob.

Clarence Darrow challenged the jury to overcome their racist bias. Photo: NY Public Library. http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1220202

Clarence Darrow challenged the jury to overcome their racist bias. Photo: NY Public Library.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The NAACP’s Walter White investigated the case and met with Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays, who became the lawyers for the defense. How could they persuade a racist all-white jury to acquit blacks who killed a white man in 1925 Detroit?

Darrow told the jury the trial was about racism, they were all prejudiced, but challenged them to transcend their prejudice. “My clients are charged with murder, but they are really charged with being black.” In a speech that lasted for hours on successive days, he showed the racist meaning of every detail of the narrative and the testimonies. Imagine the races of the Sweets and the mob were reversed, he said again and again, in a reframing that showed the Sweets as heroes and the mob as criminals (a “criminal organization,” according to Michigan law).  He closed, challenging the jury again, and again elevating their role: They were not deciding a criminal case, they were engaged in “a study of life” and a judgment on the future; they were deciding historic questions. “It is a study, gentlemen, in life, and very few jurors have ever been called upon to pass on as important a case as this.  You should not do it, and you will not do it, without considering what it means, what are its dangers and what are its hopes.”

I was struck that Darrow told the jury to acknowledge their racism without blaming them for it. Nothing here about white privilege or guilt, but an understanding of how we are all shaped by our culture, and despite this, how powerful our reason and feelings are that enable us to be just.

After a hung jury and later trial and acquittal of Henry Sweet, charges against the other defendants were dismissed. A very unusual trial, since one of the prosecutors and the judge admired Darrow, and Judge Frank Murphy was a progressive who came from a family of Irish revolutionaries. As governor of Michigan during the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike, Murphy sent the National Guard to protect the strikers and refused to eject them from the GM plant they were occupying. Roosevelt later appointed him to the Supreme Court.

More about the story here.

 

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