NATION : ’94 Release of La. Convict Urged
The Louisiana Pardon Board today recommended early release--by 1994--for Gary Tyler, a black man who contends an all-white jury wrongly convicted him of murdering a fellow teen-ager during racial violence in 1974.
Amnesty International and other organizations have urged freedom for Tyler, 31, who has spent much of his life on the state prison farm at Angola for a shooting that occurred when he was 16.
Tyler’s case has produced marches and rallies, and most recently petitions to the Pardon Board with more than 12,000 signatures. The British reggae band UB40 recorded a song about Tyler, and he was described by the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda in 1978 as a political prisoner.
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