7 February 16-22, 2023 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | in town. At the police station, he gave a full confession. “Why are you telling us all of this?” a de- tective asked, according to a transcript of the interrogation provided by the Lakeland Po- lice Department. “Well, I want to get it over with,” Laster said. “Get it over with and get straight, huh?” “Yeah.” Today, looking back at those robberies, Laster says he was stupid and ignorant. “I guess I was desperate. They took my life away,” he says. “But during those robberies, I never hurt nobody.” A judge sent Laster back to prison to serve a 29-year robbery sentence concurrently with his original life sentence. ALMOST FREE In 1983, in response to the public’s frustra- tion with skyrocketing crime, drug wars, and the crack epidemic, Florida introduced a se- ries of “tough on crime” policies, including abolishing parole — a move that doubled the prison population within the decade. How- ever, anyone sentenced before October 1, 1983 remained eligible, so Laster continued to undergo periodic parole reviews. On September 19, 1989, having served the mandatory 12-year minimum of his 29-year robbery sentence — including more than three years at a psychiatric facility for “Men- tally Disordered Sex Offenders” (then a re- quirement of release for most sex offenders) — Laster was granted parole. That decision followed years of good behavior and positive reviews from work supervisors and leaders of prison betterment programs. In a memo, a prison psychiatrist wrote that Laster “has reached his fullest potential.” Within weeks, he was scheduled to be re- leased to the small town of Jemison, Ala- bama, where a former fellow inmate had started a ministry. The ex-inmate offered Laster a place to stay and a job at a gas station he owned. Then 45, Laster knew he couldn’t blow his chance. He wrote a letter to the parole board thanking them for giving him another opportunity at freedom. “When I get out, I am going to get me a wife and be a good hus- band and father,” he wrote. That aspiration would never come to pass. Alabama’s parole authority, which was to su- pervise Laster, refused to accept him, citing “community opposition” to nonresidents be- ing paroled to the area. The parole was re- voked three days before Laster’s scheduled release. When he got the news, Laster, who’d already packed his few belongings in a paper bag, sat on his cot and stared at the concrete floor for a long time. ESCAPE Every year for the next four years, Laster stood in front of the parole board and pre- sented its members with new work and living plans offered to him by religious ministries and by people he’d met in prison betterment programs. The board rejected those plans ev- ery year, pointing to Laster’s “unsatisfactory institutional behavior.” Yet he’d committed only three transgres- sions during those four years: In 1990, he was disciplined for engaging in a consensual sex act. This, a report said, indicated that the Men- tally Disordered Sex Offender program he’d attended “didn’t work.” The following year he was disciplined for “bartering” after receiving a pair of headphones from a fellow inmate. And in 1993, he was disciplined for “verbal dis- respect and lying to a staff member.” “I would encourage you to maintain a bet- ter prison record and not receive any further disciplinary reports,” one counselor wrote, responding to Laster’s inquiries about parole. The triviality of those reports convinced Laster that he would never be released. His 1976 robberies, he realized, pegged him as ir- redeemable in the eyes of the parole board. At nearly 50 years old, Laster felt a deep desper- ation set in. Nine days before Christmas in 1993, Laster got his hands on a hacksaw at a prison in the tiny North Florida town of Century. He and another inmate cut the metal bars off a small window and climbed through. They made it to the perimeter fence before being captured. A judge gave Laster another five and a half consecutive years. Later, in a deposition about the incident, Laster said, “I have been locked up for 29 straight years. I wanted freedom. I just lost it.” A PLEA FOR RELIEF By 1999, Laster had become fully literate and began spending his free time hunched over law books in rudimentary prison libraries. He decided that while parole might be forever out of reach, he might be able to prove that he was innocent of the rape charge that put him away in the first place. With the assistance of another inmate, he filed for a writ of mandamus, requesting that a judge compel the state to compile all the available evidence in his case and send it to him. He also requested that any physical evi- dence be DNA tested and compared to his own sample. But as he was to learn, scant material was available. His trial transcripts weren’t on file with the clerk, and his Homestead arrest re- port was blown away when Hurricane An- drew devastated South Dade in 1992. His clothing and Reid Bryant’s car seat cover, col- lected by Metro-Dade police in 1963, had been destroyed a year after his conviction. In any event, no biological material had been found on any of the items. Lacking documents or physical evidence, there was no way for the court to conduct a meaningful review of his case. All around him, meanwhile, he saw inmates come and go from prison. They included rapists, who had received less time than he had under new sentencing guidelines. That’s because in 1974, many states began to legally redefine rape by introducing degrees of sexual assault to punish offenders based on the circumstances of the crime (e.g., date rape, statutory rape, aggravated rape, etc.). Today, Laster’s rape charge would be clas- sified as an aggravated sexual battery on a person 18 or older, a first-degree felony pun- ishable by up to 30 years in prison. He would be required to serve 85 percent of that sen- tence — 25 and a half years, max. Based on those reforms, Laster filed a sec- ond motion in 2004, arguing that his life sen- tence violated both Florida and U.S. constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. He asked the court to correct his life sentence to the current legal maximum. And, having already served that time, he asked to be released. But like the Miranda law that sank Laster’s 1971 appeal, revisions to state sentencing guidelines weren’t retroactive. The precedent stems from a provision known as the Savings Clause that was added to the Florida consti- tution in 1885 and prohibited the retroactive application of sentencing changes. That prohibition didn’t change until 2018 when Floridians voted to end it. However, fearing the release of potentially still-danger- ous criminals, lawmakers quickly created new legislation clarifying that amendments would not automatically apply retroactively. Rather, an amendment would need to include an additional clause specifically deeming it retroactive for the change to have any effect on past offenses. So far, only 23 people — all of them con- victed of drug-trafficking offenses related to prescription pills — have had their sentences retroactively reduced. Laster’s motion to correct his sentence was denied. ALL-WHITE JURY Laster’s third and most significant motion addressed his defense lawyer’s shortcomings and a long, unjust legacy of the U.S. legal sys- tem: the all-white jury. He based his argu- ments on two landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The first, Powell v. Alabama (1932), estab- lished that poor defendants facing the death penalty are not merely entitled to appointed counsel but also to effective counsel. It also includes the right to “have sufficient time to advise with counsel and prepare [a] defense.” That ruling, which became a legal and civil- rights milestone, should have applied to Laster’s case. His attorney, after all, took a scant four days to prepare a defense, con- ferred with Laster only once and did not call available witnesses at trial. The second decision, Taylor v. Louisiana (1975), established that a jury must be drawn from a representative cross-section of the community. That meant a jury pool had to be composed of the same percentage of women and minorities as the wider community in which a trial is held. In 2006, Laster cited both rulings in a handwritten 11-page motion asking the court for a new trial. His motion was denied be- cause there was no trial transcript docu- menting Zarowny’s “ineffectiveness” and because the Taylor ruling is not retroactive. In any case, Laster has never had a copy of his jury pool list to submit as evidence that the pool was not representative of the com- munity. Moreover, at the time of his trial, those lists did not record the participants’ race, so there would have been no way for him to determine whether the pool excluded Black people. Earlier this year, I found a copy of the Laster jury list in a file provided by the Mi- ami-Dade County clerk of the courts. It con- tained 125 names. To determine the race of each prospective juror, I compared those names against U.S. Census documents and other sources. Twenty-seven names are illegible, and there was no census information on four indi- viduals. Of the remaining 94, I was able to verify that only two were Black. Illustration by Brian Stauffer >> p8
