The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to Rattling the Bars. This is the court of public opinion. And when justice fails to show up in America’s courtroom, we bring the truth here before the people convicted in 1980 at the age of 19, Lloyd Gray was sent to prison even though prosecutors failed to meet their burden and two black jurors refused to vote guilty in almost any other state that would have meant a hung jury, no conviction. But Louisiana and Oregon at the time allowed for non-unanimous jury verdicts, a Jim Crow policy explicitly designed to silence Black jurors and funnel Black defendants into prison. These split jury verdicts were recently ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and yet more than 1,000 Black people in Louisiana remain behind bars under these tainted convictions. Today, we are joined by Erica Navalance with the Promise of Justice Initiative, an attorney for Lloyd Gray, who will help us understand how deep the legacy of racial injustice runs in the American legal system.

Erica Navalance:

Jim Crow, the Jim Crow era is kind of the era that we talk about after the Civil War. So you’ve got the Civil War. You no longer can keep people enslaved. And so sort of the next 40 or 50 years is what we call the Jim Crow era. And that essentially is where white supremacists were trying their best and the white supremacist culture was doing their best to keep power consolidated with white people. So as soon as slavery is no longer legal, Black people in the country started gaining more and more power. And I think one thing that’s important to think about with the Jim Crow era is I think sometimes we give the white supremacists of the time too much power. We think about them as promoting white supremacy. But what was actually happening is black people were recognizing their own power and pushing for it.

And so what was happening in Jim Crow wasn’t really this new, in the way I understand it, this new revitalization of white supremacy, it was the white people who had had power losing some of it to black people and doing their best to just preserve the power that they already … Equality feels like something is being taken from you when you were the one with all the power to begin with. So what Jim Crow really was, was an attempt to keep that power with white people and keep … The federal constitution and the federal government kept pushing more and more power for people of color and pretty much everybody who wasn’t a white male property owner. And so those white male property owners did everything that they could to preserve their power and create a system of law that kept the power with them and prevented other people from self-actualizing their own.

Mansa Musa:

And that’s a good opportunity. I’m glad you made that observation because that is in fact the reality. Voting rights, people stop, minority black people stop voting. So you have elected officials that come in, there’s no policymakers, but because of the control of all the institutions in the South, they was able to mandate, legislate, and regulate policies and procedures that was designed primarily to keep stay in power. Let’s talk about the Jim Core juries during this time. And more importantly, the split jury decision. These laws were crafted primarily to lose Black jury votes and to ensure the prosecutors could get convictions of any and everybody, but in this case, Black people and why they were deemed unconstitutional first. And why Louisiana is the last state where these old convictions still stand.

Erica Navalance:

Essentially in the, like I said, the 1860s, 1870s, all the way through the 18, I mean, really up until the 1960s, but sort of in the last half of the 1800s, the federal government was requiring states to give more and more rights to people of color. And one of the things that the federal government said every state needed to do was allow black people to serve on juries. And so we saw states were no longer allowed to just say, juries are all white, no Black person can serve on a jury. They had to allow Black people to start serving. And so what states started doing were finding other ways to make their vote not count. And that’s what happened in Louisiana. They said, okay. The government essentially said, “If you are going to require us to allow Black people to serve on juries, we will change our jury law

To make sure that their vote doesn’t matter.” So if the government is going to say they have to be in that room, we’ll just make it so their voice doesn’t have to be heard. Even if their body is there, their voice doesn’t get to be. And so what they did was they looked at how many people of color were in the state of Louisiana and they said, “Okay, statistically about two Black people, if we are not allowed to discriminate against them at all, about two Black people will make it onto the jury. So we’ll allow, instead of 12 out of 12 required, 10 out of 12.” So if both Black people on that jury vote to acquit somebody, they’re still convicted. And so that’s essentially how they just developed. They didn’t get rid of that discrimination. They just developed it to look different. And that was the law in Louisiana up until 2018.

And in 2018, Louisiana changed its constitution perspectively. So moving forward, there was a case that came out of the Supreme Court in 2020, and they also said, no more non-unanimous jury verdicts moving forward. And that was a case that my organization, the Promise of Justice Initiative brought.

So once the United States Supreme Court said jury verdicts by 10 out of 12 people are not constitutional moving forward, the Promise of Justice Initiative went into all of the prisons in Louisiana and tried to find everybody who was serving time on a non-unanimous jury verdict. And at the time in 2020 and in 2021, the Promise of Justice Initiative filed on behalf of over a thousand people who had been convicted by a jury of either 11-1 or 10-2. And I think it’s also important to know there were only two states that had this law. It was Oregon and Louisiana. Oregon and Louisiana allowed people to be convicted without a unanimous jury verdict. What’s even more unique and a little bit more devastating in Louisiana is we were the only state that allows people to serve a life sentence on a non-unanimous jury verdict. So even in Oregon, if you were facing a charge that required you to serve life, they required their juries to be non-unanimous. But in a state like Louisiana where so many crimes have mandatory life sentences, at the time about a thousand men and women who were serving convictions where one or two people on their jury did not think that the government proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt. So we tried to bring a challenge saying, “Well, if it’s wrong moving forward, if it’s unconstitutional moving forward, then that should apply to the thousand or so people who are currently serving time on that unconstitutional law.” If it’s racist now in 2020, it was racist back in 1980

When my client was convicted. And so that is the case that made its way through the system. And unfortunately, in Oregon, they believed yes, that should apply moving forward and retrospectively looking backward. Unfortunately in Louisiana, Louisiana Supreme Court did not agree. And so they have now said, according to the court, moving forward, no more non-unanimous jury verdicts, but everybody who was previously convicted under that law is remaining incarcerated. So we still have the Promise of Justice Initiative still has hundreds of clients who are serving out their sentences, many, many of them with life without parole sentences that never had a constitutional verdict.

Mansa Musa:

And the case was Ramos versus Louisiana? Yes,

Erica Navalance:

Exactly.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And so, all right, so they don’t give it retroactivity, they don’t make it retroactive

Decision. Can you unpack why? Because like I told you earlier, and I got out under jury instruction and we was fighting these jury called advisory instruction, and they was written into the state constitution that said that the court will give advisory instructions only. And the court and all instructions relative to the law is binding under the law. But the court would come up and say, “I’m giving you advisory instruction only as it relates to the law and the facts. Anything I tell you, you don’t have to apply, you can apply your own standard.” We was challenging us in the 50s all the way up to decision started coming out, challenging them and coming ruling in our favor, but wasn’t retroactive. Then we wind up getting one of the descending judges that had a history of always descending on these instructions and telling the courts it was unconstitutional.

They finally made him the chief, the minority judge and issue an opinion. When he gave his opinion, not only did he make it retroactive, but he was blistering when terms of talking bad about the court and how they had always been … But why is Louisiana … Why did the court did not apply retroactively and how did the Supreme Court weigh in that?

Erica Navalance:

Yeah. Why the Louisiana Supreme Court did not make Ramos retroactive? They had a couple of reasons. The first reason, essentially, they said the legislature can do it. If there’s going to be a new law, that’s really for the legislature and not for us, which I think is a really complicated way of saying we don’t want to have to have the weight of answering this question. A couple of other things that they considered, a big thing is what the courts often say is a reliance interest. So has the state of Louisiana been able to rely on these convictions for the entire

Mansa Musa:

Time?

Erica Navalance:

The district attorney and the state, district attorneys across the state said, “If you overturn all of these cases, there’s simply no way that we could retry all of these cases. And there are so many.” And I don’t know that the Louisiana Supreme Court really looked at the reality of that situation as deeply as we would’ve hoped. When you look at the actual numbers, you and I and people who have experienced with the system understand that almost 97% of cases end in pleas. And so when you’re looking at all of these people getting new trials, we’re not talking about hundreds of new trials. Most of these would have resulted in new plea agreements and it’s across the state. And so most places in the state would’ve had a couple of new cases that they would’ve had to look at. And I think the Louisiana Supreme Court was really worried about how challenging it would be to sort of look back and correct this wrong, and at least in my view, balanced that incorrectly with the reliance interest that somebody has on their freedom and their future.

And frankly, the interest that I think of, I think a lot when I think about these cases, not just about my clients who are incarcerated, my clients who never had the right to a jury trial that they deserved, but I also think a lot about the jurors who … Jury duty, we call it jury duty because it’s not a choice. You don’t get to decide whether or not to go. If you don’t go to jury duty, a judge can hold you in contempt. Yeah,

Mansa Musa:

It’s consequence.

Erica Navalance:

And this was hundreds of years of us requiring Black people to show up, to sit through a trial, to deliberate, and were required to be a part of that process while they were being discriminated against,

While they knew their voice wasn’t going to count. And I think a lot about what it would feel like to have a government force you to have that racism perpetuated upon you most often against another Black man who’s the defendant in the case more often than not. And so thinking about the 360 of that racism in that courtroom, where most of the time, most of the people with power are white and most of the people that have less power are not. And that I think was not weighed when the Louisiana Supreme Court said, “This simply would be too big of a burden for us to redo, to start over from the beginning.”

Mansa Musa:

And you know what, that’s crazy because when we, like I told you, we got out under the jury instruction, the jury instructions applied to everybody, but you got a number, you did 10 years, your 10 years was up and gone. So it really make no sense in you appealing a conviction that’s been 10 years to serve and 20 years later, everybody that it really impacted was people that were serving life sentences. So in our class, in this class, this is how they state responded, thousands, hundreds of rapists, murderers, animals going to be released if the court uphold list. So then they said this was their drumbeat. But what was overlooked was that, and they tried the same thing in terms of the complications going to be associated with retrying. Our response was, and what came out in our defense was, I served 48 years before this case came out.

The average person that was affected by anger life sentence had served at least 35 or more years.

So the courts was already saying like, “Well, they’re going to just go ahead and make plea bothering.” So where the most of us was at was in Baltimore City, they made plea bar. The court ordered everybody getting new trials. So the state’s attorneys just started making deals here and there. But this lead us to Lloyd Gray case. And I think that it’s important that our audience understand this, okay? We’re talking about being found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. So we’re talking about guilt and innocence, and we’re talking about evidence that can come forth to prove my innocence. And because you don’t have a unanimous jury verdict system, I don’t care I can say guilty and everybody that say not guilty, if they not the majority, then my way going to go. Can you talk a little bit about Lloyd Gray? Because I know he was 19 years old when he was in 1980 when he was put on a trial, but please summarize the key elements of his case.

What happened during the trial?

Erica Navalance:

So Mr. Lloyd Gray was arrested in 1980. He was 19 years old and he was arrested for the aggravated rape of a woman that was living in his neighborhood. They knew each other from sort of around the area, but she was 33, Lloyd was 19, and so they kind of just knew each other. He was arrested for this aggravated rape. And when he went to trial, really the evidence against him that was tested in front of the jury was her testimony and his testimony. That was really the majority of the evidence that was presented at trial. A big reason for that is his lawyer didn’t challenge the evidence against him. So normally, if there’s physical evidence or there’s forensic evidence that the state wants to put on the person who conducted a rape exam, normally they have to come in and testify and a defense attorney gets to ask them questions and challenge them.

And that very basic level of defense didn’t happen for Mr. Gray. His lawyer stipulated to all of that, which essentially means that person doesn’t need to testify. We accept that evidence as true. And so none of the medical or forensic evidence was tested at all by the defense. It was just introduced to the jury without it being challenged. Mr. Gray knew that there was somebody … He had seen this woman on the evening that this alleged rape had happened. He had seen her earlier in the day. They got into a disagreement, and then Mr. Gray’s friend, Herbert Collins, said, “Hey man, it’s not worth it. ” And the two of them left. For his entire time pretrial, Mr. Gray was telling his lawyer, “Go find my friend, Herbert Collins. He was with me. He can tell you we walked away.” And his lawyer did not find that man and did not present him to the jury.

We know now from later on in the 1990s, that is exactly what Mr. Collins would have testified to, but none of that was presented to the jury. So what the jury heard in 1980 was a woman accusing Mr. Gray of rape and a 19-year-old Black man who took the stand and denied it.

So you have a jury of 12 people, and you’re exactly right. The state is supposed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. And when that jury deliberated and they deliberated for less than an hour before he was convicted of a crime that sent him to prison for the rest of his life, that jury deliberation room didn’t need to have the big, difficult conversations that most juries have to have because that jury room understood that only 10 people needed to agree. And so two people on Lloyd’s jury did not agree. They wanted to find him not guilty and they did so. And so we have paperwork that says 10 people found him guilty, two people found him not guilty, but in 1980 and Louisiana, that meant guilty. And we know now that those two people were both black women. So it is exactly how this law was designed to work is how it worked in Lloyd’s case where black people got onto the jury and then their voices were entirely discounted.

Mansa Musa:

And talk about the swasstick. How did that play into racial animals?

Erica Navalance:

Absolutely. So Mr. Gray, when two sides go to trial, the defense attorneys have a file and the state, the district attorney has a file. So the prosecutor has one. As a defendant, you’re not entitled to see that file until after you are convicted and sentenced. And even then, it costs quite a bit of money. So Mr. Gray was incarcerated for many years after his trial and tried and tried to get pieces of that file, but was never able to get the entirety of his district attorney’s file. So when the Promise of Justice Initiative took on his case, we went to the district attorney’s office and we asked for a copy of his entire file, all of the paperwork in it, and a copy of the front cover and the back cover. And that’s when we found something that I still feel incredibly shocked by at the very front of Lloyd Gray’s, the cover of his case.

So this is the file that would have been sitting on the desk when he was prosecuted.

At the very top, it says, “Office of the District Attorney for Orleans Parish.” And right next to that label, somebody in the prosecutor’s office had doodled a swastika on the very front of the cover of his case. So we’re talking about a case with a 19-year-old Black man without a criminal record being accused of a crime for which he could spend the entirety of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. We’ve got a law where the jurors, two voices will not count, and then we’ve got prosecutors who are sitting there prosecuting this case casually drawing symbols of white supremacy. So we know from the beginning to the end of Lloyd’s trial, it was designed for him to fail. It was working exactly as it was designed. It’s not a mistake. He’s not somebody who fell through the cracks. This is what the system was designed to do for him.

Mansa Musa:

And that’s interesting because under the Constitution, everybody got a right to a fair trial. That’s like a constitutional right. And how do you establish fairness when, one, you can’t get a unanimous jury. Two, your lawyer is inaffected by every standard Strickland, every case that came out, the Supreme Court dealing with inaffects this case. The appeal lawyer is inaffected because if your trial attorney who say, “Well, we just going to try them on the record,” whatever we’re going to concede to whatever forensic evidence, we’re going to concede to any testimonies that people ain’t there, and that’s his word against hers, you don’t stand a chance on getting acquittal. Even if you had a unanimous verdict, but talk about at some point in time, his mother worked that ain’t going to prison. Talk about that, the trauma that came out of that, and if you know how they was able to reconcile or how they reconcile, or is she still alive, tell our audience about that, because one, this is trauma beyond anybody’s imagination.You’re guilty because you’re black, you don’t have the right to adequate defense, even though you’re supposed to.

Everything that’s going on with you is saying that it was designed for you to be where you at right now. And then you look up your mother working in the prison. The fact

Erica Navalance:

That Lloyd served 30 years at Angola prison while his mother was a guard there, I think is … It’s hard to pick a piece of his case that’s the most heartbreaking, but I think why that piece of his case is something that I think of as the most heartbreaking is it is the way that Lloyd was incarcerated at Angola. So actually, let me back up. So when Lloyd Gray was convicted in 1980, he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. And almost everybody in the state of Louisiana that’s serving a life without the possibility of parole sentence goes and does that time at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is also known as Angola.

It’s a working plantation, so you are required to work in the fields. And when Lloyd got there, he was a young, I think he had turned 20 by the time he was sentenced and his mother was working as a guard at Angola. Much of Lloyd’s family, many of Lloyd’s ancestors are actually … There’s an incredible storyteller at the Promise of Justice Initiative named Sarah, and she’s been doing incredible work on Lloyd’s case. And she’s traced some of his ancestors to what we think were enslaved people on some of the exact same land that Lloyd is now doing his time on. Come on. So Angola is right along the Mississippi River where many plantations were. And we think that Lloyd’s ancestors were enslaved on the very grounds that he was then sent to in 1980 to do the same sort of agricultural work, being forced without pay.

And he was doing this with his mom as a guard there. And Lloyd, for his first little bit, was able to look outside of his cell and see his mother in a guard tower. And every morning he would go to the bars so that his mom could see him and know that he was okay. And after a few months, I don’t know if it’s that the Department of Corrections realized that they had that familial connection, but you see, exactly the same thing that we saw with enslaved people

Happening to Lloyd and his mother. As soon as they saw that they had this bond, they split them up. So Lloyd moved to a different camp, his mom was no longer allowed to be a guard anywhere near him, and we don’t have any paperwork on that. I imagine that that was because they were afraid that his mother wouldn’t enforce the rules against him if they had to. If he escaped, would she hesitate to shoot him? And you look at these records of the exact same plantations that Angola is on now when you look at the fact that they were deliberately taking enslaved women and enslaved children and splitting them up to break that familial bond. And that’s exactly what they did to Lloyd and his mother. So Lloyd’s mother worked at Angola for about 30 years before she retired. And unfortunately, I think probably one of the most difficult things for Mr. Gray in his 45 years of incarceration is that his mother passed away while she was home and he was still at Angola.

And so they never got to have that moment of freedom. They were in the same place for 30 years, but they were never able to be mother and son the way that people should. In the most fundamental relationship that you have, the Department of Corrections deliberately kept them apart. And

Mansa Musa:

That devastating

Erica Navalance:

Cruelty that’s designed to be there.

Mansa Musa:

Right. That’s the cruelty that the families, like you say, in terms of slavery, when it was reconstruction, when they had the emancipation proclamation, most of the slaves that left, they put one ass in papers to try to find their family members. They try to get reconnected with … And here in this case, the devastation is that I’m innocent, my mother work here, and y’all whole fear is that she not going to be brutal towards me. And because you don’t think she going to be brutal towards me, you disrupt any relationship we have under this draconian system. But talk about where the kids staying at now through all these decades, because we know he maintained his innocence, and And refuse to plead guilty. Talk about where the case stands now and going forward, how y’all plan on trying to get Lloyd free.

Erica Navalance:

So there are a couple of ways that we’re going to continue arguing Lloyd’s case. One is about his due process rights. So as you were talking about earlier, Mansa, the right to a fair trial, your due process rights, and that’s, I think, a really important piece of not just Lloyd’s case, but of everybody with a non-unanimous jury verdict is he’s not asking for anything new. He’s not asking for anything more. All we are asking for is what he has been entitled to the entire time. In 1980, he was entitled to a fair trial and he did not get one.

Mansa Musa:

That’s right.

Erica Navalance:

What we’re asking for now is the fair trial that he should have gotten 45 years ago. So there are two ways that we’re doing that. One is through due process. So we’re trying to argue that the fact that he had a non-unanimous jury verdict and the fact that there was this swastika that clearly somebody in that prosecutor’s office that was representing the state of Louisiana was pushing forward these white supremacist ideals so casually that they are drawing them on the file of a black man that they are trying to send to prison for the rest of his life. So that is a due process claim that we are arguing for Lloyd’s case. The other thing that we’re arguing for Lloyd is we talked about at the beginning these non-unanimous jury verdicts moving forward being unconstitutional. And the Louisiana Supreme Court said that law is not retroactive. But what we’re trying to say in Lloyd’s case is, okay, if every non-unanimous jury verdict isn’t entitled to a new trial, what about the ones where we can prove that racial discrimination is the reason for that verdict? And there are some justices on the Louisiana Supreme Court that seemed to say, yes, I don’t think every single person who got a non-unanimous jury verdict gets a new trial. But if somebody had a Black juror whose voice was discounted, maybe that’s a case in which they should get a new trial.

And so we’re saying that’s Lloyd’s case exactly. Not one, but two of his jurors voted not guilty, and both of those people were Black women. So in these sorts of cases in particular where we know that that verdict was because a Black person was discriminated against, those cases, a defendant should have a new trial. So those are two ways we’re going to keep arguing his case.

Mansa Musa:

And I like that evidentiary standard that the court coming out was saying that, because y’all can show two jurors say not guilty. Exactly. So by the fact that you don’t have a unanimous jury verdict system, if you have a unanimous jury verdict system, you’re going to even have a mistrial or you going to have not guilty if everybody coming the other way. Yeah. Thank you, Erica Navalance. We rattle the bars today. I think our audience, and I think our viewers and I think our listeners will be going to get well served with this education about how the criminal injustice system is being used to intentionally enslave people. This is the 13th Amendment. And whenever I think about Louisiana, I think about what Nina Simone, when she was talking about Mississippi, only thing she could utter she say, Mississippi God damn. She couldn’t describe it no way that the main thought of it was so much agony.

And this is the same thing going on with Louisiana and the system. But we hear at the real news and rattling the bar, we try to recognize that the law is the laws of the people. It’s supposed to be for the people and by the people. And when these laws are not for the people and body people, then it’s our obligation to bring people much like yourself in this space to tell why these laws are unconstitutional and how to make these laws become constitutional. To live up the creed of this country that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people, all people. And so we ask that you continue your good works and that we look forward to working with you on future projects. Thank you.

Erica Navalance:

Thank you so much. Thank you for having

Mansa Musa:

Me. And I want to remind our audience and our viewers that this is the real news. This is what we do. We don’t chase stories down like an ambulance chasers. We don’t fabricate. We don’t create some kind of false narrative in order to get supporters. We go right to the source, such as we went with Erica and about Mr. Lloyd’s case, and we went to the source. And then we know that the system was set up design primarily to create a Lloyd situation, to create situations where she said, and I think that we really need to think about this, that in Angola, this is not me making this up. They got a graveyard and they are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds or hundreds, hundreds of grave. How many of them people died because they didn’t have a unanimous jury verdict? How many of them died because it was a racial animus that contributed to them getting found guilty?

And hopefully this case right here will be the case that breaks that system up, that breaks that system of Jim Crow. We asked that you continue to support the real news and rallying the box. Guess what? We actually are the real news.