The Perplexing Case of Florida's Longest-Serving Inmate | Part 2: Hard Time

This is Part 2 of a two-part story by Terence Cantarella. Click this link to read Part 1, "No Way Out."

Prison

Nineteen-year-old Boast Laster arrived at Raiford Prison in North Florida on February 4, 1964. The huge complex, the largest in the state, was ringed by double fences topped with barbed wire and German shepherds that patrolled the area between them. Guards with rifles stood atop perimeter watchtowers.

Inside the facility, which lacked air-conditioning, segregation ruled. Blacks and whites never ate, showered, worked, or rested in the same area or at the same time. Skin color aside, Raiford was a barely functioning dumping ground for the state's worst criminals and troubled inmates from other prisons. In 1969, the prison's superintendent told the Miami Herald, "We have not only the rejects of society but the rejects of the prison system here." Racism, rape, and assault were constants.

In October 1968, a guard told Laster he had a phone call. It was a member of his mother's church. "I'm sorry, Bo," she said. "Your mama died."

Laster says his mother wrote him many letters but never visited him at Raiford because it upset her too much. Then she got sick and couldn't even visit if she wanted to. Laster says she died of a stress-related illness due to overwork and his imprisonment. She was 53. By the time Bo found out, she'd already been buried.

Laster's father told him Reid Bryant disappeared from Florida City after his acquittal. There were rumors he'd been shot to death.

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Laster’s girlfriend stuck by him until his mother's death. She'd make the long bus trip to Raiford every few weeks to bring him food and necessities, but Laster eventually asked her to stop. "Don't let me keep you from living," he says he told her. Yet she still came. Finally, he took her off his visitation list so she wouldn't be allowed into the prison. Last he heard, she married a serviceman and had twin daughters.

He never heard from Reid Bryant again. Laster's father told him Bryant disappeared from Florida City after his acquittal. There were rumors he'd been shot to death.

Several phone numbers and at least two addresses are listed online for an 80-year-old Reid Bryant in Florida City. Phone calls and letters received no response. My attempts to contact possible family members on social media likewise got nowhere. I even found a Florida City teenager who shares Bryant's full name (Reid Henry Bryant), but his mother said there was no relation. Eventually, I drove to Florida City and knocked on doors.

Nothing.

An Appeal, At Last

Paradoxically, a death sentence might have proved more helpful to Laster than a life sentence. Under Florida law, a death sentence is automatically appealed to the state supreme court. The high court would have examined his case and could have ordered a new trial.

With a life sentence, however, there is no mandate for an appeal. And, while the right to appeal a criminal conviction had long been enshrined in the U.S. and Florida constitutions, there was no procedure to ensure that a defendant in Florida actually got one.

Instead, the process of filing an appeal was entrusted to a defendant's trial lawyer. "If an indigent person was convicted of a felony," explains Richard Jacobs, who worked as an assistant state attorney in Miami during the 1960s, " the trial lawyer was supposed to petition the court to be removed and have appellate counsel appointed."
Michael Zarowny, Laster's lawyer, didn't do that. And Laster didn't know the law. "Ain't nobody tell me about no appeal," he says.

A full six years later, in 1971, an attorney named Thomas Balikes finally filed an appeal on Laster's behalf. Laster says he never met Balikes and was unaware of the appeal until the clerk of court sent him some paperwork.

Longtime Miami attorney Roy Black surmises that the court may have noticed that Laster never got an appeal and assigned the case to an attorney. Additionally, a 1970 Florida Supreme Court decision, Baggett v. Wainwright, which guaranteed indigent defendants the right to free counsel on appeal, may have led to a review of capital cases and the appointment of Balikes to Laster's case.

In court filings, Balikes argued that Laster's confession shouldn't have been admitted at trial because his Miranda rights had been violated. The Miranda law, derived from the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona, mandates that police officers inform suspects of their right to remain silent and to consult with an attorney before questioning.

It was, however, a strange basis for an appeal. While the transcript of Laster's confession shows that detectives failed to inform him of his right to legal counsel, his interrogation occurred three years before the ruling in Miranda. And in Johnson v. New Jersey, decided a week after Miranda, the court ruled that Miranda couldn't be applied retroactively.

The appeal was denied.

A year later, in 1972, Laster briefly tasted freedom when he was allowed out for 24 hours to visit his father, who was hospitalized with leukemia. His father, whose name was also Boast Laster, had never stopped working toward his son's exoneration but eventually grew too ill to continue. To the younger Laster, the outside world looked like a dream — "all that space and people just livin'" — but he didn't have time to look around. He said his goodbyes; a month later, his father was gone.

Second Chance

In the 1970s, even life sentences often carried the possibility of parole in Florida. Inmates who conducted themselves well could sometimes get transferred to work-release centers — low-security facilities where inmates lived while working at jobs in the community — within seven or eight years. If an inmate proved himself responsible in work release, he was paroled.

The idea was to give lifers hope for eventual release. An endless sentence was a recipe for bad behavior. Parole also helped to counter prison overcrowding.

From 1970 to 1975, Laster received no disciplinary write-ups at any of the five prisons where he was held. That, along with his participation in a GED program and Alcoholics Anonymous, favorable work reports, religious faith, and "excellent" attitude, led to his transfer to the Lakeland Community Corrections Center, a work-release facility in Polk County, on August 1, 1975. Laster says he was a "permanent party" at Lakeland — meaning he worked "within" the facility, not outside, and received $20 (a little over $100 in today's economy) each month to buy snacks and toiletries from the commissary.

Prison records indicate Laster was paroled six months later, went to live in a low-income apartment nearby, and began working as a cook at a Holiday Inn.

Laster disputes that he was paroled. He says he continued living at the work-release center and was simply given permission by a supervisor to work at the Holiday Inn in the evenings. The apartment, he says, belonged to a friend whom he was allowed to visit now and then during temporary furloughs.

It's unclear whether Laster simply misunderstood the conditions of his work release or, as he claims, that those conditions weren't explained to him.

Either way, a few weeks after Laster began working at the hotel, a prison report quoted his employer as saying that Laster "is an excellent worker and well-liked by all his co-workers." The report stated that he "appears to be adjusting well" and "no problems are noted."
Laster, however, found himself increasingly frustrated at his ongoing supervision. After seeing the outside world, his thrill at receiving a modicum of freedom transformed into anger at having lost 12 years of his life for a crime he swore he didn't commit and at seeing no path back to a normal existence.

In mid-April, ten weeks after starting his part-time evening job, the 32-year-old resolved to make a run for it. He figured he could disappear and start fresh somewhere far away if he could get enough money to leave Florida.

Looking back, Laster says he was stupid and ignorant. "I guess I was desperate. But during those robberies, I never hurt nobody."

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He borrowed a .22-caliber pistol from a teenage co-worker, walked into four convenience stores, pointed the gun at the clerks, and demanded the money in their registers. They all complied. But Laster didn't get far; cops tracked him down three days later, still in town. At the police station, he gave a full confession.

"Why are you telling us all of this?" a detective asked, according to a transcript of the interrogation provided by the Lakeland Police 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 frustration with skyrocketing crime, drug wars, and the crack epidemic, Florida introduced a series of "tough on crime" policies, including abolishing parole — a move that doubled the prison population within the decade. However, 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 "Mentally Disordered Sex Offenders" (then a requirement 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 released to the small town of Jemison, Alabama, 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 husband and father," he wrote.

That aspiration would never come to pass. Alabama's parole authority, which was to supervise Laster, refused to accept him, citing "community opposition" to nonresidents being paroled to the area. The parole was revoked 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 presented 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 every year, pointing to Laster's "unsatisfactory institutional behavior."

Yet he'd committed only three transgressions during those four years: In 1990, he was disciplined for engaging in a consensual sex act. This, a report said, indicated that the Mentally 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 disrespect and lying to a staff member."

"I would encourage you to maintain a better 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 irredeemable in the eyes of the parole board. At nearly 50 years old, Laster felt a deep desperation 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 evidence 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 report was blown away when Hurricane Andrew devastated South Dade in 1992. His clothing and Reid Bryant's car seat cover, collected 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 punishable by up to 30 years in prison. He would be required to serve 25 and a half years, max.

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Today, Laster's rape charge would be classified as an aggravated sexual battery on a person 18 or older, a first-degree felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison. He would be required to serve 85 percent of that sentence — 25 and a half years, max.

Based on those reforms, Laster filed a second motion in 2004, arguing that his life sentence 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 constitution 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-dangerous 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 convicted 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 system: the all-white jury. He based his arguments on two landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

The first, Powell v. Alabama (1932), established 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, conferred 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 because there was no trial transcript documenting 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 community. 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 Miami-Dade County clerk of the courts. It contained 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 individuals. Of the remaining 94, I was able to verify that only two were Black.

That underrepresentation essentially ensured that a Black juror would not be seated, significantly stacking the deck against Laster.

Studies have shown that jurors often find defendants from other racial and ethnic groups guilty at higher rates, particularly in rape trials where the suspect is Black and the victim white. In fact, in the 24 years before Laster's trial, of the 30 men executed for rape in Florida, 29 were Black. Notably, all 30 of those executed men had been accused of raping white women. Additionally, no white man has ever been executed for the nonhomicidal rape of a Black woman in any U.S. state.

Laster avoided execution. But his life sentence, handed down in the same era, still stands.

Going Through the Motions

In 2011, Laster found a procedural error he believed negated his conviction. He had determined, 48 years after his trial, that his indictment didn't bear a court clerk's "minute entry" or "notation," as required by law. Nor does the court docket show the indictment was filed at all.

Laster argued that those errors meant the court had no authorization to try him. A judge denied the motion as legally insufficient. An appellate court dismissed it, too, as did the Florida Supreme Court.

Over the years, Laster refiled his motions, tweaking them based on new information or laws he learned about.

One problem with motions is that they're notoriously hard for nonlawyers to get right. Failing to invoke the proper rule (or subsection of a rule) often leads to dismissal. Future attempts to refile the same motion are often denied as successive, even though the first motion was never adjudicated on its merits.
Laster has written to a handful of lawyers and organizations asking for pro bono help but received no response.

He also has written letters to eight Florida governors asking for clemency. Those requests were long shots. Since 1980, clemency, an "executive lowering of the penalty," has only been granted to two inmates convicted of sexual battery.

Laster has sought clemency from eight governors. He'll be eligible to apply again in 2026. "If I'm still around," he says, "I'll try again."

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Laster's most recent request to Gov. Ron DeSantis was filed on June 8, 2021. The Office of Executive Clemency responded, informing Laster that the governor had denied the pending clemency applications of "all murderers and felony sex offenders."

Laster will be eligible to reapply for clemency in 2026 when he's 81.

"If I'm still around," he says, "I'll try again."

What Now?

Laster doesn't have to work. At his age, it's no longer mandatory. To stay active, he says, he mops floors and helps elderly or infirm inmates at the Dade Correctional Institution south of Florida City, where he was transferred last year. On a typical day, though, he wakes up, goes to breakfast, then spends the day listening to a Christian radio station, reading, and writing letters. He writes to churches, ministries, the court, and to me. I get one letter a week, sometimes two.

I tried to help things along. I wrote to the University of Miami School of Law's Innocence Clinic and to the Miami-Dade state attorney's Justice Project, both of which work to overturn wrongful convictions. I asked if they could help Laster. Neither group responded.

Laster's sole path to freedom may lie with the parole board, now known as the Florida Commission on Offender Review (FCOR), a panel of three commissioners that decides which inmates to parole or to release early for other reasons. The last time Laster became eligible for release was in December 2009. At that time, an Alcoholics Anonymous counselor named Fred Rebozo, who owns a used-car dealership in South Miami-Dade, pledged to offer Laster a maintenance job at his business and a place to stay.

"He is punctual and polite," Rebozo wrote in a letter to the FCOR commissioners. "He never misses our meetings... He will be welcome [at my business] and I would be delighted to have his assistance."

The commission declined to release Laster, telling him in a letter, "[We have] been unable to find that there is a reasonable probability that, if you are released on parole, you will live and conduct yourself as a respectable and law-abiding person and that your release will be compatible with your own welfare and the welfare of society."

"[We have] been unable to find that there is a reasonable probability that...you will live and conduct yourself as a respectable and law-abiding person."

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The decision, they wrote, was based on the nature of his crimes and history of alcohol abuse. (Laster has not had a drink since 1976.) In 2014 and 2021, he was denied again for the same reasons.

Those denials reflect a wider pattern. Even though 3,789 inmates were eligible in Florida last year, FCOR issued only 21 paroles. Parole, inmates often say, is like winning the lottery.

Fred Rebozo, the AA counselor who offered Laster work and a room in 2009, says his offer still stands. A job and living space are both requirements for parole.

"If he gets out," Rebozo says, "I'll take him."

Mia

There's one other potential scenario.

Now 79 years old and widowed, Mia still lives in Florida. In theory, she could write a letter to a judge, the state attorney, or FCOR in support of Laster's release, or provide a statement to be used as part of a petition for relief. Alternatively, if Laster can get a lawyer and a new hearing, she could reaffirm what she said at trial more than half a century ago: that she was never certain Boast Laster was one of the men who attacked her.

Would she do any of those things?

I found Mia's daughter on social media. She explained that her mother was so traumatized by the 1963 attack that she has been afraid of male strangers ever since. She added that Mia is in poor health and began shaking and crying when told of my inquiry. It would be best, she said, if I didn't speak with her.

"Did I do wrong? Yeah, I went out there and stole. But raping somebody? No. Never. That ain't me."

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Laster says he doesn't expect Mia to come forward. And that's OK. "I don't blame no one for my situation," he says.

Yet six decades later, he sometimes ponders a question: Who has suffered more, him or Mia? "Did I do wrong?" he muses. "Yeah, I went out there and stole. But raping somebody? No. Never. That ain't me."

After so many years, what would he do if he got out?

He says he wants to find out where his parents are buried and lay flowers on their graves. He wants to eat ham hocks with rice and black-eyed peas, followed by sweet potato pie. He wants to sit in the stands and watch a baseball game under a wide-open sky.

Mostly, he wants to know one last time what freedom feels like.

"It's been so long," he says, "I can't remember no more."

This is Part 2 of a two-part story by Terence Cantarella. Click this link to read Part 1, "No Way Out."