Solitary

by Albert Woodfox

  In June, the NBC Nightly News did a segment on us; our supporters had been trying since my trial in 1998 to get national network news to report on our story. “Let’s understand something here,” Herman’s voice came over by phone in the report, “the SPCA would shut this prison down if they had dogs up in here like this. It’s just cruel and unusual punishment.” Teenie Rogers was interviewed for the NBC segment and also gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times.

  As the months passed in the CCR dorm I was reminded of Herman’s extraordinary resourcefulness. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and that is nowhere more true than in prison, but Herman went beyond the norm. I once watched him fill his favorite pen with ink pulled from another pen. He attached the two pens somehow and spun them on a string until all the ink from one pen went into the other. He sewed pieces of thick white athletic socks onto his regular socks at the ankle to protect his skin from chafing when he walked in the leg irons. He made gloves out of cut-off sweatshirt sleeves, tracing the fingers of his own hand on the sleeve and cutting it out with a razor blade, then sewing the finger seams together using thread from unraveling a sheet.

  We were frustrated because we had no chance to talk to prisoners in the main prison. The only time we were in the same area with other prisoners outside CCR was when we were in the visiting room, and prisoners weren’t allowed to talk to each other there. We discussed ways to reach them. “The only way to make change is to get among the ‘gangsters’ and ‘gangbangers’ and to arm them with new methods of thinking,” Herman would say, quoting Mumia Abu-Jamal. “If our young brothers are lost,” Mumia said, “then it is our duty to find them!”

  While housed in the CCR dorm we had yard every day and Herman and I could be in the yard at the same time. We would never admit it or say it aloud, but the punishment of 23 hours a day in the cell had taken a toll on our health. We weren’t as fast as we used to be. We were in our sixties now. My back stiffened on me some days and on those days I couldn’t run at all. There were times when I suddenly felt fatigued and weak and I figured that was from the diabetes. I was on stronger medication for my high blood pressure now. Herman had his own aches and pains and was going deaf. He asked people to speak up, saying, “My ears are closing.” After waiting for months he was finally sent to the hospital in Baton Rouge to have his hearing tested. The doctors told him he had severe hearing loss and prescribed two hearing aids. The prison gave him only one. He said it created an imbalance in his head.

  On July 8, 2008, I got a message to call one of my attorneys, Nick Trenticosta. When your lawyer calls you in prison, part of you braces for bad news. There could be a death in the family. I called him back. Nick was joyful. He told me my conviction was overturned by Judge Brady, who had decided to follow Magistrate Judge Noland’s recommendation of relief. Judge Brady overturned my conviction on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel and also found that prosecutors had unlawfully failed to turn over evidence they had that would have helped my defense. The state immediately asked Judge Brady to reconsider his decision.

  On September 25, after denying the state’s motion to reconsider his ruling, Judge Brady entered judgment, granting me habeas corpus relief. The state had 30 days to retry me or dismiss the charges against me. Nick gave me the news on the phone. He said, “Albert, it sounds like you’re drunk.” I said, “I am drunk. I’m drunk on justice.” Nick made numerous attempts to meet with Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, but Caldwell wouldn’t meet with him. “We call on the attorney general to do the right thing,” Nick told reporters. “To act as a reasonable public servant in the pursuit of justice . . . to allow Mr. Woodfox to go home today.” Caldwell talked to reporters, saying he would appeal Judge Brady’s ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. “I oppose letting him out with every fiber of my being,” he told the reporters, “because this is a very dangerous man.” My lawyers filed a motion for my release on bail pending Caldwell’s appeal, and a hearing for that motion was scheduled. At the bail hearing in October, my brother Michael’s daughter, my niece Rheneisha Robertson (the director of a nonprofit health organization); and her husband, former professional football player Bernard Robertson, told the court I could live with their family in a gated community outside New Orleans. Michael testified about my character.

  Nick told the judge how my already poor health, after more than 30 years of solitary confinement, would be jeopardized by my staying in prison and cited my outstanding conduct record. Assistant to the attorney general Dana Cummings argued against bail saying the state would be “irreparably injured” if I was released. She emphasized my criminal record and that I was “twice convicted of murder.” Judge Brady reminded her that both of my murder convictions had been overturned. He asked her how the state would be “irreparably injured” if I was free on bail. Cummings replied, “If he goes out and kills one of our witnesses, we’re irreparably injured.” Burl Cain testified I was a danger to the community, “because he is not a rehabilitated prisoner. He will be a predator when the opportunity comes his way.” Outside the courtroom, Buddy Caldwell painted me as a monster. He told the press I was a convicted rapist and a serial sex offender—all lies.

  While the court considered the state’s appeal of my victory, my niece was terrorized for agreeing to take me in. We heard that the attorney general’s office contacted the homeowners’ association where she lived and spread lies about me. Strangers somehow got into her gated community and repeatedly drove slowly by her house. Some neighbors received in their mailboxes flyers about me stating that I was a rapist. “Buddy Caldwell . . . embarked upon a public scare campaign reminiscent of the kind of inflammatory hysteria that once was used to provoke lynch mobs,” wrote Ira Glasser, the former executive director of the ACLU. “He sent emails to neighbors calling Woodfox a convicted murderer and violent rapist; and neighbors were urged to sign petitions opposing his release.”

  One day Michael told me Rheneisha was home with her sick child when the doorbell rang. She opened the door to a mob of reporters, asking to talk to her. She didn’t know what to do; she wanted to go to her child, who was in another room of the house, but didn’t want to close the door on the reporters or say something that might come back to hurt me. Her neighbors stopped waving to her. I told my lawyers to tell the judge I was withdrawing her name as the person I would stay with on bail. I was concerned about my niece’s family’s safety and reputation. I didn’t want to be the cause of friction between her and her neighbors. My attorneys informed Judge Brady and told him that they were looking for another place for me.

  When I first heard about the false rape charges Buddy Caldwell was making against me I felt sick. I had risked my life protecting men from being raped in prison. Now I was being falsely accused of being a rapist. I called my closest supporters and lawyers and told them I wanted to speak out against the false accusations.

  Nobody wanted me to talk publicly about the rape allegations made by Buddy Caldwell—not my lawyers, not my family, not my closest friends and advisers. Everybody had a different reason and begged me not to speak out. Some thought I shouldn’t stoop to the level of Buddy Caldwell. Others thought it would make me look guilty to defend myself, or they feared that a “war of words” in the press would make Caldwell’s charges look legitimate. Some thought that since the rape charges were bogus they would “die down.” I knew the rape charges wouldn’t die down. If you want to smear an African American man’s reputation, all you have to do is say the word “rape.” It is a bell that can’t be unrung. I wanted to let our supporters know I was innocent of these accusations. For all of the people all over this country, all over this planet who had rallied to the cause of the Angola 3, who had fought for my freedom, I needed them to hear me say I never raped anyone. My support committee and attorneys asked me to let them deny it for me.

  Buddy Caldwell based these false rape charges on old rap sheets created when the police emptied the books on me the night I was arrested f
or armed robbery in 1969. There has never been any real charge, arraignment, indictment, or prosecution of me for rape, ever. Caldwell was lying when he said there were witnesses and that there was evidence. There was no way he could prosecute me for rape. I was innocent. I knew I had comrades who would get my statement out to the public when I was ready, even if it was against their better judgment.

  The attorney general’s office filed more than 300 pages of exhibits and memoranda with the court to oppose my bail, documents that falsely stated that I was a “convicted sex offender” and misleadingly suggested that I had a number of “aggravated rape and armed robbery charges” from the late 1960s. Louisiana claimed I was never prosecuted for the rapes because I’d already been sentenced to 50 years for armed robbery. This was bullshit because the night I was arrested for the armed robbery was the same night the books were emptied on me charging me with rape. At that time rape in Louisiana carried the death penalty. If the state could have prosecuted me for rape, it would have. But Louisiana charged me with and prosecuted me for armed robbery, not rape, because there was no evidence of any kind, no eyewitness, no victim statement that supported the rape charges. And yet, Caldwell told the court, “No community should be so endangered by this admitted career criminal who still has outstanding, viable, unprosecuted aggravated rape charges.”

  Attorneys Chris Aberle and Nick Trenticosta responded with a memorandum of our own, pointing out the “numerous misrepresentations, mischaracterizations, and tenuous unsubstantiated accusations based on patently incredible hearsay” in the state’s case. They pointed out that five of the six rape allegations in my arrest record were generated when the police arrested me on February 13, 1969, for armed robbery, when they emptied the books on me. My lawyers also made clear that I was never prosecuted for any of those charges except armed robbery.

  The State first notes that Mr. Woodfox was arrested six times for aggravated rape in 1967 and 1969. Later in its memorandum, the State purports to list all of the crimes committed by Mr. Woodfox and includes six instances of aggravated rape so as to leave this Court with the false impression that Mr. Woodfox had been convicted of those offenses. What the State does not make clear is that the sole source of information regarding five of those six rape allegations is their appearance as unadorned charges in three arrest registers, each generated after the police arrested Mr. Woodfox on February 13, 1969, for the robbery with which he was ultimately charged and found guilty.

  Mr. Woodfox avers, on information and belief, that during that period in history, New Orleans police routinely charged arrestees with unsolved crimes in the hope that the defendant could be connected to the crime. Such a practice would explain why those five capital offenses appear on the arrest registers, notwithstanding that the State never charged Mr. Woodfox with a single one of those aggravated rapes. One must assume that the State’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Woodfox for any of those crimes arose from the lack of any evidence connecting Mr. Woodfox to any of those crimes.

  The State also grossly misleads this Court regarding the sixth rape charge, alleged to have occurred in 1967. On page 15 of its memorandum, amid what purports to be a list of all of the crimes Mr. Woodfox has committed, the Attorney General avers that on 11/20/67, Mr. Woodfox committed the “aggravated rape of J.C.” Following that entry, the State purports to allege another crime. Specifically, on 2/28/1968, Mr. Woodfox committed aggravated battery, a crime for which he pleaded guilty and received a 15-month sentence. According to the State, Mr. Woodfox admitted that “he and his girlfriend got into a fight.” What the State conceals from this Court is that the battery offense described by the Attorney General is the same crime originally charged as the “aggravated rape of J.C.” Although the Attorney General is in possession of an FBI document that makes this clear, he has chosen not to include it in the exhibits to his memorandum. If the State could not show that Mr. Woodfox committed aggravated rape 40 years ago, it surely cannot do so now. Hence, the Attorney General’s repeated attempts to cast Mr. Woodfox as a serial rapist and a sex offender are baseless and grossly unfair. Such argument and allegation have no place in these proceedings.

  Another shockingly false statement made by Louisiana that Nick and Chris addressed in our memorandum was that I was somehow linked to a plot to murder former warden C. Murray Henderson and “other Angola officials” so they couldn’t testify at my 1998 trial. All I can say is we needed Henderson at my trial. We needed to put Henderson on the stand to ask him about how he paid Hezekiah Brown for his lies against us back in 1973—how he wrote letters to get Hezekiah Brown a pardon, how he had cartons of cigarettes delivered weekly to Brown, how he told inmate Leonard Turner he would lose his parole if he didn’t give a statement against us. The “evidence” they had that I was allegedly connected to this plot to kill the former warden was an unauthenticated, unsigned memorandum based on triple hearsay, sourced by an unidentified confidential informant. In another false charge, Warden Burl Cain spouted a claim during a deposition that I also threatened the lives of Brent Miller’s brother and prosecutor John Sinquefield, but he eventually had to admit this was not true, because he had no personal knowledge whatsoever to support the claims he made. There was, of course, no truth to what he said, therefore no evidence, no proof.

  Caldwell continued to slander me in the press as my attorneys tried to get me bail. Herman was spared from Caldwell’s lies—for the moment—because his case was still in state court. My conviction had just been overturned, so I was the target of Caldwell’s campaign to destroy my reputation and justify keeping me in prison. Caldwell told National Public Radio that fall that I was “the most dangerous man in America,” all while dodging questions about the weakness of Louisiana’s case against me. In a three-part series on our case, NPR reporter Laura Sullivan asked Caldwell about the bloody fingerprint that was left at the scene of Miller’s killing and was never identified. Caldwell responded, “A fingerprint can come from anywhere. We’re not going to be fooled by that.”

  On Saturday, November 1, 2008, I was reading on my bunk when Herman got word there was an article about me in that day’s Baton Rouge Advocate. Since papers weren’t delivered to the CCR dorm on weekends I called a friend and asked him to read it to me. It was a front-page article quoting Attorney General Caldwell as stating that if I was released he “would pursue six aggravated rape cases and six counts of armed robbery from 1967 to 1969” against me.

  “If we let him out we will probably never see him again,” Caldwell said in the article. “The guy’s a serial rapist.” Nick defended me in the article. “It’s a flat out lie,” he told the paper. “He has never been charged with six counts of rape. There is no case. It’s offensive to the practice of law.” Chris Aberle called it “a ridiculously absurd comment,” adding, “If they have evidence . . . why didn’t they supply it a long time ago?” To add insult to injury, at the end of the article Caldwell stated, “Albert’s never been in isolation. He’s had TV. He’s had all the luxuries you can have in prison.”

  I sat on my bunk and wrote a four-page statement denying the attorney general’s accusations. I called Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio and asked her to record me reading my statement and to broadcast it. I wanted my supporters to know how I was feeling and what I was thinking, in my own words. In part, I read,

  The attorney general’s office has decided to launch a smear campaign reminiscent of the federal government’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) to oppose my constitutional rights to be released on bail. . . . The techniques and tactics used by COINTELPRO were lies, deceptions, missing information, and character assassination. These techniques and tactics were used to cause chaos and disunity among members of any organization or group targeted by the government. . . . Shortly after my bail hearing on October 14, 2008, a smear campaign was started. First they spread lies about me in my niece’s neighborhood. Someone contacted the homeowners’ association that my niece belongs to and told them my niece was bringing a murderer and
rapist into their community, which put her in the middle of a firestorm among her neighbors.

  On the rape charges, I wrote,

  I welcome them [the attorney general’s office] to put the evidence out there. Tell the public what you got. He says I’m a serial rapist. OK, show us what you got. Witnesses? DNA? Let’s have it. Where’s the proof. He’s got nothing. There is no way he could bring these accusations through the courts . . . so he put his accusations before the media.

  After I read the statement Noelle interviewed me. “My main concern now is the safety of my niece and her family,” I told her. “I’m very distressed that the relationship she had with neighbors in her community may be destroyed because of this smear campaign by the attorney general’s office, and the thing is, these people in positions of power and authority, they violate the Constitution, they break the laws and they have immunity from prosecution. Then they walk away and continue to live their lives, and all the people whose lives are destroyed by them, by their illegal actions, are left to fend for themselves.” I continued, “The attorney general made the statement that two juries ‘have spoken’ and I have been convicted twice on this murder charge. What he failed to say is that, had the state of Louisiana followed the Constitution of the United States and the laws of the state of Louisiana to indict me and convict me, this case would not have been overturned twice. They were able to convict me because they used unconstitutional tactics—the discrimination against blacks in my grand juries, giving me incompetent lawyers, not turning over evidence that could have shed light on the real killers of Brent Miller. Everyone says my trials were overturned on a ‘technicality,’” I said. “The Constitution is not a technicality.” I put a copy of the statement I wrote in the mail to my friend and comrade Gail Shaw in Sacramento and asked her to post it online, which she did.