This week, two decades-old cases involving men with innocence claims reached final resolution: Louisiana inmate Gary Tyler (pictured) was released after 42 years in prison and Paul Gatling was exonerated in New York more than 50 years after his wrongful conviction. Both men had once faced the death penalty. Tyler was convicted and sentenced to death for the fatal shooting of a 13-year-old white boy in 1974 during a riot over school integration. A white mob had attacked a bus filled with black students, including Tyler. After the shooting, Tyler was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace for talking back to a sheriff’s deputy. The bus and students were searched, but no weapon was found. Police later claimed to have found a gun on the bus during a later search. That gun turned out to have been stolen from a firing range used by the sheriff’s department. Tyler was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury when he was 17 years old. His death sentence was overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Louisiana’s mandatory death penalty statute unconstitutional in 1976, and his life sentence was recently overturned after the Supreme Court barred mandatory life sentences for juvenile offenders. Tyler was released on April 29, after the district attorney’s office agreed to vacate his murder conviction, allow him to plead guilty to manslaughter, and receive the maximum sentence of 21 years, less than half the time he had already served. Mary Howell, one of Tyler’s attorneys, said, “This has been a long and difficult journey for all concerned. I feel confident that Gary will continue the important work he began years ago while in prison, to make a real difference in helping to mentor young people faced with difficult challenges in their lives.” On May 2, 81-year-old Paul Gatling was exonerated. Brooklyn prosecutors charged Gatling with capital murder in 1963 despite the fact that he did not fit the description of the killer and no physical evidence linked him to the killing. He pled guilty to second-degree murder after his lawyer told him he would get the death penalty if the case went to trial. Governor Nelson Rockefeller commuted Gatling’s sentence in 1974 and he was released from prison, but he continued to seek exoneration, in part, because his conviction prevented him from voting. Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, whose Conviction Review Unit reinvestigated the case, said, “Paul Gatling repeatedly proclaimed his innocence even as he faced the death penalty back in the 60s. He was pressured to plead guilty and, sadly, did not receive a fair trial.… We’re here because Mr. Gatling would not let go of his demand to be deemed innocent.”
(“Gary Tyler a free man after more than 4 decades in Angola,” Associated Press, April 29, 2016; B. Herbert, “Gary Tyler’s Lost Decades,” The New York Times, February 5, 2007; M. Lennihan, “More than 50 years later, Virginia man exonerated for NYC killing,” CBS News, May 2, 2016.) See Race and Innocence.
