Gary Tyler memoir: How I was put on death row at 17 for a crime I didn't commit.

At the age of 16, Gary Tyler was framed for the death of a 13-year-old white student who was shot and killed near a Louisiana high school on Oct. 7, 1974. Tyler had been on a school bus filled with Black students that had come under attack at the time of the shooting from opponents of school desegregation, but there was no evidence linking him to the killing. At 17, an all-white jury made Tyler the youngest person in the U.S. on death row. Despite numerous attempts to have his sentence overturned, Tyler spent more than four decades in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana before being released in 2016. The following excerpt is adapted from Chapter 3 of Tyler’s memoir , Stitching Freedom: A True Story of Injustice, Defiance, and Hope , published by One Signal Publishers and set