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Gary Tyler | |
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 Gary Tyler, speaking at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 2017 | |
| Born | July 19 1958 (age 66) |
| Criminal status | Released April 29, 2016 |
| Conviction(s) | First degree murder; reduced to manslaughter in a plea agreement |
| Criminal penalty | Death; commuted to life imprisonment; further commuted to 21 years imprisonment |
| Website | freegarytyler |
Gary Tyler (born July 19, 1958), from St. Rose, Louisiana, is an African-American man who is a former prisoner at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola, Louisiana. He was convicted of the October 7, 1974 shooting death of a white 13-year-old boy and the wounding of another, on a day of violent protests by whites against black students at Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. He was tried as an adult and convicted of first-degree murder at age 17 by an all-white jury; he received the mandatory death sentence for that crime, according to state law. When he entered Louisiana State Prison (Angola), he was the youngest person on death row.
In 1976 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roberts v. Louisiana that the state's death penalty law was unconstitutional, as it required mandatory sentences for convictions of certain capital charges, without consideration of mitigating factors. The Supreme Court ordered state court reviews and the commutation of sentences of persons on death row to the next lower level of punishment. Tyler's sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole for 20 years.
His defense appealed the conviction. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in 1980 that Tyler's trial had convicted him on "unconstitutional charges" and was "fundamentally unfair"; it remanded the case to the lower courts and ordered a new trial. But on state appeal, it changed its ruling in 1981, saying that attorney error by Tyler's original defense counsel did not allow redress. Tyler was recommended by the state parole board for a pardon, but governors had failed to act on this.
Many observers believe that Tyler was wrongfully convicted, as his trial and defense were seriously flawed. Tyler's cause was taken up again in 2007 by human rights organizations and a variety of public figures after his case was reviewed by a columnist of the New York Times. In 2012 the United States Supreme Court ruled that persons who were minors at the time of a crime for which they were convicted, could not be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, and applied this retroactively. It ordered state courts to review such cases. Tyler was released in 2016 after the state arranged a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter, which had a maximum sentence of 21 years; since he had already served nearly twice that, he was released from prison. Following Tyler's release from prison, no further police action was taken to identify the murderer which remains unsolved to this day.