Chasing Gideon (19 page)

On December 4, 1975, approximately a month after he and Earl Truvia were arrested, an Orleans Parish grand jury heard ten minutes of testimony from a single witness, Sheila Robertson.

“Would you tell the ladies and gentleman just what exactly you saw and where you were and what took place?” assistant district attorney Kurt Sins asked her.

“Well, one night I was in the bedroom. It was the night before Halloween, and I was in the bedroom looking out the window, which I always do,” Robertson said. “I always be looking out the window most every night . . . and there be three guys. Two of them . . . one of them was on one side of [Elliot Porter] and the other one was on the other side. He was in the front, and it looked like they was arguing. So, when they saw me in the window, they started hugging, and they were hugging, you know, like they were laughing, you know, as if they were . . .”

“Did they all three go to laughing?” Sins asked.

“No, just the two, not him.”

“Where were they?” Sins asked. “Was one on one side and one on the other?”

“Right,” Robertson agreed. “And when Elliot saw me in the window, he was trying to beg me to help him if he thought I had a phone or anything, or maybe he thought I could get in touch with the police or something, but I didn't. So, I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me then.”

“What do you mean, ‘he was trying to tell' you? Did he actually speak to you?”

“No, he was looking at me like if, you know, something was going on, and he was trying to get somebody to help him.”

“Did he have a frightened look on his face?”

“Yes, but I didn't know, see, I didn't know what really was going on at the time, so I didn't know what to think. I looked at him and, you know, and uh . . .”

“What happened?”

“O.K. Then they walked, they walked, he got like about two steps, two steps, and then he broke out and ran. The other two boys broke out and ran behind him. They broke out and ran behind him on the side of the building, and the next thing I knew they were shooting. The other two boys ran back, and one stopped and glanced at me. You know, he looked at me real hard. The other one told him to ‘come on,' and he started running, and they went back to around the Miro [Street] side. The other side which was Miro, and, uh, then about a couple of night later the same two guys came in on me. I was laying on the bed. I thought I heard somebody, but I wasn't sure. I didn't get up. I said, ‘Nobody can't get in because the door is locked.' But they took the window out on the top porch, and they came in. When they came in, they was coming up the steps, and I thought somebody, you know, I saw his head, but he reared back so I couldn't see it. I said, ‘Well, that's just my imagination.' So, uh, then before I knowed anything both of them had ran in. One jumped over the bed, you know, like crossing it, and he held me like that. He said, ‘We just come to remind you not to go to the police.' I said, ‘Well, I'm not going to the . . .' I didn't tell him that. I was telling him like this here. I was nodding my head telling him I wasn't going to go to the police. I wasn't going to tell or nothing. The other one looked at me and said, ‘Cause if you tell anything, we're going to come back for you. We're coming back for you. We'll be back.' And they were doing like this here, and I told them I wasn't going to tell.”

“Did you get a good look at them?” Sins asked.

“Yes.”

“Were they the same two people you saw out in the courtyard?”

“Yes, the same two.”

Sins asked some questions about the lighting outside, which Robertson assured him was good. Then he moved on to the light inside. “That night when they came in your apartment, did you have any lights on in your apartment?”

“Uh-huh,” Robertson said. “I keep my kitchen light on. I keep the bathroom light on, and the hall light. I always keep that on.”

“O.K. And that gave you plenty enough light to see the two people?”

“Right. The light . . . my bedroom [is] right here, and the bathroom was right there, and we were facing each other.”

“Do you recall what clothing they were wearing the night when they killed Elliot?”

“No, not really,” Robertson said. “I know one had on a pair of jeans. I know that for a fact because I seen his jeans. I couldn't see the shirt.”

“How about that night when they came in your house a couple of nights later?”

“They didn't have that on. He had something different on.”

“How long have you known Elliot?”

“I didn't really know him.”

“Did he live around you?”

“Yeah, he . . . I stayed like in this driveway, and he stayed across the street in the next driveway.”

“What floor do you live on?”

“I was living on the second and third floor.”

“And the bedroom window that you were looking out of, was that on the second or third floor?”

“That was on the third floor.”

“Had you seen these two guys before, prior to this time?”

“I seen them around. I seen them, like, they be's on the corner, standing on the corner where I go to the grocery at, the corner grocery store. All of them be's on the corner and stuff, you know, sitting around sometimes. They be laughing and talking sometimes. Sometimes they be boxing, you know, different things.”

“Are these the same two people whose picture you picked out when the detective showed you the pictures?”

“Uh-huh, same two.”

Robertson said she saw the two men pass by beneath her window and then go around the corner.

“Did you actually see the shot fired?” Sins asked.

“No, I didn't actually see him shot. I'm not going to say that.”

“That was around the corner?”

“Yeah, that was on the side [of the building]. I don't know which one shot him.”

Sins tried to get a sense of the timing, but Robertson couldn't recall how much time passed between the time they went around the corner and she heard shots fired. “After the shots were fired, about how much time went by before you saw them running back?”

“They ran right off,” Robertson said.

“Right away?”

“Uh-huh.”

“O.K. Sheila, now, think. When Elliot ran and the two guys were chasing him, did you notice any one of the two guys chasing him with a gun, or pull a gun out of his hand, while they were chasing him?”

“No.”

Sins asked if any of the grand jurors had any questions. Several did. “After you saw this, you didn't go to the police right away?” one asked.

“No,” Robertson admitted.

“And then they came in and threatened you, and that's when you decided to tell the police?”

“I told my mama what happened,” Robertson corrected. “So, mama told me to get in touch with the housing authority and see if they couldn't, you know, get me out of that apartment so it would be safer for me. After I called the housing authority, and I talked to the lady, the secretary at the housing authority, that's when she called the police and she told them that I called in and said that I knew what had happened.”

“Thank you very much for coming down here,” Sins said.

It was damning testimony.

The grand jury indicted Greg Bright and Earl Truvia with one count each on the second-degree murder of Elliot Porter. The trial would take place on July 29, 1976, seven months later.

At the time of his arrest in 1975, Greg Bright worked a series of odd jobs, sometimes in restaurants, mostly on the riverfront where he had a regular gig cleaning oil and other debris from the holds of barges. He could barely read, having dropped out of school in sixth
grade to take care of his ailing father, and his knowledge of the law was nonexistent. He had no money to speak of. His mother worked at General Diaper Services, where she folded diapers and sheets for twenty-nine years. Greg sat in jail for months hoping he would get a lawyer, hoping the lawyer would come visit him, hoping the lawyer would ask what had happened, hoping he'd get a chance to explain to the attorney that he had gone to a bonfire at a local community college that night with a girl, that he'd gotten a ride with a friend, that the girl at the bonfire, the friend driving the car, and his mother at home would all attest to his whereabouts that evening. He tried not to worry; he had an alibi.

The court appointed a public defender named Robert Zibilich to represent Greg, a private attorney who worked part-time as a public defender while juggling his paying clients. All the public defenders in the city worked this way. According to Greg, his attorney never visited him in jail. An investigator visited him there once to ask some questions about where he was that night and that was it. Another lawyer, Greg says, stood up for him in court to enter his not-guilty plea. “I met with [my lawyer] once before the trial at a motion hearing,” Greg says, explaining that this first conversation with his attorney took place after he sat in jail for approximately three months. (Greg's attorney later disputed this, agreeing that he never visited him in jail but insisting that he talked to him several times at the courthouse when Zibilich was there to file motions.)

To his credit, Zibilich did file discovery motions promptly in January 1976, asking for any documents or information about the case. But the assistant district attorney's response is essentially rejection after rejection of each request. For example, Zibilich asked for a list of witnesses that the state intended to call during trial. “Defense is not entitled to this information,” prosecutors responded. The defense asked for “any and all items of physical evidence or tangible property obtained from any person” whether via search warrant or otherwise that it intended to introduce during trial. “Defense is not entitled to this information,” prosecutors responded. The defense asked for “any and all medical reports of examinations conducted by the Coroner's office for the Parish of Orleans reflecting the medical condition of the victim named in this indictment.” “Defense is
not entitled to this information,” prosecutors answered. The defense asked for the rap sheet on the defendants “and that of any witness the State intends to call.” This information, critical in the case of the state's sole eyewitness, Sheila Robertson, would be denied in the usual fashion: “Defense is not entitled to this information.” Finally, the defense requested all Brady material be shared. The 1963 Supreme Court decision
Brady vs. Maryland
requires that all exculpatory evidence be shared with the defense. That means any conflicting statements offered by witnesses, any information about a witness that impeaches their credibility, any police reports indicating alternative scenarios to the one presented by the district attorney, anything that could influence a jury's assessment of guilt or punishment must be provided to the defense. Here, Bright's attorney spelled it out to properly cover all the bases, requesting, “Evidence materially favorable to the defendant either as direct or impeaching evidence.” In particular, Zibilich asked for “[w]ritten statements or interviews reduced to writing obtained by the State through police investigative procedures from any co-defendant, accomplice, accessory, suspect or any other person having knowledge or information regarding the charge contained in this Indictment,” and so forth. This time the prosecution asserted: “State is not in possession of any.”

On July 29, 1976, Greg and Earl were tried for second-degree murder in Section B of the Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans. The assistant district attorneys, Henry Julien and Patrick Quinlan, laid the groundwork for their case in opening arguments. “The meat of this case,” Julien told the jury, “will get down to the testimony of one individual.” The prosecution identified this witness as Sheila Robertson and said she would tell the jury how “on the night of October 31, the early morning hours at least on October 31, she was sitting at her window.” There, she saw three young men walk by. “She will identify those young men to you today, two of them being the defendants here, and the third being Elliot Porter. And as they walked in front of her house, something seemed amiss, something seemed wrong. . . . A struggle ensued. She could see the struggle. And it appeared that the two people were attacking Elliot Porter, a fifteen-year-old.” Julien went on to explain that she
would further testify that those two men—Greg and Earl, whom she didn't know—broke into her house two nights after the murder and threatened to kill her and her eighteen-month-old baby if she told the police what she'd seen. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is basically the case the state will present to you,” Julien said.

“You won't see any weapons introduced here today,” he admitted. “But, I believe, from the facts that you will see, and from the testimony you will hear, and the circumstances surrounding those facts—now, I'm not saying circumstantial evidence. I'm saying the circumstances surrounding those facts, which is the only way you can really determine those questions . . . you will determine, or will be able to determine, that the two defendants before the bar murdered fifteen-year-old Elliot Porter. Which one actually pulled the trigger, I don't know. But they are principals, acting in consort. . . . Thank you.”

Greg Bright's attorney, Zibilich stood up. “If Your Honor please, Mr. Bright relies on his presumption of innocence,” he said. He sat down, his opening argument complete in this single sentence.

Very little about the way justice was delivered to the poor in New Orleans changed between 1975 when Greg Bright's case went to trial and 2005 when disaster struck—and shook things up.

Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans on August 29, 2005, and within days, the ensuing storm surge and levee breaks flooded the streets, leaving 80 percent of the city underwater. This included the courthouse and adjacent jail. As the water levels rose, 6,700 Orleans Parish Prison inmates, as well as several thousand others who had been evacuated
to
this jail from surrounding parishes as the storm approached, were trapped. Some were trapped in cells as the water levels rose in the building, according to Human Rights Watch, which interviewed 1,000 prisoners in the weeks after the storm, and, as deputies fled to safety with their families or in the course of evacuating inmates to other jails in the state, hundreds of prisoners were left without food, medicine, or even air (as the windows were sealed and all electricity, including air-conditioning, failed) for four days.
¹⁴
Meanwhile, most of the prisoners were evacuated, scattered to the wind in dozens of jails across Louisiana and
bordering states, while several hundred others were contained for days in the open, in a pasture where food and water were simply tossed by deputies to the masses who fought for supplies, the strong prevailing over the weak. The sheriff, ostensibly, had a list of who was where, but it was unreliable; prisoners had traded around their ID bracelets, switching up identities and thus, crimes committed and times served.