On May 13, 2012, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that Louisiana was the “prison capital of the world,” incarcerating more of its people, per capita, than any other state. “First among Americans means first in the world,” said staff writer Cindy Chang. “Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.” Chang reported that, at the time of the article, 1 in 86 adults in Louisiana was incarcerated, nearly double the national average. Among black men from New Orleans, 1 in 14 was behind bars. She reported on Louisiana’s harsh sentencing laws: “In Louisiana, a two-time car burglar can get 24 years without parole. A trio of drug convictions can be enough to land you at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the rest of your life.” The “hidden engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine” she reported, “is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.” Later that month, three days before I was to attend an evidentiary hearing in Baton Rouge regarding my habeas petition, Amnesty International started a new online petition, asking Secretary Le Blanc, who said I was a danger to myself and others, “Where is the evidence?” “On April 17, 2012, you issued a statement that Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace are held separately from other prisoners to protect prison employees, other inmates and visitors,” the petition read. “Where is the evidence to back up this statement? Records show that neither man has committed any serious disciplinary infraction for decades. Prison mental health records indicate that the men pose no threat to themselves or to others. . . . Where is the evidence?” Around 1,000 people who signed the petition also emailed Secretary Le Blanc directly, calling on him to produce evidence backing up his assertion that I was a danger to prison employees, other inmates, and visitors.
My evidentiary hearing took place at the Federal District Courthouse in downtown Baton Rouge. During the hearing I was held at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, where Herman was, but I wouldn’t see him there. When I arrived I was immediately placed in the dungeon. I protested, pointing out I had no recent disciplinary reports in my record and that I never saw the reclass board or disciplinary court at Hunt. I was told the decision came from “higher up.” They confiscated my socks and never gave me my toiletries or the clothes I brought from Wade. The other prisoners on the tier were loud, screaming, moaning, talking to themselves day and night—it was their way of dealing with the pressure. My lawyers tried to intervene, but prison officials would not move me from the dungeon. I didn’t get any sleep. In the morning, I would be in court.
The stakes couldn’t have been higher at this evidentiary hearing. My life was on the line. Because of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, prisoners submitting habeas petitions are only allowed to raise issues that had been originally preserved in their postconviction relief application, and only those issues that had not previously been ruled on. I had two claims left by the time I got to Judge James Brady in federal court in 2006. Judge Brady had already ruled on one of my two claims: in 2008 he overturned my conviction on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. The Fifth Circuit reversed that. Now I was before Judge Brady on my last claim: that my 1993 indictment by a West Feliciana Parish grand jury was tainted by discrimination because the judge, who handpicked the grand jury foreperson, almost exclusively selected white forepersons in a parish that was over 40 percent black. George Kendall, Sam Spital, Corrine Irish, and Carine Williams had done a mountain of research to prepare for this hearing, to prove the consistent underrepresentation of African Americans serving as grand jury forepersons in the parish and to debunk the state’s case, which was that the judge’s selections had been “race neutral.”
The hearing lasted three days, May 29–31, 2012. Each day before leaving my cell I asked for my socks to wear under the restraints and my request was denied. Without socks my ankles were cut and bruised. In the courtroom, the state spared no expense in its attempt to defeat our claim, trying to prove the West Feliciana judge’s selection of grand jury forepersons did not discriminate against blacks, presenting witness after witness who testified that objective factors, like education, supposedly made the appointments of the grand jury forepersons in West Feliciana Parish “neutral,” even if they were handpicked by the judges. George’s team refuted that, identifying African Americans on the panel of prospective grand jurors and showing that their employment and education were comparable to the qualifications of the white forepersons actually selected.
At the end of the hearing, the matter was in Judge Brady’s hands. If he agreed with us, I would get a new trial. If he agreed with the state, I wouldn’t. Judge Brady asked each side to submit a final brief three weeks after the transcript of the hearing was made available—which would take about another three weeks—and submit a final rebuttal to those briefs 20 days after that. In all it shouldn’t have taken longer than eight weeks to get everything to the judge. The state dragged out the process, as usual, filing for extensions before submitting briefs. We wouldn’t get a ruling for nine months.
When the hearing was over I expected to be transported back to Wade. Instead, I was kept in the dungeon at Hunt for nine more days. It was excruciating. I wasn’t supposed to be in the dungeon, I hadn’t broken any rules. Temperatures outside were in the 90s, and it was much hotter in the cell. There was one fan for the tier. I had no phone privileges, no canteen, no yard, no television, no ice, and no visits except with my lawyers. I wasn’t allowed to call my brother. I was served food that was still frozen. I was only allowed out of my cell 15 minutes a day for a shower. I had to wear leg irons to the shower. I wasn’t moved back to Wade until my lawyers threatened Hunt officials with contempt of court. (Later we sued Hunt officials for ignoring all transfer, classification, and disciplinary procedures required to justify putting me in the dungeon while I was there to attend my hearing. My friend New Orleans lawyer Emily Posner filed the suit, along with attorney Sam Dalton; it ended up being folded into our civil suit against cruel and unusual punishment.)
When I got back to Wade, hundreds of letters were waiting for me. Amnesty had launched a “Write for Rights” campaign for me and Herman, asking members to write to us. I sat on my bunk and opened the letters and cards from people all over the world, and I was deeply touched to read their words. Many had sent beautiful pictures of nature on the cards they picked out for me.
Preparing for the evidentiary hearing had taken George and his team months. Now that it was over, they could get back to focusing on our civil case and, we hoped, get us out of solitary confinement for good. The judge who’d been handling the case, Judge Ralph Tyson, had died in 2011, and our civil case was, coincidentally, passed to Judge James Brady, the same judge presiding over my habeas petition. Judge Tyson had been sitting on a number of pretrial motions regarding our civil case for more than two years; without rulings we couldn’t move forward. Judge Brady ruled on them within a few weeks. One of those motions was related to an order issued back in February 2010 by Magistrate Judge Docia Dalby, granting my lawyers access to emails exchanged by Angola warden Burl Cain and Attorney General Buddy Caldwell’s office that proved they colluded to manufacture a reason that would allow them to move me and Herman out of the CCR dorm and back into individual CCR cells in 2008.
In October, King received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. As always, he spoke of me and Herman in his remarks: “My evolution began in prison—in Angola State Penitentiary, in Louisiana—in an 18,000-acre former slave plantation,” he said. “My experience in a six-by-nine-foot cell for 29 years in solitary confinement taught me the difference between legality and morality. It made me realize that despite the fact that the 13th Amendment allegedly abolished slavery, slavery was never abolished. I learned that a person could be actually innocent of a crime but convicted legally, and that this person would be designated a le
gal slave—as it was in 1864 where the Constitution decreed that if you were black being a slave was your lot. Modern-day slavery is alive and well in America but it has taken on a different form—from the plantation to the prison. . . . A case in point are my two comrades—Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace who are now serving their 40th year in solitary confinement—and tens and thousands of others who have also been unjustly convicted but remain in prison in America in slavery.”
Four months later, on February 26, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge James Brady overturned my conviction again, this time on the issue of racial discrimination in the selection of the grand jury foreperson. Judge Brady saw through all the bullshit “science” state prosecutors spent a fortune creating in their attempt to prove there was no racial discrimination in the selection of the foreperson for my 1993 West Feliciana grand jury. I would get a new trial. I was ecstatic. Judge Brady ruled in his 34-page decision that the state had failed to show that “objective, race-neutral criteria”—such as education and employment—were used in the selection process. Brady agreed that the West Feliciana Parish judge who picked grand jury foremen favored the appointment of white people for that role. He also again granted a motion for my release on bail pending my appeal. The state immediately appealed to the Fifth Circuit, asking it to overturn Brady’s ruling and for a stay of Judge Brady’s order to release me on bail, because, the state claimed, I was “a danger to the public and a flight risk.” The state argued that a stay would not substantially injure me, because “he has already been incarcerated for several decades.”
Thirty thousand people signed an online Amnesty International petition calling for my immediate release after Judge Brady’s ruling. In response, Attorney General Buddy Caldwell played his “rape card” again, replying to these petitioners with the same rape accusations he had made against me in 2008. He wrote that I was guilty of killing Brent Miller, saying, “There are no flaws in [the] evidence” that convicted me and Herman, and that we were never held in solitary confinement. “Contrary to popular lore,” he wrote, “Woodfox and Wallace have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system. . . . They have always been able to communicate freely with other inmates and prison staff as frequently as they want. They have televisions on the tiers, which they watch through their cell doors. In their cell, they can have radios and headsets, reading and writing materials, stamps, newspapers, magazines and books. . . . They can exercise in the hall, talk on the phone, shower and visit with the other 10 to 14 inmates on the tier. At least three times per week, they can go outside on the yard and exercise and enjoy the sun if they want.”
In the following weeks retired Louisiana Supreme Court chief justice Pascal Calogero Jr., the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Funds of New York and of New Orleans, and the nonprofit organization the Promise of Justice Initiative filed “friends of the court” briefs in support of a new trial. Former chief justice Calogero wrote about how grand jury forepersons can exert influence over other grand jurors. “Although the state has come a long way in eradicating racial discrimination throughout the grand jury foreperson selection process, we must not turn our back on those convictions that were tainted by the old system.” I disagreed that the state had “come a long way in eradicating racial discrimination” in any part of the judicial system, and I still believe that racial discrimination and gender discrimination are very prevalent in today’s judicial system in America, but I was extremely grateful for Calogero’s support.
One afternoon in May I was getting ready to go on the yard at Wade when the guard who came to escort me said he had to strip-search me. I told him it was against Department of Corrections regulations to strip-search prisoners housed in maximum-security lockdown unless there was probable cause. I knew this by heart, because it was a ruling that came down when I sued the state on this issue back in 1978. “Going on the yard isn’t probable cause,” I said. He told me he was obeying orders from the colonel; it was a new rule at Wade. “I have to strip-search you,” he repeated. I handed him my jumpsuit, my socks, and my tennis shoes. He went through them and handed everything back. He told me to drop my drawers. “Raise your arms, open your mouth, raise your tongue, raise your genitals, turn around, bend over, spread your cheeks.”
I wrote to Warden Goodwin and told him the strip searches were unconstitutional, and about the 1978 19th Judicial District ruling on the lawsuit I filed, which stated prisoners could only be strip-searched under certain conditions. I asked him to stop the unlawful strip searches. I sent copies to my lawyers. I never heard back from him.
I talked to the men on my tier, telling them we didn’t have to accept the strip searches, because the prison was breaking the law. I asked them to join me in fighting the strip searches; none of them wanted to get involved. Nobody stood with me. My lawyers pleaded with me not to physically resist the strip searches. “We’ll take it to court,” they said. Some sergeants and guards didn’t do the strip searches; they didn’t have the taste for it. Others acted as if it was their greatest pleasure to humiliate somebody. There were days when I was strip-searched as many six times, before and after I left my cell, even when I was only leaving my cell to walk to the guard booth—escorted and always within sight of at least one guard—to take a phone call from my lawyer. Having to bend over so a security officer can look at your anus gives you a terrible sense of being violated. It’s one of the most humiliating things that can be done to you. Even the courts recognized this. As the ruling on my original suit stated, “Visual body cavity searches were a humiliating procedure” and “should only be used rarely.” Some days I didn’t leave my cell at all, to avoid being strip-searched.
That summer George Kendall asked me and Herman to meet with psychologist Craig Haney again so that Haney could finish his report on us, which would be used by our defense for our civil trial to show the impact of solitary confinement on us. I told him that at times I felt empty. I was losing interest in things. I said, “You don’t know the horrors of fighting for your sanity.” The pressure of being locked in the cell required all of my mental, emotional, and physical will to survive.
Chapter 50
Man of Steel
Maybe my soul is that of concrete
Maybe it is that of the wind
Maybe it is that of fire
Maybe it is the spirit of the people—the spirit of my ancestors,
Whatever my keepers wish my soul to be,
The man of steel is always free.
—Herman Wallace
Herman wasn’t well. He’d been complaining of stomach pain and went to the prison hospital several times. He wrote to me that the doctors at Hunt told him he had thrush or a stomach fungus, and they were treating him for a fungal infection. I was relieved that he was finally getting some medical help. In June 2013, George Kendall and Carine Williams showed up at Wade for an unexpected visit. George told me they had asked our medical expert, Dr. Brie Williams, to update her report about our health status. In reviewing Herman’s recent medical records, she grew very concerned and asked the prison health-care providers to further examine him and to allow her to examine him. The attorneys got permission to take Herman to a hospital in Baton Rouge. “Albert,” George said, “Herman doesn’t have thrush or a stomach fungus. He has advanced liver cancer. The doctors say he may have only three or four months to live.” I started to say something but I wasn’t able to speak. Herman’s smile flashed in my mind. He was standing on the walk at Angola.
Dr. Williams didn’t need a CT scan to examine Herman, George continued. She could see and feel the tumor on his liver as soon as she lifted his shirt; it was protruding in the shape and size of a toy football. After the diagnosis, Carine said, prison officials were planning to put Herman back in his cell. Even though he was dying, George and Carine had to fight to get officials at Hunt to keep Herman from being returned to lockdown. They won. When he was sent back to the prison from the hospital, Herman was put in an isolation room in the h
ospital unit.
George promised they’d do everything they could to get him out of isolation and into the hospital dorm. He told me they were filing for an expedited review of Herman’s habeas petition (which had been sitting without any attention from the court for four years, since December 2009). They told me they were working to get prison officials to allow me, Herman, and King to meet with them together to discuss our civil suit, because the state was refusing to allow us to meet. “You will see Herman again,” Carine promised me. After they left I called my brother. Michael took the news hard. He cried because he loved Herman. He cried because he knew what it would mean for me to lose Herman. We thought we were invincible.
George and Carine negotiated with the state to get Herman’s classification reduced from maximum to medium security, threatening to go to the court if necessary. Because of their actions Herman was taken out of isolation and housed in a prison hospital dorm with a day room where he wouldn’t have to wear leg irons. They were also able to persuade the court to order the prison to allow us to meet together with our lawyers. Because of this, Herman, King, and I would see one another again.
On July 10, Amnesty International launched a campaign directed at Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, calling for Herman’s immediate release on humanitarian grounds. “After decades of cruel conditions and a conviction that continues to be challenged by the courts, he should be released immediately to his family so that he can be cared for humanely during his last months,” wrote Amnesty’s Tessa Murphy. Once again Governor Jindal hid, refusing to talk to Amnesty representatives and referring questions about Herman to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.
Solitary Page 36
