Brady agreed with my claim that the state’s conduct demonstrated extreme prejudice against me. “Additionally, Mr. Woodfox has served over forty years in solitary confinement,” he wrote. “The Court agrees with Mr. Woodfox that the time involved here results in extreme prejudice. The State understates the extent of the prejudice done to Mr. Woodfox. . . . A habeas court must consider all of the circumstances involved when defining relief. The prejudice of an unconstitutionally obtained indictment is only one of the relevant circumstances.”
Brady also cited the evidence of my innocence in favor of an “extraordinary” remedy and noted the Fifth Circuit had said before that it failed to see the “overwhelming evidence” the state claimed to have against me. “There was an abundance of physical evidence available at the crime scene in 1972,” Brady wrote, “but not one piece of physical evidence incriminated Mr. Woodfox.” He cited the following indications of my innocence that were raised in my writ: “(1) a statement from State’s key witness Leonard Turner admitting Mr. Woodfox was not involved in Miller’s murder; (2) statements from two women with whom Chester Jackson . . . spoke about Woodfox’s actual innocence upon his release; (3) a reliable scientific review of the bloody print at the scene, exculpating Woodfox; (4) evidence that severely undermines the credibility of State’s three prisoner witnesses; and (5) a polygraph examination indicating that Woodfox truthfully denied involvement in the crime.”
He noted the hardship of my continued solitary confinement even after I’d “demonstrated an ability to live peacefully with others,” writing, “Mr. Woodfox has remained in the extraordinary conditions of solitary confinement for approximately forty years now, and yet today there is no valid conviction holding him in prison, let alone solitary confinement. Last year a unanimous panel of the Fifth Circuit observed: ‘[C]onsidering the duration of the solitary confinement, the severity of the restrictions, and their effectively indefinite nature, it is clear that Woodfox’s continued detention in CCR constitutes an “atypical and significant hardship on the inmate in relation to the ordinary incidents of prison life” according to any possible baseline we consider.’” In conclusion, Brady wrote, “The only just remedy is an unconditional writ of habeas corpus barring retrial . . . and releasing Mr. Woodfox from custody immediately.”
The state immediately appealed Judge Brady’s decision to the Fifth Circuit. A three-judge panel from that court issued a temporary stay that would keep me in prison until a more permanent ruling would come down, within the next four days. Representative Cedric Richmond (of the U.S. House) released a statement calling for my release. Of Buddy Caldwell, he said, “This is an obviously personal vendetta and has been a waste of tax payer dollars for decades. The state is making major cuts in education and healthcare but he has spent millions of dollars on this frivolous endeavor and the price tag is increasing by the day.”
Four days later, on June 12, Carine Williams came for a lawyer’s visit to keep me company while we waited to hear if I’d be released from prison that day or not. We were in a ground-floor room that had a window looking out on the parking lot. There were some reporters and a film crew outside. The visit started around ten a.m. and the court had said it would rule before one p.m. We sat together at a table, talking. We both watched the clock on the wall. The later it got, the more hopeful we became. If they were going to rule against me, why would they wait until the last minute?
In my cell that morning, I’d made a list of what I’d do when I got out of prison. I’d never done that before. “Visit Mama’s grave. Spend time with my daughter. Learn how to live in society.” As the hour hand moved closer to the deadline I saw outside the window, over Carine’s shoulder, that one of the reporters who had been standing with the others was leaving. He got in his car and drove away. I knew then that the Fifth Circuit would not grant my release. I didn’t have the heart to tell Carine. I thought of all the hard work she had done, along with my other attorneys, and felt a wave of sadness come over me. Some of the most difficult times for me in prison were moments like these, when it wasn’t only a loss for me, but for everybody who worked so hard on my behalf and who cared about me. The guards brought her a cordless phone, which rang shortly afterward. George was on the line. He gave her the news: the Fifth Circuit decided to leave the stay in place and to keep me in jail pending the state’s appeal of Judge Brady’s exceptional writ. Carine and I put a brave face on for each other. We said our good-byes. Carine walked out of the jail to give a statement to the reporters. I was taken back to my cell.
In his exceptional writ Judge Brady wrote that I would not be able to get a fair trial anywhere in the state of Louisiana. My arrest affidavit alone was proof of that. That summer we got further corroboration. The foreperson on the grand jury that indicted me in February came forward with concerns about the grand jury hearing; she had misgivings about the process. A white, Christian, lifelong conservative Republican, Deidre Howard, a dental hygienist for 41 years, didn’t know anything about me before the prosecutors made their case against me. She trusted Assistant Attorney General Kurt Wall, Special Assistant Attorney General Tony Clayton, and West Feliciana Parish district attorney Samuel D’Aquilla, who she knew personally. The prosecutors told the grand jurors my conviction was overturned on a “technicality” and made the case for my indictment. The grand jury indicted me. Deidre signed the indictment and gave it to the judge and was dismissed. She believed I was guilty. But something felt wrong. One day she was working as a dental hygienist and the next day she was deciding the fate of a man’s life. She felt unprepared to do what she had just done.
She talked to her twin sister, Donna, stating she didn’t want to be in that situation ever again. She had taken an oath not to reveal details of what happened in the grand jury room but when my indictment was reported in the newspaper the next day Donna knew that was Deidre’s case. In the following weeks Deidre had trouble sleeping. Out of concern for her sister, Donna and her husband typed my name into a search engine online and found out I could be innocent and that I’d been kept in solitary confinement for 40 years. On Deidre’s next visit to Donna, her sister told her, “The whole world has been trying to get him out.” Deidre Howard’s knees gave out and she fell to the floor. She felt betrayed and used because she had trusted the attorney general’s office to be honest and now she knew she didn’t get the whole story. She felt the weight of the world was on her now. Her first reaction was to try to undo the indictment, which, she learned later, could never be undone.
Deidre hired a lawyer because she wasn’t sure how to proceed with a complaint about the grand jury and still comply with the grand jury secrecy she swore to at the time. She wrote a personal letter to Judge William Carmichael of the 20th Judicial District Court, who oversaw the grand jury hearing and would be the judge on my third trial. Her attorney mailed her letter to Judge Carmichael and Judge Brady, with a letter of his own, stating that his client “has had serious misgivings about that process from the date of the jury’s decision.” Judge Carmichael informed my attorneys about it and put the letter under seal. When Deidre didn’t hear back she wrote to the special assistant attorney general, Tony Clayton; and to the West Feliciana Parish district attorney, Samuel D’Aquilla. “In my opinion, after reading everything I can get my hands on, articles, books, trial transcripts, visual and audio interviews,” she wrote, “I believe Mr. Woodfox is innocent of the murder.” When she didn’t receive any response, she wrote to the assistant attorney general Kurt Wall. When no response came, she wrote to Attorney General Buddy Caldwell and then, after hearing nothing back, Deidre wrote to Governor Bobby Jindal. “I wish that I could go back and redo that morning but sadly I cannot,” she wrote. “I decided that I could cry and hurt, or take action, because as his plight goes so does mine. . . . Please, can you do anything? When the dust settles one day on this case, it is going to be one of the darkest chapters in our state’s history.” Later she would say she kept thinking to herself, “How did Louisiana hold a man i
n a cell for over 40 years on the word of an eyewitness who was given free cigarettes for years? Didn’t anybody wonder why?”
With nobody responding to Deidre, her sister Donna wrote a heartfelt letter of her own, describing Deidre’s experience and “begging for help,” to every member of the Louisiana legislature, members of the media, and others in influential positions who she thought could help. Before it was over, she had sent more than 500 letters.
In June 2015, I once again applied for pretrial bail. As usual, the state fought back, starting with delaying tactics. First, prosecutors claimed that my case was a capital case and therefore my right to bail was limited. My lawyers Robert McDuff and Billy Sothern actually had to cite case law that made it clear beyond question that my case wasn’t a capital case and that I was, therefore, eligible for bail. In the end, though, I wouldn’t get bail.
The first time I heard about Deidre Howard was in July. At that point, because her correspondence had been placed under seal, I didn’t know her name. But Billy told me he was going to file a motion to be allowed to read a sealed letter written by a woman who was the foreperson at my grand jury. He told me the woman had raised issues about the actions of the grand jury. In September, my attorneys were able to view the letter and filed a new motion to quash my indictment on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. That motion was eventually denied. Still, the integrity and courage that Deidre Howard displayed in coming forward to speak out about her experience, even early on, before she knew if I was innocent or guilty, were so noble and rare. I am grateful to this day. Later, Deidre would say it took months for her to process everything that happened. “As a citizen, I was taught to respect those in authority,” she said. “I was not prepared to second-guess them. A citizen coming from [her] own job doesn’t walk into the courthouse with the mind-set that the prosecutors are not going to be honest, or that they would knowingly leave out facts that would change the whole story. I felt completely disillusioned, because the rules that I, and most citizens, try to live by were not the ones that I found the officials lived by.”
Chapter 52
Theories
That summer my criminal defense attorneys Billy Sothern and Rob McDuff filed a motion to dismiss my case, as key prosecution witnesses had died since my 1998 trial. With so few still alive, it would be impossible for me to exercise my constitutional right to confront witnesses and cross-examine them about information we had uncovered since 1998. (Many of those who led the investigation had also died, meaning we couldn’t question them on why they didn’t pursue other leads revealed in the deputy’s notes or the bloody tennis shoe that was found near the scene of the crime.) That motion was denied.
Billy and Rob filed 33 pretrial motions that would be ruled on in coming months, most of them seeking fairness, such as asking for a change of venue so I wouldn’t be tried in St. Francisville, in West Feliciana Parish, where I’d had two or possibly three unconstitutional grand juries; asking the court to compel the state to allow modern DNA testing on all remaining physical evidence and to compare the fingerprints from the crime scene against Angola’s fingerprint archives from the 1970s as well as the FBI’s recently expanded Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) database; asking for blood testing; and asking for a unanimous jury. They filed to exclude the impeached, discredited testimony of state’s witnesses Joseph Richey, Hezekiah Brown, and Paul Fobb, all deceased.
Billy and Rob also reinvestigated Brent Miller’s murder. In part, they looked at several statements former prisoners had given our investigators over the years—statements about who killed Brent Miller. Their investigation got yet another statement—sparking a new theory.
This first account we got of Brent Miller’s murder, though, came years before, from Billy Sinclair, who had been a longtime editor of the prison magazine The Angolite. In 2001, one of our lawyers had reached out to Sinclair to ask him if he’d heard anything about the murder; as an editor at the magazine he had a lot of freedom at Angola and knew a lot of prisoners. Sinclair, who was still incarcerated at the time, responded right away, writing to my lawyer that he believed Herman and I were innocent because a prisoner named Irvin “Life” Breaux told him so back in 1973; that he killed Miller, and told him that Herman and I were innocent. Sinclair had nothing to gain by coming forward. I had never met him. He and Herman were on the same CCR tier for six months back in 1974. He said that he wanted to set the record straight, writing, “I do not know Woodfox but I did get to know Hooks. I met him in 1974 when I spent about six months in CCR. I had a tremendous amount of respect for him. He is one of a half-dozen inmates who, over the last three decades, left a lasting impression on me for his courage, character and commitment.”
Billy Sinclair gave this sworn statement to my attorneys:
In March or April 1973, I met and became close personal friends with an African-American inmate named Irvin “Life” Breaux. I met Breaux through the Prisoner Grievance Committee, a 36-inmate grievance committee created at the Louisiana State Penitentiary by former Corrections Director Elayn Hunt. I was on the “Executive Committee” of the Prisoner Grievance Committee and a representative from the Big Yard. Breaux was a member of the general committee, a representative of the Main Prison’s maximum-security cellblocks.
A recognized inmate leader, Breaux had been placed in maximum-security lockdown status for alleged “black militant activities” following the April 1972 killing of an Angola prison guard named Brent Miller. Breaux and I were part of a seven-member inmate team given quasi-official approval to educate and encourage the general inmate population of the Main Prison Complex regarding both the need and inevitability of the racial integration of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
In the spring and summer of 1973, Angola was experiencing a horrific wave of prisoner violence and homosexual rapes. Breaux was instrumental in creating an organization called the Brotherhood, a group of African-American inmates committed to saving young inmates from homosexual rape and slavery. It was through the integration/Brotherhood efforts that Breaux and I cultivated and maintained a very close personal relationship—a relationship fueled by our mutual personal and political beliefs that the lawless, corrupt, and evil conditions prevalent at Angola had to be changed.
Breaux was possessed by a militant ideology that subscribed to the belief that violence was an acceptable and, under specific circumstances, a preferable means to bring about changes at the state penitentiary. I was a budding “jailhouse lawyer” who believed that concentrated legal action offered the best opportunity to produce the changes we both desired.
Breaux and I frequently discussed and debated our common objectives but different methods of accomplishing those objectives. A strong bond of mutual trust developed between us; we became “comrades in the struggle.”
It was during these discussions and debates that the subject of the killing of Brent Miller surfaced, especially since Breaux had been one of the scores of African-American inmates who had been placed in lockdown for “militant activities” in the wake of the Miller killing. In these conversations, Breaux initially alluded to involvement in the Miller killing, stating that prison officials either knew or believed that he was involved in that crime.
It was common knowledge throughout the prison system that four inmates known as “the Angola Four” had been locked up and were placed in CCR as the ones responsible for the killing of Brent Miller. Breaux repeatedly insisted to me that those inmates were “innocent”; that they had been “framed” by Custody Warden Hayden J. Dees. He was contemptuous of the notion that two of the Angola Four inmates, Chester “Noxzema” Jackson and Gilbert Montegut, could even be called “black militants” (a term that Breaux took particular pride in)
He became especially incensed when talking about how the other two Angola Four inmates, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, had been “framed” by Warden Dees.
I placed significant credence in what Breaux told me. Hayden J. Dees “ruled” Angola in tha
t era; Angola belonged to him. He operated with an official fanaticism against “black militants” and communism. Following one of the first disciplinary hearings at Angola at which I was allowed to participate as an “inmate counsel,” Dees approached me, livid and irrational, and accused me of being a “communist.”
So it was natural for Breaux and I—the “black militant” and the “white communist”—to discuss Dees and his role in the “Angola Four” case. One day Breaux told me—and it was the first of several times that he told me—that he and others had actually killed Brent Miller. He stated that in April 1972, he and others were committed to a plot to kill twelve known black “snitches.” The plot called for all the snitches to be killed simultaneously in different parts of the prison on the day Miller ended up being killed.
Breaux told me that Brent Miller walked into the Pine dormitory as he and other inmates were separating for distribution the weapons that would be used in the attacks on the snitches. He described a confused scene in which the inmates initially tried to subdue Miller but that Miller was either stabbed or cut. Breaux said a collective and instantaneous decision was made by the inmates to kill Miller because he had recognized them, and then to “get rid” of the weapons.
I never once asked or probed Breaux about this incident. The information was far too sensitive even to know and, frankly, it was not a subject matter that I wanted to talk about. But there was certainly more than one conversation during which he told me that he had killed Miller . . . ; that Dees and other prison officials knew he was involved; that they could not charge him with the crime because it would expose the fact that the “Angola Four” had been framed; and that he would eventually “be killed” because of his role in, and knowledge about, the Brent Miller killing. Irvin “Life” Breaux was stabbed to death at the Louisiana State Penitentiary on August 11, 1973, by two inmates named Gilbert Dixon and Willie Carney.
Solitary Page 40
