Laura Glesby photos
Gaylord Salters offers "Truth With Proof" on Church Street.
Gaylord Salters imagined the event years before it took place, back when he was still fighting for his freedom.
Then, during a year in which newly-freed Black men put New Haven’s criminal justice system on trial, Salters made the event happen: Seven days in a row of calling public attention to how law enforcement manipulated evidence to pin crimes on himself and others.
The weeklong rally in June, titled “Injustice Amongst Us: Seven Days of Truth With Proof,” centered around a wrongful conviction crisis in New Haven. It drew dozens outside City Hall and the police department headquarters — including exonerated New Haveners, random pedestrians who happened upon the event, and criminal justice reformers who traveled from out of state.
The activism coincided with a momentous year of public and personal reckonings with police misconduct against Black New Haveners — including a decision to overturn the conviction of Maleek Jones (pending appeal), the dropped charges against recently-exonerated Adam Carmon, and the largest police misconduct settlement in the country paid to Randy Cox.
Salters, 48, made it his mission to piece these individual incidents together into a broader call for accountability, not just on those seven days, but throughout 2023.
All the while, he has been fighting to clear his own name of what both he and the man who once testified against him say was a wrongful conviction resting on witness coercion.
Reform activist James Jeter credited Salters with generating a broader public understanding that the mounting wrongful convictions uncovered in New Haven are connected and “systemic.” People can no longer say “that’s just one case,” Jeter said.
“Gaylord has brought a crazy energy” to this activism, Jeter added. “Because it’s him. It’s who he is. And he’s fighting for his vindication.”
“It Is Hard Being In A Cage”
Laura Glesby Photo
Salters with the most recent book he authored, Momma Bear, at La Isla restaurant in 2022.
Salters was born on New Years’ Day 1975. He was raised in New Haven’s Quinnipiac Terrace public housing development in the 1980s, the third youngest of four kids. He attended Clinton Avenue Elementary School, Fair Haven Middle School, and Wilbur Cross High School.
His mother worked at a factory producing airplane parts, and later, turbine components. The check she earned wasn’t enough to pay all the family’s bills.
As a result, Salters and his little brother became entrepreneurial kids. They earned money carrying grocery bags for neighbors and shoveling snow. “When there was no snow on the ground to shovel, we had to pivot and we got a lawn mower,” he said. “I couldn’t wait ‘til I was 14 years old and I could get that summer job.”
Decades later, as Salters said on an episode of WNHH Radio’s “Dateline New Haven” in June, “I realized all that my mother had been through trying to keep her children safe from our own environment. And she didn’t know that it was a losing battle.”
It was a losing battle, Salters said, because “while she’s at work and we have free time and outside of our door is all the chaos that comes with poverty, it was just a losing situation.”
By the time Salters was a teenager, the crack epidemic had taken root in New Haven. He found that the drug trade offered much more income than a summer job.
The fallout of that era affected Salters’ family in multiple ways. “I had siblings get addicted,” he said. And police soon wanted to arrest him and his brother, Johnny Johnson, even though they didn’t have the evidence to do so.
Detective Thomas Troccio and prosecutor James Clark were able to put Salters behind bars eventually — for a crime he has always maintained he never committed. Salters was convicted in 2003 for a 1996 shooting that injured two people. The state’s sole witness against him was one of the shooting’s survivors. That witness had been simultaneously arrested on a gun possession charge, and prosecutors secretly sent him to a prison diversion program for which he ordinarily would not have qualified.
Previous Independent articles have gone in depth into the misconduct that kept Salters behind bars even after the state’s key witness against him recanted; the daily legal research and advocacy he undertook while incarcerated, which culminated in a sentence modification allowing him to leave prison in 2022; and the wrongful conviction, exoneration, and murder of his brother Johnny, with whom he at one point shared a cell.
According to the Vera Institute, Connecticut’s incarcerated population has grown by more than 400 percent since 1983, peaking around the time that Salters was sentenced. By the end of Salters’ time in prison, based on Census data compiled by the Prison Policy Initiative, Black people made up 44 percent of people incarcerated in Connecticut, but only 13 percent of the state as a whole.
“It is hard being in a cage, even when you have committed a crime,” Salters reflected. “Losing total control of your well-being, your physical being, is something that is out of this world. And it does something to you. And it lasts forever. Unless you have a realization that ‘This is not right.’ And you come to that realization by seeing, Why does everybody in here look like me, come from my communities? And why is it so constant, why is it so hard to stay away from this place?”
Those who are wrongfully convicted, Salters said, contend with another layer of injustice. “Just being in there, in that cell for 20 years, and not having nothing to do with this — that creates a certain type of beast. It makes you do a lot of reading, a lot of studying.”
"Injustice Amongst Us" On Church Street
Laura Glesby photo
Criminal justice advocates stand ground on Church Street for "Truth With Proof" protest.
When Salters left prison in 2022, he continued to devote hours to research and activism. He organized a rally outside the federal courthouse on Church Street calling attention to wrongful convictions in 2022. Day by day, he made calls, took on speaking roles, and met other criminal justice reformers face to face.
Over time, he amassed a group of allies from all over the country, including the New England Innocence Project, music producer Jason Flom and Khaliah Ali (the daughter of the late famous boxer Muhammad Ali), advocates from Yale Law and Cardozo School of Law, and the NAACP, among others. These allies comprised the list of guest speakers who came from across the state and beyond for Seven Days of Truth With Proof this June.
On the protest’s first day, 25 people assembled for hours outside City Hall, steps from the federal courthouse and from federal prosecutors’ office. The group included criminal justice reform activists and men who had been wrongfully incarcerated themselves.
Salters had organized guest speakers, short documentary screenings, opening prayers, collective chants, and detailed recountings of the research he compiled on how police and prosecutorial corruption led to his conviction and others’.
On each day of the protest, Salters zeroed in on patterns of corruption from specific prosecutors and detectives that led to the convictions of Stefon Morant, Darcus Henry, Bobby Johnson, Daryl Valentine, and himself, among many others.
In presentations about these various convictions to twenty or so onlookers, Salters anonymized the names of the detectives and prosecutors involved in each case so as to be “diplomatic.” But he made clear that many of the same law enforcement officials were responsible. That many, such as Anthony DiLullo, were allowed to continue in their professions even after their misconduct came to light.
On the first day of the Injustice Amongst Us protest, Salters focused largely on Maleek Jones, who spent nearly 30 years in prison for a murder conviction that a judge eventually overturned in August.
Salters explained how the state’s case against Jones hinged on the testimony of a man who was also convicted of the same crime; how the theory that Jones was involved with the crime contradicted ballistic evidence; how the only eyewitness of the crime, a friend of the victim, has always maintained that Jones was not involved, even though detectives allegedly pressured her to name him.
From the court’s perspective, Salters argued,“the word of a police officer is solid. The word of a prosecutor is solid. Point blank, period. But the word of an individual who has spent 30 years in prison means nothing, even when he has the truth and proof to show that he was wrong.”
Jones heard about the protest from a phone call with Jeter after the fact. “I had no idea that was going on,” he said. “To know there were people out there … I’m just grateful. Words can’t even suffice what that actually meant to me, my family. That was huge.”
On the third day of Injustice Amongst Us, State’s Attorney John Doyle announced in court that he would not be pursuing a new trial against Adam Carmon, whose conviction had been overturned several months prior. This announcement meant that Carmon, who had spent three decades in prison after a trial mired in suppressed and manipulated evidence, could call himself “exonerated.”
The next day, Carmon showed up to Salters’ protest — where he met Cecilia Bratton, a former prosecutor who had signed onto the warrant for Carmon’s arrest that led to his wrongful imprisonment. According to Salters and Carmon, she apologized to him, saying she didn’t know that the warrant she signed was based on fabricated evidence. She invited him out to dinner. “She’s a great lady,” Carmon said. “She expressed such heartfelt shame.”
Carmon knew when he heard about the protest that “I had to be there,” he said. He attended not only for himself, but for the people responsible for his conviction: “Their feet should be held to the fire.”
Salters believes that Carmon and Jones’ overturned convictions are signs that a movement for justice is making progress.
“It’s only for so long you’re gonna be able to lie and dance around these situations,” he said, “because all of this truth is here. All of these facts are here.”
“I Want This For Other People”
Salters outside the New Haven Free Public Library's Ives branch, where he frequently does his research.
Outside of his activism, Salters has focused on reconnecting with his family. He splits his time between Connecticut, where his wife and four kids live, and North Carolina, where his mom, who recently developed cancer, resides.
Salters beams when he talks about his kids. His oldest daughter, Gabrielle, is the Chief Operating Officer of Salters’ company, Go Get It Publishing. (He refers to her as “the boss.”) His son, Gaylord Jr., is pursuing a music career under the name JunThatsIt. He drops his school-aged kids off at school and picks them up at the end of the day. “I love my grandbaby,” he added. “Make sure you put that in there.”
One recent night, Salters went to a jewelry store with his youngest daughter (“my eleven-year-old genius”) to buy a Christmas present for his wife. They brought the family poodle, Chance, who was mostly well-behaved inside the bustling mall. The words Salters initially wanted to engrave amounted to too many letters, so he kept the message short and exceptionally sweet. (This reporter is sworn to secrecy until Christmas day.)
At the mall, Salters thought about his friends who are still incarcerated. “It’s a beautiful thing being here with one of my daughters,” he said. “But I want this for other people.”
Previous New Haveners of the Year:
• 2022: Honda Smith
• 2021: Giovanni Zinn
• 2020: Maritza Bond
• 2019: Anthony Duff
• 2018: Kim Harris & Amy Marx
• 2017: New Haveners Under 30: Caroline Smith, Coral Ortiz, Justin Farmer, Jesus Morales Sanchez, Margaret Lee, Sarah Ganong, Jacob Spell, Steve Winter, Eliannie Sola, Leiyanie Lee Osorio
• 2016: Corey Menafee
• 2015: Jim Turcio
• 2014: Rev. Eldren Morrison
• 2013: Mnikesa Whitaker
• 2012: Diane Polan, Jennifer Gondola, Jillian Knox, Holly Wasilewski
• 2011: Stacy Spell
• 2010: Martha Green, Paul Kenney, Michael Smart, Rob Smuts, Luis Rosa Sr.
• 2009: Rafael Ramos
• 2006: Shafiq Abdussabur
It all goes back to racism built into the evil system of U.S. capitalism.
Thank you for this amazing story that shows human beings are good to the core.
This story could be repeated thousands of times in almost every State in this country.
It all goes back to racism and the evils of capitalism.
The White rich people commit crimes everyday. But, they're White and assumed innocent (think donald trump).
If 45 was a Black man he'd have been in prison decades ago.
Until the system of capitalism is restructured to a social democratic system the victims of racism as seen here will go on.
That's why stories like this are so important!
Thank you for reporting this!
Change is coming because change is certain and that's all that is.