Chasing Gideon (22 page)

“Yeah, he was sleeping in bed.”

“And he pulled a gun on you?” Julien said, referring to the defendants.

“Right.”

“Which one, who was it?”

“He didn't pull one on me. It was my kid.”

“He held a gun to your kid's head?”

“Right.”

“How old is your child?”

“Well, at the time he was a year and four months, maybe five or six. Really I couldn't say, but he was a year and something like that.”

“Did you get a look at that person?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Did you see who that person was?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Who was that person?”

“It was that dude right there,” she said, pointing to Earl.

“Who else was in the room?”

“The other guy next to him.”

“Now, Miss Robertson, did you call the police after this happened?”

“Did I call the police immediately after that?”

“Right, immediately after.”

“No, I didn't.”

“What did you do?”

“Really, okay, I took—I talked to Housing Authorities. My intentions wasn't to call the police period because of my protection, and also my child's. So—”

“Why did you call the Housing Authorities?”

“To get out of the apartment. I wanted to move out the apartment.” The Housing Authority called the police for her.

Julien returned to the question of what she saw the night of the murder. “Did you have any trouble seeing who walks by your window?”

“No trouble at all,” Robertson assured him.

Zibilich and Haggerty cross-examine her for thirteen minutes, asking her again what she saw that night, why she did not immediately report what she saw to the police, whether she knew the defendants, and so on.

The state entered a few items into evidence—some photos, the autopsy report—and rested its case.

“Very well,” the judge said.

“If Your Honor please, on behalf of Mr. Bright, the defense rests,” said Zibilich.

Without calling a single witness on behalf of his client, Zibilich concluded the murder trial in fewer than two hours. Though Greg's eight subpoenaed witnesses sat in the courthouse hallway waiting to be called into the courtroom, several of them alibi witnesses ready to explain where Greg had been that night, Zibilich did not avail himself of them. The judge called a brief recess.

Greg recalls conferring with his attorney: “He said he wasn't going to use the alibi witnesses because he thought it would aggravate the jury, who he said were tired and aggravated that the trial was taking so long.” (Later, Zibilich would argue that he didn't think Greg's witnesses were credible.)

Meanwhile, Earl Truvia was having a similar conversation with his attorney, who advised against calling witnesses or letting Truvia himself testify. “He said the jurors were under the impression that we was guilty and the jurors wanted to leave and he said only—if we were to testify, it would only aggravate our situation.”
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Back in the courtroom, both Zibilich and Haggerty failed to put forward any alternate scenario for the murder, and indeed declined to deliver a closing argument altogether. The jury quickly returned a verdict: Guilty of murder in the second degree. Both Greg and Earl were sentenced to “serve the balance of their natural lives at hard labor in the custody of the department of corrections.” It was Earl's eighteenth birthday.

Louisiana, as noted before, leads the country in imprisoning more of its residents per capita than any other state, standing at the fore-front of what is really a national trend of over-incarceration. Fueled by the War on Drugs (which has many citizens arrested for possession of small amounts), an increasing tendency to hold more people pretrial with higher bonds, and a tough-on-crime policy reflected in mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the number of people incarcerated in the United States has shot up from 300,000 thirty years ago to more than 2 million today.
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Convinced by law enforcement and prosecutors that judges were doling out uneven penalties based on race and socioeconomic status, Congress and state legislatures adopted mandatory minimum penalties, primarily in drug cases. What sounded like good policy at the time essentially shifted the power to adjust a sentence based on factors such as age or family circumstances from judges to prosecutors. So, for instance, the sale of a small amount of drugs prior to the adoption of mandatory minimums might have merited a sentence ranging from probation to ten years. Mandatory minimums, however, would prevent the judge from imposing a sentence any lower than five years. The prosecutor, on the other hand, has the ability to charge the defendant under a different statute that doesn't carry a mandatory minimum (conspiracy, possession, use of a telephone to facilitate a drug crime), but the defendant must plead guilty and pay whatever other price the prosecutor exacts in negotiations. “Cooperation,” or becoming an informant, is often required by the prosecutor as the cost of freeing the judge up to consider a lower sentence.

In federal prisons, the numbers of inmates who had received a mandatory sentence rose by 155 percent between 1995 and 2010, from 29,603 to 75,579, according to a 2011 report by the United States Sentencing Commission.
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Because the number of offenses carrying mandatory minimums has increased so rapidly, inmates serving time in federal prison under such penalties make up almost 40 percent of the prison population. Once again, Louisiana leads the way, with some of the harshest sentencing laws in the country. Three drug convictions can land a person in jail for life, without parole. And the legislature is micromanaging the kinds of sentences meted out, for example, passing a law in 2005 to mandate punishment for thieves stealing sacks of crawfish from ponds, a crime that can send a person away for ten years “depending on the value of the crustaceans,” the
Times-Picayune
reported in May 2012.
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As a result of these trends, Louisiana has seen an explosion in its prison population, with one out of every eighty-six residents doing time in 2012. In the aforementioned series on incarceration in the state, “Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital,”
Times-Picayune
reporters follow the money to reveal
who is profiting from the prison boom that swept the state in the '90s. In the debut article in the series on May 13, 2012, reporter Cindy Chang reports that 53 percent of the state's inmates are housed in “local prisons run by sheriffs or private companies like LaSalle Corrections for the express purpose of making a buck.” Chang explains that sheriffs or private companies such as LaSalle Corrections pay small parishes for the privilege of operating the prisons. For example, Jackson Parish, with a population of sixteen thousand residents, gets $100,000 from LaSalle for the privilege of running a 1,147-bed prison there—and the added advantage of one-hundred-plus new jobs for locals working to run the place. Jackson's local sheriff, Andy Brown, who gets a brand-new workforce of deputies at the prison, proudly told the
Times-Picayune
that it was a win-win situation for his small community: “There's a lot of patronage here by hiring all these people. . . . We employ X number of people and don't spend any money, plus the $100,000-a-year sponsor fee. I get the patronage.” These local, privately run prisons also house lots of overflow prisoners from the crowded city jails in New Orleans and Baton Rouge—and then try to squeeze a profit from the $24.39 a day they get for each prisoner. (Louisiana spends less than any other place in the country on its inmates.) The privately run local prisons make Angola, a state-run prison, look like the Ritz. Clay McConnell, who inherited the LaSalle prison empire from his father, doesn't dispute that he's after the bottom line. “We realized that prisons are like nursing homes,” he told the
Times-Picayune
, referring to the family's prior experience in the nursing home business. “You need occupancy to be high. You have to treat people fairly and run a good ship, but run it like a business, watch food costs, employee costs.” This “incarceration on the cheap,” Chang reports, typically means no rehab services, no GED programs, no classes to learn a trade. “If you are sentenced to state time in Louisiana, odds are you will be placed in a local prison—a low-budget, for-profit enterprise where you are likely to languish in your bunk, day after day, year after year, bored out of your skull with little chance to learn a trade or otherwise improve yourself.”

Later, writing about the 4,500 aging prisoners who are in Angola serving life without the possibility of parole, Chang notes, “while
most have committed violent crimes, nearly one in 10 are locked up forever on drug or other nonviolent offenses.” Further, “[t]hree out of four are African-American men.” Here, in the state-run prison, the Department of Corrections gets slightly more per prisoner ($55 a day, though this is still less than any other state) and they at least offer classes. “The dormitories at Angola sleep about 80 men and have heating in the winter but no air conditioning,” one caption in the series read. “Even under the spartan living conditions, a lifer who enters prison in his early 20s will cost taxpayers more than $1 million if he lives past 70. The prisoners have the opportunity to learn a trade, including air-conditioning repair.”

Meanwhile, in the city of New Orleans, conditions at the Orleans Parish Prison are notoriously bad. Still, the numbers of incarcerated swell. On the surface, the numbers of incarcerated—and the overcrowding and understaffing in the prisons—appear to have little to do with the problems at the city's public defender's office. But studying the “perfect storm” of problems in the criminal justice system here makes apparent the monetary disincentives and the power imbalances that fuel troubles in the public defender's program here, and in similarly strapped cities nationwide. Prisons, and who controls and fills them, shape policy and reform efforts.

Historically, New Orleans marches lockstep with the nation in this regard. In the 1970s, when New Orleans's population was larger than it is now, the jail had 800 beds. By the time Katrina hit the city in 2005, that number had grown to 8,000 beds. “We have 300,000 [residents] in New Orleans now, which, based on the national average, means we should have 800 or 850 beds in the jail,” insists Henderson, of VOTE and Resurrection After Exoneration. “One in fourteen black men from New Orleans is behind bars, compared with one in 141 white men,” the
Times-Picayune
reported, and “[o] ne in seven men from the city is either in prison, on probation or on parole.”
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In the aftermath of Katrina, which destroyed huge swathes of the massive Orleans Parish Prison, multiple circus-style tents were erected to “temporarily” house inmates; seven years later, the tents are still housing prisoners.

In March 2012, the U.S. Marshals Service pulled all its prisoners from the facility due to concerns about safety, the rampant violence, inadequate medical care, and the many deaths that occurred in the facility in the previous five years.

Then, a week later, on April 4, 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class-action suit against Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, who runs the New Orleans jail—or Orleans Parish Prison, as it is called—in United States District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana.
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The suit is one of two hundred lawsuits filed against the jail in the preceding three years. The 3,400-bed jail, which holds mostly people awaiting trial, is a massive complex stretching several blocks behind the courthouse, and more than 35,000 people each year are processed through intake. The Law Center alleges, “Violence is rampant.” (To back this up, Southern Poverty Law Center lawyers spoke to dozens of current and past prisoners and studied ambulance records, noting that for the month of February 2012 alone, deputies called for ambulances twenty-three times to transport prisoners to the hospital for “fractures, puncture wounds, lacerations, trauma and the like” and this did not include medical emergencies handled on site.) The facility is understaffed, the lawsuit alleges, leaving prisoners in huge dormitories to police themselves for most of the day while a single guard watches hundreds from an enclosed booth. “The people imprisoned at OPP live in unconstitutional and inhumane conditions and endure great risks to their safety and security. . . . Because OPP is dangerously understaffed and because existing staff lack the training and supervision necessary to care for the people in their custody, corruption and violence are rampant.” In the tents, there is one deputy per eighty-eight prisoners; in the House of Detention, a multistory building, one deputy supervises sixty prisoners. “The classification system is inadequate, and fails to screen for prisoners with enemies, as well as fails to sort prisoners into dorms according to propensity for violence or risk of harm. Prisoners face threats to their lives and safety on an almost daily basis, and struggle to secure even the most basic services at OPP. Mental health care is dangerously deficient, exacerbating—and in some instances causing—the violent crises within the facility.”
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Although national statistics indicate that 64 percent of inmates in local jails suffer from mental illness, the lawsuit notes that in the Orleans Parish Prison there is a policy of suspending all medication for a minimum of thirty days upon admission. “This makes people living with mental illness particularly susceptible to abuse because symptoms of their mental illness begin to manifest acutely when they are denied medication,” lawyers assert in the complaint. The one full-time psychiatrist in the 3,400-bed facility, the complaint alleges, “does not conduct minimally adequate assessments or review necessary information before diagnosing (or dismissing) patients and making determinations about whether to prescribe medication. They elaborate: