http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/36-years-solitude
36
Years of Solitude
By James Ridgeway |
Mon March 2, 2009 5:30 PM PST
What's left of Albert Woodfox's life now lies in the hands of a federal appeals
court in New Orleans. By the time the court hears his case on Tuesday, the 62-year-old
will have spent 36 years, 2 months, and 24 days in a 6-by-9-foot cell at the
Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. An 18,000-acre complex that still
resembles the slave plantation it once was, the notorious prison, immortalized
in the film Dead Man Walking, has long been considered one of the most
brutal in America, a place where rape, abuse, and violence have been
commonplace. With the exception of a few brief months last year, Woodfox has
served nearly all of his time there in solitary confinement, out of contact
with other prisoners, and locked in his cell 23 hours a day. By most estimates,
he and his codefendant, Herman Wallace, have spent more time in solitary than
any other inmates in US history.
Woodfox and Wallace are members of a triad known as the "Angola 3"three
prisoners who spent decades in solitary confinement after being accused of
prison murders and convicted on questionable evidence. Before they were
isolated from other inmates, the trio, which included a prisoner named Robert
King, had organized against conditions in what was considered "the
bloodiest prison in America." Their supporters believe that their
activism, along with their ties to the Black Panther Party, motivated prison
officials to scapegoat the inmates.*
Over the years, human rights activists worldwide have rallied around the Angola
3, pointing to them as victims of a flawed and corrupt justice system. Though
King managed to win his release in 2001, after his conviction was overturned,
Woodfox and Wallace haven't been so lucky. Amnesty International has called
their continued isolation "cruel, inhuman, and degrading," charging
that their treatment has "breached international treaties which the USA
has ratified, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights and the Convention against Torture." Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.),
chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has taken a keen interest in the case
and traveled to Angola last spring to visit with Woodfox and Wallace.
"This is the only place in North America that people have been
incarcerated like this for 36 years," he told Mother Jones.
Meanwhile, the prevailing powers in Louisiana, from
Angola's warden to the state's attorney general, are bent on keeping Woodfox
and Wallace right where they are. The state's Republican governor, Bobby
Jindal, has thus far steered clear of the controversial case. Conyers, though,
who has spoken with Jindal about Woodfox and Wallace, says the governor seemed
"open-minded."
For his part, Conyers is optimistic that Woodfox's fortunes, at least, could
soon change. On Tuesday, Nick Trenticosta, who is one of Woodfox's lawyers,
will have 20 minutes to convince the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the
decision of a district court judge in Baton Rouge, who last July overturned Woodfox's
conviction for the 1972 murder of an Angola prison guard. The murder, for which
Wallace was also charged, occurred while Woodfox was already serving a sentence
for armed robbery. Trenticosta, a longtime Louisiana death penalty attorney who
heads the New Orleans-based Center for Equal Justice, will argue that his
client received inadequate representation from his court-appointed attorneys
when he was retried in 1998, as well as during his original trial in 1973.
Better lawyers, he'll argue, would have shown that Woodfox's conviction was
quite literally bought by the state, which based its case on jailhouse
informants who were rewarded for their testimony. The primary eyewitness to the
murder received special privileges and the promise of a pardon. One of the
corroborating witnesses was legally blind, while another was on the
anti-psychotic drug Thorazine; both were subsequently granted furloughs.
Woodfox's lawyers will also make the case that the state failed to provide his
previous defense attorneys with crucial information about the witnessesensuring
that they were unable to cross-examine them effectivelyand lost physical
evidence, which was inconclusive at best, and possibly favorable to the
defendant. (A spokeswoman for the Louisiana State Penitentiary said the prison,
as a matter of policy, would not comment on an ongoing case.)
Depending on how the appeals court decides, Woodfox may get a chance at another
trial, where this time he'll be represented by a team of highly skilled
lawyers. If given that opportunity, Trenticosta told Mother Jones in a
recent interview, he and his colleagues will go beyond just refuting the
evidence that led to their client's conviction. They intend to reveal the
identities of the real murderers of prison guard Brent Miller, who, Trenticosta
says, are now dead. He says his team has "numerous witnesses who saw"
the murder and others "who have good information." (Asked for the
names of the witnesses and others with specific knowledge of the murder,
Trenticosta said he would reveal their identities only if there is another
trial.) Of Woodfox and Wallace, Trenticosta says, "They were targeted.
They were set up." The lawyer believes the state of Louisiana is
determined to prevent Woodfox from being retried in order to "cover up a
coverup."
The state's case against overturning Woodfox's conviction will be argued by Kyle Duncan,
a University of Mississippi law school professor who is an admirer of the
jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
He will likely take the usual position in these types of cases, arguing that
Woodfox's previous defense attorneys, despite what Trenticosta might say, had
every opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses, so no new trial is warranted.
But Duncan is little more than a mouthpiece; the force behind the state's
appeal is Louisiana attorney general James "Buddy" Caldwell Jr. The
former prosecutor, who moonlights as an Elvis impersonator, is a politically
ambitious Democrat. Since his election in 2007, Caldwell has fought efforts by
Woodfox and Wallace to overturn their convictions. After Woodfox's conviction
was overturned last year, Caldwell
declared, "We will appeal this decision to the 5th Circuit. If the
ruling is upheld there I will not stop and we will take this case as high as we
have to. I will retry this case myself…I oppose letting him out with every
fiber of my being because this is a very dangerous man."
Caldwell shares this position with Angola's warden, Burl Cain, a devout Baptist
who has a reputation for proselytizing to the inmates under his watch. Cain,
who has likened the Black Panthers to the KKK, is adamant that the aging
Woodfox is and always will be a menace to society by virtue of his political
beliefs. He has said that Woodfox is "locked in time with that Black
Panther revolutionary actions they were doing way back when…And from that,
there's been no rehabilitation."
After a three-judge appelate panel hears arguments on March 3, it will be at
least six weeks, and possibly many months, before it rules on the appeal. If it
concurs with the district court's decision, Woodfox will be retried or
released. If it overrules the lower court, his conviction will remain in place,
and his defense team will have to go back to the drawing board.
Albert Woodfox's journey to the East Courtroom of the 5th Circuit Court
of Appeals began 40 years ago, when he was convicted of armed robbery at age 21
and sentenced to 50 years of hard labor. After being transferred from New
Orleans to Angola in 1971, Woodfox met Herman Wallace and Robert King.
In the early 1970s, Angolawhich spans an area the size of Manhattan and is 30
miles from the nearest townwas a lawless, dangerous hellhole. The all-white
corrections officers, who were called "freemen," lived with their
families in their own community on the prison grounds, with inmate-servants
they called "house boys." There were just 300 freemen to control an
inmate population of more than 3,000but they were backed by hundreds of
so-called "trustees," supposedly trustworthy convict guards, who were
known to abuse other prisoners. In his just-published autobiography, From
the Bottom of the Heap, Robert King, who was released in 2001 after proving
that he'd been wrongfully convicted of the murder of a fellow Angola inmate,
says prison guards stripped prisoners, shaved their heads, and made them run a
gauntlet of bats and clubs; incoming prisoners, known as "fresh
fishes," were sold as sex slaves. According to records kept by
the prison's famous newspaper, The Angolite, there were 82 stabbings in
1971, 52 in 1972, and 137 in 1973. (The paper's longtime editor, Wilbert
Rideau, won the prestigious George Polk Award for his journalism while still in
prison.)
In his book, King describes the tinderbox atmosphere at Angola when he arrived
in 1971. That August, prisoners had organized a hunger strike to demand an end
to the inmate-guard system, sexual enslavement, racial segregation, and 16-hour
workdays. King sensed a mood of defiance among the prisoners and learned that
Wallace and Woodfox were "teaching unity amongst the inmates, establishing
the only recognized prison chapter of the Black Panther party in the
nation." He joined Wallace and Woodfox in organizing the prison population
to advocate for better living conditions.
It was in this volatile environment that Brent Miller, a 23-year-old
corrections officer born and raised in Angola's staff community, was stabbed to
death in a prison dormitory on the morning of April 17, 1972. About 200
prisonersevery one of them blackwere rounded up and interrogated. Billy Wayne
Sinclair, a white inmate who was on Angola's death row at the time (he was
eventually freed), later told
NPR: "You heard hollering and screaming and the bodies being slammed
against the walls. Upstairs you could smell tear-gas bombs…We heard the
beatings that were going on for weeks after that." Two days after the
murder, an elderly prisoner named Hezekiah Brown came forward, reportedly
telling investigators that he had witnessed the stabbing being carried out by
Woodfox and Wallace, along with two other inmates. Based on his statements, the
local sheriff filed charges against the men he had named.
Brown was the state's key witness against Woodfox in his 1973 trial. A
magistrate judge who reviewed Woodfox's case wrote last summer that Brown's
testimony was "so critical to [the prosecution's] case that without it
there would probably be no case." After a federal court overturned
Woodfox's conviction, he was given another trial in 1998, where Brown's account
again figured heavily. At that point, Brown had been dead for two years, but
his testimonywithout defense objectionwas read into the record. In his 1973
testimony, Brown admitted that he had at first said he was not in the dormitory
when the murder happened, but then decided to tell "the truth."
According to Brown, the truth was that on the morning of the murder Miller
stopped by his bed for coffee, as he often did, and while he was sitting on
Brown's bed, the four men came into the dorm and began stabbing him. (NPR,
which did a three-part series on the case last year, interviewed a former
Angola inmate who said he was with Woodfox in the prison mess at the time of the
murder.)
According to evidence presented at Woodfox's 1998 trial, Brown was rewarded for
his testimony in numerous ways: He was moved to a minimum-security area, where
he lived in a house, luxurious by prison standards, and was provided with a
carton of cigarettes a week. And a month after the 1973 trial, then-warden
Murray Henderson began writing letters to state officials seeking a pardon for
Brown, which cited his testimony against Miller's alleged murderers. During
Woodfox's 1998 retrial, Henderson acknowledged that he promised Brown a pardon
in exchange for his help "cracking the case." It took years, but
Brown, a serial rapist serving life without parole, was released in 1986.
A second key witness was an inmate named Paul Fobb, who said he saw Woodfox
leaving the dormitory after the murder. Fobb, who was legally blind, was also
dead in 1998, and his earlier testimony, like Brown's, was read into the record
without objection by Woodfox's lawyers. Fobb, who had been convicted of
multiple rapes, was granted a medical furlough shortly after testifying, and
left Angola.
A third prosecution witness, Joseph Richey, claimed that he saw Woodfox and
others exiting the dorm, and on going inside saw Miller's body. At first he
said he thought the inmates were going for help, but after a meeting at the
attorney general's office, Richey changed his statement. He later confirmed
being on Thorazine at the time of his testimony, and said he had told the
attorney general's office as much. This information was not given to Woodfox's
defense lawyers in either trial, nor were the juries made aware. Richey was
subsequently transferred from Angola to a minimum-security state police
barracks, and went on to work as a butler at the Louisiana governor's mansion.
He was even provided the use of state police cars. While supposedly under the
watch of the state police, Richey robbed three banks.
Yet another supposed witness, Chester Jackson, never testified at Woodfox's
1973 trial. Yet in 1998, his statements to investigators were mentioned by
prison officials testifying for the prosecution, with only belated objections
by the defense that this was hearsay evidence.
Then there was the physical evidence: a homemade knife that couldn't be linked
to any of the accused; a bloody fingerprint that likewise matched none of the
men Brown had implicated; and flecks of human blood on Woodfox's shirt (which
he denies he was wearing that day). The bloodstained shirt was lost before the
1998 trialand before it could be tested for DNA.
In 1973, Woodfox was convicted of Miller's murder in a matter of hours by an
all-white jury. Wallace was convicted just as quickly in a separate trial. It
took more than two decades of appeals, but Woodfox finally won a new trial on
the basis of "ineffective assistance of counsel"poor lawyering. Yet
the 1998 trial not only failed to reveal earlier miscarriages of justice, but
also introduced one of its own: One member of the grand jury that reindicted
Woodfox was Anne Butler, ex-wife of former Angola warden Murray Henderson, who
had led the investigation of the murder in 1973. She was kept on the jury even
after revealing her identity to the district attorney, and despite the fact
that she had written about Miller's murderand her belief that Woodfox and Wallace
were guiltyin the 1992 book she coauthored with Henderson, Dying to Tell,
which she reportedly passed around for other jurors to read.
Woodfox began working to secure himself a third trial almost immediately
after his second. But a lifeline came to him via another member of the Angola
3, Robert King. Convicted of a separate prison murder and placed in solitary
for decades, King ultimately won his release with the help of Chris Aberle, a
former 5th Circuit staff attorney who had been assigned to represent him in his
appeal. King was convinced that, like himself, Woodfox and Wallace were
"victims of frame-up and racism," he said in a recent interview. He
asked Aberle to help them as well, and the lawyer agreed. In 2006, Aberle filed
a habeas corpus petition on Woodfox's behalf with the Federal District Court
for the Middle District of Louisiana.
With Aberle and a team of new lawyers fighting for them, King speaking out on
their behalf, and a growing support movement, it looked as if 2008 would be a turning
point for Woodfox and Wallace. In March, they were moved
for the first time in 35 years from solitary to a maximum-security
dormitory with other prisoners. The move followed Rep. John Conyers' visit to
Angola and was spurred by a civil lawsuit initiated by the ACLU and carried
forward under the leadership of noted death penalty attorney George Kendall,
who argued that the Angola 3's decades-long confinement in solitary violated
the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. (The case is ongoing.)
Then, in June 2008, a federal magistrate judge named Christine Noland issued a
70-page report in response to Woodfox's habeas petition. The report recommended
that Woodfox's 1998 conviction be overturned, based on the deficiencies in his
defense counsel. It also pointed to the weakness of the state's case:
At the most, the Court sees a case supported largely by one
eyewitness [Brown] of questionable credibility…two corroborating witnesses,
Richey and Fobb, both of whom, according to other evidence submitted with
Woodfox's petition, provided trial testimony which was materially different
from their written statements given just after the murder, and one of whom's
testimony (Fobb's) could have been discredited by expert evidence; and no
physical evidence definitively linking Woodfox to the crime.
Because, in the Court's view, the State's case did not have
"overwhelming" record support, confidence in the outcome is more susceptible
to and is undermined by defense counsel's errors...and as a result, Woodfox is
entitled to the habeas relief he seeksthat his conviction and life sentence
for the second-degree murder of Miller be reversed and vacated.
A month later, in July 2008,
federal district court Judge James Brady affirmed Noland's findings and issued
a ruling overturning Woodfox's conviction. In November, he ordered Woodfox
to be released on bail pending a new trial. "Mr. Woodfox today is not the
Mr. Woodfox of 1973," Brady wrote in his ruling. "Today he is a
frail, sickly, middle-aged man who has had an exemplary conduct record for over
the last 20 years."
Buddy Caldwell, Louisiana's attorney general, would have none of it. He
appealed Brady's decision, then moved swiftly to mount an emergency motion to
block Woodfox's release. "We're…not going to let them get away with that
kind of thing," Caldwell
told the press. (Caldwell declined to comment for this story.)
Woodfox's release was contingent upon him finding a place to live. His niece,
who lived in a gated community outside New Orleans, offered to take him in. But
an attorney in Caldwell's office emailed the neighborhood association to warn
that a cold-blooded murderer was about to be released into their midst.
Woodfox's niece reported
that her neighbors stopped waving to her family and cars began circling past
her house, sometimes stopping. "We became afraid for our children,"
she said. While his lawyers worked to secure other living arrangements, the
court decided to grant the state's emergency motion, declaring that Woodfox
would have to remain in custody pending his appeal.
Caldwell has shown a similar determination when it comes to Wallace, who is
pursuing his case through state courts, backed by the same legal team. In 2006
a state judicial commissioner issued a report similar in many ways to Christine
Noland's, recommending that Wallace's conviction be overturned based largely on
questions about Hezekiah Brown's testimony. But the recommendation was
subsequently dismissed by both the district court and its appellate court.
Wallace has taken his appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court, where his case is
pending.
Caldwell's fixation on keeping Wallace and Woodfox locked up mystifies some
observers of the case. But in addition to any political motives he may have,
Woodfox's lawyer, Nick Trenticosta, suggests, Caldwell may be seeking to
protect the reputation of one of his closest associates and childhood friends,
John Sinquefield.
As the district attorney who prosecuted the 1973 case against Woodfox,
Sinquefield stands to be tainted by revelations that the state's key witnesses
were compromisedand that he failed to provide key information to the defense
team. Magistrate Judge Noland has already criticized Sinquefield's behavior in
Woodfox's 1998 trial, where he was called as a witness. After Brown's testimony
had been read into the record, Sinquefield, who's now the chief assistant
district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish, took the stand to describe the
dead witness' delivery of his original testimony. Brown, said Sinquefield, had
"testified in a good, strong voice, he was very open, he was very
spontaneous, he answered questions quickly, and he was very fact
specific." He also declared, "I was proud of the way he testified. I
thought it took a lot of courage."
In her report, Noland pointed out that Sinquefield's testimony was highly
unorthodox. She noted that "a prosecutor's statements suggesting that he
has personal knowledge of a witness's credibility" meets the Supreme
Court's criteria for "egregious prosecutorial misconduct."
Caldwell, for his part, has made clear that he will go to great lengths to keep
Woodfox and Wallace in prison, and preferably in solitary confinement (where
both men were returned after their brief respite last year). If need be, he
says, he will personally prosecute Woodfox for a third time for the Miller
murder. And if at any point it looks as if Woodfox will be returned to societywhether
on bail or through exonerationCaldwell has said he intends to launch a
prosecution on what he claims are several 40-year-old charges of rape and
robbery for which the prisoner was never prosecuted.
Good luck, says Aberle, who notes that Caldwell is referring to an arrest
record from the '60s. Such charges were then commonly used to hold black men,
he says, but seldom stuck because they had literally been pulled off a list of
existing unsolved rape cases. "Nothing ever happened with any of
them," Aberle says. Caldwell, he adds, "would have to make a case
with witnesses he couldn't come up with 40 years ago."
After Caldwell, the man who appears most determined to keep Woodfox and Wallace
behind bars, is Angola's current warden, Burl Cain. Known for his prison
evangelizing, Cain has set up chapels around the grounds and a host of Bible
study classes and other religious activities for prisoners. As described in a
glowing 2008 article in the Baptist Press:
Once called the bloodiest prison in America, the Louisiana
State Prison at Angola now has a new reputation as a place of hope for more
than 5,000 inmates who live out their life sentences without parole. Many
inmates know they'll leave the prison walls only when they die, yet despite
their circumstances, there is joy in their hearts.
Credit for this unprecedented transformation is given to its
one-of-a-kind warden, Burl Cain, who governs the massive prison on the
Mississippi River delta with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.
The article notes Cain's
special dedication to delivering souls from the death chamber into the hands of
Christ. When he supervised his first execution as warden, Cain said, "I
didn't share Jesus" with the condemned man, and as he received the lethal
injection, "I felt him go to hell as I held his hand." As Cain tells
it, "I decided that night I would never again put someone to death without
telling him about his soul and about Jesus." Cain believes that there is
only one path toward rehabilitation, and it runs through Christian redemption.
According to Wallace, Cain has at least once offered to release him and Woodfox
from solitary if they renounced their political beliefs and accepted Christ as their savior.
If Cain did indeed make that offer, that's the extent of the mercy he's willing
to show the men. "They chose a life of crime," he
has said. "Every choice they made is theirs. They're crybabies crying
about it. What they ought to do is look in the mirror and quit looking
out." The appeals panel that reviewed Woodfox's grant of bail relied
heavily on Cain's statements in deciding to keep the prisoner in custody.
According to the court's stay of release, "The only testimony on whether
Woodfox poses a threat of danger was the deposition of Warden Cain, who
testified about his impressions of Woodfox's character and Woodfox's disciplinary
record while in prison. The Warden stated his belief that Woodfox has not been
rehabilitated and still poses a threat of violence to others."
In his deposition, Cain provided numerous examples of Woodfox's rule breaking:
Prison guards, he reported, had discovered five pages of
"pornography" in the prisoner's cell, which, Cain went on to say,
"we believe can cause inmates to become predators on other inmates,
because they seethe sexual thing arouses them. And so they're in an
environment where there are no females, there is no sexual gratification other
than whatever you can create yourself, and then what happens is…it causes
homosexuality…and is counterproductive to moral rehabilitation." On
another occasion, Woodfox was found "hollering and shaking the bars on his
cell," a "very serious" offense, Cain said, because the inmate
was "absolutely being defiant," behavior that could cause other
inmates to "rack the bars" and even "cause a riot." Cain
rattled off more charges against the man he called a "predator,"
ranging from throwing feces at other prisoners to threatening a hunger strike.
Cain said that Woodfox had made a "telescopic" pole of compressed
paper that could be used as a spear or a blowgun. Woodfox had also been found
with an empty Clorox bottle, something escaping prisoners used as
"flotation devices," according to Cain, when making their getaways
down the nearby Mississippi River. The majority of these violations25 of them
over 36 yearshad occurred more than 20 years earlier.
Cain has made clear that one of the reasons he thinks Woodfox and Wallace are
dangerous is his belief that the prisoners are moles for the Black Panthers,
who might take the opportunity to start a revolution in the prison if they are
released from solitary. If they're let out of prison altogether, Cain suggests,
they will take their militant agenda to the streets. In his deposition, he
stated that Robert King is "only waiting, in my opinion, for them to get
out so they can reunite."
"Reunited for what reason?" asked Nick Trenticosta.
"Because he passes out little cookies with the panther on them," Cain
said, apparently referring to the logo of King's homemade candy business. (King
began making pralineswhich he now dubs "freelines"while still in
Angola, using a makeshift stove fashioned out of soda cans and fueled by toilet
paper.) "If he passed out those cookies with KKK on them, it would be no
different to me. He would be guilty. If you build your life on hatred and
you're hung up back 20 or 30 years ago, and we have moved onto society past
that, you can't go back reliving in the public. You're dangerous…You can keep
until the cows come home; I'm never going to tell you he's not violent and
dangerous, in my opinion. I just can't do it."
Asked by Trenticosta to assume, for a moment, that Woodfox was not guilty of
killing Miller, Cain insisted that his treatment of the prisoner would remain
unchanged.
"I would still keep him in CCR [solitary confinement]," he said.
"I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I
still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the
young new inmates. I would have me all kind of problems, more than I could
stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them [Woodfox and Wallace]…He
has to stay in a cell while he is at Angola."
Asked to define "Black Pantherism," Cain replied, "I have no
idea. I have never been one. I know they hold their fists up, and I know that I
read about them, and they advocated violence…Maybe they are nice good people,
but he is not."
When Trenticosta pressed him on why Woodfox was dangerous, Cain grew angry.
"What can I say? He's bad. He's dangerous. I believe it. He will hurt
you…They better not let him out of prison."
*Among the activists who have taken up the cause of the Angola 3 were Anita
Roddick, the late founder of the Body Shop (who was also a Mother Jones board
member) and her husband, Gordon. The Roddicks' family charity, the Roddick
Foundation, contributed funding for this story.
--
Free All Political Prisoners!
nycjericho@gmail.com • www.jerichony.org