[Ppnews] 37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three

[Political Prisoner News]

37 years of solitary confinement: the Angola three

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/10/erwin-james-angola-three

In 1972, three men in a Louisiana prison were 
placed in solitary confinement after a prison 
guard was murdered. Two of them are still there – 
even though many believe they are innocent.

Angola prison, the state penitentiary of 
Louisiana, is the biggest prison in America. 
Built on the site of a former slave plantation, 
the 1,800-acre penal complex is home to more than 
5,000 prisoners, the majority of whom will never 
walk the streets again as free men. Also known as 
the Farm, Angola took its name from the homeland 
of the slaves who used to work its fields, and in 
many ways still resembles a slave plantation 
today. Eighty per cent of the prisoners are 
African-Americans and, under the watchful eye of 
armed guards on horseback, they still work fields 
of sugar cane, cotton and corn, for up to 16 
hours a day. "You've got to keep the inmates 
working all day so they're tired at night," says 
Warden Burl Cain, a committed evangelist who 
believes that the rehabilitation of convicts is 
only possible through Christian redemption.

Undoubtedly there is less violence and abuse 
among the prisoners under his wardenship than 
there was under his predecessors. But Angola is 
still a long way from being a "positive 
environment that promotes responsibility, 
goodness, and humanity", as he proclaims in the 
prison's mission statement. In fact at the heart 
of Cain's prison regime is an inhumanity that would make Jesus weep.

For more than 37 years, two prisoners, Herman 
Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have been locked down 
in Angola's maximum security Closed Cell 
Restricted (CCR) block – the longest period of 
solitary confinement in American prison history.

Having experienced the isolation of "23-hour 
bang-up" during my own 20 years of imprisonment, 
for offences of which I was guilty, I can attest 
to the mental impact that such conditions 
inflict. My first year was spent on a 
high-security landing where the cell doors were 
opened only briefly for meals and emptying of 
toilet buckets. If decent-minded prison officers 
were on duty we were allowed to walk the yard for 
30 minutes a day. The rest of the time we were 
alone. The cells were 10ft x 5ft, with a chair, a 
table and a bed. You could walk up and down, run 
on the spot, stand still, or do push-ups and 
sit-ups – but sooner or later you had to just stop, and think.

As the days, weeks and months blur into one, 
without realising it you start to live completely 
inside your head. You dream about the past, in 
vivid detail – and fantasise about the future, 
for fantasies are all you have. You panic but 
it's no good "getting on the bell" – unless 
you're dying – and, even then, don't hope for a 
speedy response. I had a lot to think about. When 
the man in the cell above mine hanged himself I 
thought about that, a lot. I still do. You look 
at the bars on the high window and think how easy 
it would be to be free of all the thinking.

Such thoughts must have crossed the minds of 
Wallace and Woodfox more than once during their 
isolation. They are fed through the barred gates 
of their 9ft x 6ft cells and allowed only one 
hour of exercise every other day alone in a small 
caged yard. Their capacity for psychological endurance alone is noteworthy.

Wallace and Woodfox were confined to solitary 
after being convicted of murdering Angola prison 
guard Brent Miller in 1972. But the circumstances 
of their trial was so suspect that there are no 
doubts among their supporters that these men are 
innocent. Even Brent Miller's widow, Teenie 
Verret, has her reservations. "If they did not do 
this," she says, "and I believe that they didn't, 
they have been living a nightmare."

One man who understands the nightmare that 
Wallace and Woodfox are living more than anyone 
else is Robert King. King was also convicted of a 
murder in Angola in 1973, and was held in 
solitary alongside Wallace and Woodfox for 29 
years, until his conviction was overturned in 
2001 and he was freed. Together, King, Wallace 
and Woodfox have become known as the "Angola three".

The case of the Angola three first came to 
international attention following the campaigning 
efforts of the Body Shop founder and humanitarian 
Anita Roddick. Roddick heard about their plight 
from a young lawyer named Scott Fleming. Fleming 
was working as a prisoner advocate in the 1990s 
when he received a letter from Wallace asking for 
help. The human tragedy Fleming uncovered had the 
most profound effect on him. When he qualified as 
a lawyer, their case became his first. "I was 
born in 1973," he says. "I often think that for 
my entire life they have been in solitary."

Through Fleming, Roddick met King and then 
Woodfox in Angola. Their story, she said later, 
"made my blood run cold in my veins". Until her 
death in 2007 Roddick was a committed and 
passionate supporter of their cause. At her 
memorial service King played two taped messages 
from Wallace and Woodfox. In the congregation was 
film-maker Vadim Jean who had become good friends 
with Roddick and her husband Gordon during an 
earlier film project. "Anita's big thing was, 
'Just do something,'" says Jean. "No matter how 
small an act of kindness. Listening to Herman and 
Albert's voices at her memorial was like having 
Anita's finger pointing at me and saying, 'Just 
do something'." And so he decided to make In the 
Land of the Free, a searing documentary, released later this month.

The story Jean's film tells is one that has 
resonance on many levels. All three men were from 
poor black neighbourhoods In New Orleans. They 
grew up fearing the police, who would regularly 
"clear the books" of crimes in the area, 
according to King, by pinning then on disaffected 
young black men. "If I saw the police, I used to 
run," King says. He admits to being involved in 
petty crime in his early years, but "nothing 
vicious". Eventually King was arrested for an 
armed robbery he says he did not commit and was 
sentenced to 35 years, which he began in New 
Orleans parish prison – and there he met Albert Woodfox.

Woodfox had also been sentenced for armed robbery 
– and given 50 years. On the day he was sentenced 
he escaped from the courthouse. He made his way 
to Harlem in New York, where he encountered the 
Black Panthers, the revolutionary 
African-American political movement. He witnessed 
the Panthers engaging with the community in a 
positive, constructive way, educating and 
informing people of their rights. He says it was 
the first time in his life that he had seen 
African-Americans exhibiting real pride, pride 
that emanated from the young activists, he says, "like a shimmering heatwave".

Two days later Woodfox was caught and taken to 
New York's Tombs prison where he saw first-hand 
the militant tactics of imprisoned Panthers who 
resisted their guards with organised protests. In 
Tombs, Woodfox was labelled "militant" and sent 
back to New Orleans where he joined King on the 
parish prison block, known – due to the high 
concentration of Panther activists – as "the 
Panther tier". There Woodfox became a member of the Black Panther party.

Outside, confrontations between the Panthers – 
described by FBI director J Edgar Hoover as "the 
greatest threat to the internal security of the 
country" – and the police were escalating. In an 
attempt to undermine the influence of the 
Panthers in New Orleans parish prison, officials 
tried to shoehorn men they termed "Black 
Gangsters" on to the tier – men like Wallace, 
also serving decades for armed robbery. One day 
Wallace was suffering from the pain of 
ill-fitting shoes. One of the Panthers, on his 
way to a court appearance, took his shoes off and 
handed them to Wallace. "Right then I knew that 
that was what I needed to be a part of," he says. 
In the summer of 1971 Wallace and Woodfox were shipped to Angola.

The civil rights bill had been signed in 1964, 
but seven years later Angola was still operating 
a segregated regime. Prisoner guards carried guns 
and were also responsible, according to 
well-documented sources, for organising 
systematic sexual abuse of vulnerable prisoners, 
which flourished in the prison's mostly dormitory 
accommodation. And violence between prisoners had 
reached such levels that Angola was known as "the bloodiest prison in America".

Woodfox and Wallace quickly extended the New 
Orleans chapter of the Black Panthers into 
Angola, establishing classes in political 
ideology and exposing injustices. They organised 
work stoppages, demonstrating to fellow prisoners 
the liberating power of acting with a "unity of 
purpose" and worked to eradicate the prevalent 
sexual abuses. But their political activities 
made them targets for the administrators. By the 
spring of 1972, tensions in the prison were dangerously high.

These were the conditions in which Brent Miller 
met his untimely death. That April, a prisoner 
work strike drew the attention of the guards who 
were called from normal duties to deal with the 
disturbance. Miller, a strong, athletic young man 
of 23, stayed behind alone. He entered a 
dormitory holding 90 prisoners and sat on an 
elderly prisoner's bed, drinking coffee and 
chatting. Moments later he was attacked and stabbed 32 times.

Two days later, four men identified as "black 
militants", including Wallace and Woodfox, were 
accused of the murder. It was quickly ascertained 
that one of the four had been inserted into the 
case by the prison administration. Charges 
against him were dropped. Another, Chester 
Jackson, admitted to holding Miller while the 
guard was stabbed to death. Jackson turned 
state's evidence in return for a plea to 
manslaughter. The case was tried in a town called 
St Francisville, the closest courthouse to 
Angola. The jury had been picked from the local 
populace, many of whom earned their living from 
the prison or had families and friends that 
worked there; all were white. Wallace and Woodfox 
were found guilty of Miller's murder, sentenced 
to life imprisonment without parole and taken 
from the court straight to Angola's CCR block to begin their life in isolation.

Robert King was brought to Angola from the parish 
prison two weeks after Miller's killing, as part 
of a roundup of black radicals. King had never 
met Miller and was in a prison 150 miles away 
when the murder took place. Yet he was 
investigated for the crime and identified as a 
"conspirator" before being transferred to 
lockdown on CCR alongside Wallace and Woodcock.

The following year a prisoner named August Kelly 
was murdered on King's CCR tier. A man named 
Grady Brewer admitted that he alone was 
responsible for the killing, which he said he 
carried out in self-defence. But King was also 
charged. The two men faced trial together in the 
same St Francisville courthouse where Wallace and 
Woodfox had been convicted the year before. The 
sole evidence against King came from flawed 
prisoner testimony. He and Brewer had not been 
allowed to speak to their attorneys for any 
length of time before their trial. When they 
protested, the judge ordered their hands to be 
shackled behind their backs and their mouths 
gagged with duct tape for the duration of their 
trial. The men were convicted and sentenced to 
life without parole. King later won an appeal; 
the federal court ruled that he had not been 
sufficiently unruly in the dock to warrant the 
shackling and gagging. He went back to trial in 
1975, was re-convicted and immediately sent back to CCR.

When, after Scott Fleming's intervention in the 
case of Wallace and Woodfox in the 1990s, new 
lawyers reviewed the original trial of both men, 
discovering "obfuscation after obfuscation". The 
state had used a number of jailhouse informants 
against them, many of whom gave contradictory 
accounts of what they saw. One was registered 
blind. The key witness in the case was a man 
called Hezikiah Brown who testified he witnessed 
the murder. In his initial statement to 
investigators however, Brown said he had not seen 
anything. Three days later, when he was taken 
from his bunk at midnight by prison officials and 
promised his freedom if he testified, he agreed 
to say that he saw Wallace and Woodfox kill 
Miller. At the time Brown was serving life 
without parole for multiple rapes. Immediately 
after he agreed to testify he was given his own 
minimum security private house in the prison 
grounds and a weekly cigarette ration.

Wallace and Woodfox did not give up. They fought 
their convictions from their cells and in 1993 
Woodfox was granted an appeal, forcing a new 
trial. The case was sent back to the same 
courthouse to be tried in front of a new grand 
jury. A local author, Anne Butler, who had 
published a book in which she detailed the case 
and was convinced that the right people had been 
convicted, acted as jury chairperson. No 
witnesses were called. Instead Butler was called 
upon to explain the case. Once again, the jury 
was composed of people who worked in Angola or 
were related to people who worked there. Butler's 
husband and co-author was Murray Henderson, who 
had been the warden of Angola when Brent Miller 
was murdered. It is worth noting that Henderson 
was a key member of the original investigation 
team and that, during that investigation, a 
bloody fingerprint was found close to Brent 
Miller's body. It was determined that it did not 
belong to Woodfox nor to Wallace, but despite the 
prison holding all the fingerprints of all the 
prisoners, no attempt was made to find out whose 
it was. The bloody print was also ignored at 
Woodfox's retrial. He was reconvicted and sent 
back to isolation in Angola's CCR.

It was 26 years before King won the right to 
another appeal. In 2001 the Federal court found 
that the jury in King's original trial had 
systematically excluded African-Americans and 
women and agreed that the case should be reheard. 
This time around the prisoner witnesses recanted 
and the federal court sent the case back to the 
district court for review. The state negotiated a 
deal with King. Reluctantly, and with his left 
hand raised instead of his right, he pleaded 
guilty to conspiracy; an hour and a half later he was freed.

In September 2008, Woodfox's conviction was 
overturned; the federal court ruled that his core 
constitutional rights had been violated at his 
original trial. Louisiana attorney general Buddy 
Caldwell could have set Woodfox free immediately. 
Instead he decided to contest the federal 
decision and Woodfox, now 64, was returned to 
Angola's CCR, where he remains. Herman Wallace, 
now 68, was moved to another Louisiana prison 
last year, where he too continues to be held in solitary confinement.

Today King, now 67, is still campaigning for 
justice for his friends. Albert Woodfox: "Our 
primary objective is that front gate. That is 
what we are struggling for and we are actually 
fighting for our freedom. We are fighting for 
people to understand that we were framed for a 
murder that we are totally, completely and 
actually innocent of." Robert King says he is 
free of Angola, but until his friends are free, 
"Angola will never be free of me."

Jean hopes his film will make a difference. 
"These men need help," he says. "Louisiana needs 
to be shamed into doing the right thing."

Further information: 
<http://angola3.org>angola3.org. If you wish to 
help highlight the plight of the Angola 3, you 
can write to the Governor of Louisiana at the 
Office of the Governor, PO Box 94004, Baton Rouge, LA 70804, US.





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