After more than 13 years on Death Row—the longest such period in U.S. history—two convicted Negro rapists were ordered freed last week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. The court ruled that Edgar Labat, 43, and Clifton Alton Poret, 37, had been denied fair trial by the all-white jury system of Orleans Parish (then 32% Negro), which had never allowed a single Negro to serve on a criminal jury.
Labat and Poret were charged with raping a young white woman, who was wrenched from her escort's side on a dark New Orleans street in 1950. Sentenced to death in 1953, the condemned men won nine stays of execution, once beat their date with the electric chair by only three hours. On grounds ranging from coerced confessions to perjured testimony, they appealed to Louisiana's top state court twice, to the U.S. Supreme Court four times. In 1964, the pair broke Caryl Chessman's eleven-years eleven-months Death Row record, and kept appealing in a process that, one judge complained, "seems to have no end."
Scandalized Scandinavians. While hanging on at Louisiana's tough Angola Penitentiary, Labat changed himself from a semiliterate hospital worker to something of a poet and painter. In 1963, Angola officials handed him a world fame of sorts by barring his correspondence with Mrs. Solveig Johanson, a Swedish housewife in Stockholm who had become interested in the case. One official claimed that Louisiana law forbade Negroes to correspond with whites. This was later revised by the statement that prison rules limited access to any prisoner on Death Row to his immediate family and his legal and spiritual counselors. The incident caused an uproar, and more than 38,000 incensed Swedes and Norwegians signed and sent petitions to President Johnson and Louisiana Governor John J. McKeithen.
Poret, a carpenter's apprentice who had formerly lived in California, placed a classified ad in a Los Angeles newspaper declaring that he was condemned to death for a crime he had not committed. When a Los Angeles butcher named Nelson Soil offered free legal aid, a 7-ft. flaming cross was suddenly planted on his lawn. Labat's more successful publicity apparently irked Poret; last year a prison official told newsmen that the two convicts "were not on speaking terms."
At week's end New Orleans authorities had located the rape victim and one of the key witnesses in the case. Louisiana Attorney General Jim Gremillion denounced the Court of Appeals decision as "horrible" and added: "It looks like the court wants to give them [Labat and Poret] a medal for staying in prison." Gremillion will appeal for a rehearing; if that fails, he will go to the U.S. Supreme Court.