In another statement, the one that Rob and Billy got with an investigator, a prisoner who was a teenager in 1972 swore he was in Pine 1 the morning Brent Miller was killed. He said that two “sissies”—gal-boys—and their prisoner-pimp, who “owned” them, were arguing with a fourth prisoner, Leonard “Specs” Turner, when Miller walked in. “They had knives and Miller saw it” the witness said. He said the snitches and their pimp jumped Miller and started stabbing him. “Albert Woodfox was not there,” he stated. “Neither was Herman Wallace or Gilbert Montegut. Chester Jackson was not involved with the stabbing. I left the dorm, past Miller on the ground, and went over by the laundry. That’s when they locked everything down.”
Another prisoner told one of our investigators that a prisoner paid by the pimp to protect the snitches in Pine 1 attacked Miller. He was a very powerful prisoner who ran gambling operations and drugs on the walk, known as a “shot caller”, and was supposedly very close with some security officers because he made money for them, selling dorm assignments and jobs to prisoners. Also, in this version, Chester Jackson allegedly helped the shot caller, who he was supposedly good friends with, kill Miller. In this version, Irvin Breaux and a few other prisoners who didn’t live in Pine 1 were also there. (Had they come to the dorm that morning to kill the snitches but instead got involved with killing the guard? We don’t know.) The shot caller who allegedly killed Miller in this version supposedly confessed to his girlfriend close to his death. He said he felt sorry Herman and I took the fall for Brent Miller’s murder, but he didn’t want to go back to prison. Another purported witness who was interviewed said he saw prisoners who didn’t live in Pine 1 walk toward the dorm that morning “suited up,” meaning armed, and “dressed in raincoats with hoods up and tied in front of their faces,” but he didn’t see what happened next.
I don’t know what to make of these theories. Most of them came to us through investigators from statements that were not signed. Every prisoner who claimed to have seen Brent Miller’s murder and who talked to an investigator—or to anyone—about the killing had his own interests in play, either protecting himself or his reputation, or protecting someone he liked, or possibly hurting someone he didn’t like. We also got a statement from Chester Jackson’s younger brother, Noel Murphy, who had been a prisoner at that time of Miller’s killing. He swore Jackson told him he (Jackson) killed Miller, and that Herman and I were innocent, but Jackson lied about me and Herman to protect Murphy, who was 20 at the time, as well as to protect his stepson (who was also at Angola then). Murphy said Chester Jackson was told by authorities that he, Murphy, would be tortured along with Jackson’s stepson if Jackson didn’t lie about us. He said Jackson had promised his mom he would take care of him in prison. Did Chester Jackson kill Brent Miller? I saw him in the dining hall that morning at breakfast. Everett Jackson, who was with me during the time Miller was killed, also testified he saw him at breakfast. A different prisoner claimed in another statement to have seen Irvin Breaux at breakfast that morning. Did the murder happen earlier than the coroner said? Did it happen later? There is no way to know. The only value these statements have to me is the one consistent thread that runs through them: that Herman and I weren’t there.
Billy Sinclair was the first person who had any knowledge of Herman’s and my innocence to come forward. As a journalist and editor of The Angolite, he had a deep knowledge of Angola and its administration and history. He was known outside the prison for work he did in the community while he was still a prisoner. In his first letter to my lawyer, Sinclair wrote of an encounter he had with Hezekiah Brown: “In the early 1980s The Angolite did a feature on Angola’s infamous ‘Dog Pen.’ . . . Brown was assigned to the Dog Pen after his testimony against Wallace/Woodfox. The prison took care of him back there. I spoke to him briefly at the Dog Pen—‘a niggah got to do what a niggah got to do to get by—white folks run this prison,’ he said to me. In convict parlance, that was his way of saying . . . that he had lied for the State in exchange for the lifetime position at the Dog Pen.”
Chapter 53
The Struggle Continues
In the summer of 2015, while Buddy Caldwell was running for office for the third time, 18 members of the Louisiana House of Representatives introduced a resolution (HR 208, 2015) asking the attorney general to withdraw his appeal of Judge Brady’s ruling to release me, barring further prosecution of me. The resolution didn’t pass, but I believe press coverage of the legislators’ bill may have helped expose Caldwell’s unreasonable actions against us, including how he used taxpayer money to indict Herman Wallace on his deathbed. In November, Buddy Caldwell was voted out of office. In the eight years he was in office, this self-serving demagogue acted as if he was obsessed with finding justice for Brent Miller, and yet he refused to test the bloody fingerprint left at the scene of Brent Miller’s killing against the fingerprints of all the prisoners on the walk that morning. He brought no integrity to the office of attorney general or to the state of Louisiana. Instead of prosecuting cases based upon the merits of the evidence, he was more interested in publicity. He abused his authority as attorney general and he made our case a personal vendetta. I was happy the majority of the people of Louisiana saw through him and voted him out of office. Unlike a court ruling, it couldn’t be undone.
On November 9, 2015, in response to the state’s appeal of Judge Brady’s exceptional writ, a randomly selected three-judge panel in the Fifth Circuit—different from the one that had ruled on my case previously—agreed with the state and ruled that Judge Brady overstepped his authority when he denied the state the right to retry me. It was a split decision. Judge Carolyn Dineen King wrote that my case did not “present a constitutional defect that cannot be cured at retrial” and that Judge Brady was wrong to assume the state courts would not provide me with a fair retrial. Judge Priscilla Owen agreed. The court vacated Judge Brady’s order to release me without a retrial. I would go to trial. In a powerful dissent, Judge James L. Dennis wrote, “If ever a case justifiably could be considered to present ‘exceptional circumstances’ barring reprosecution, this is that case.
“The writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action,” Judge Dennis wrote. “Today, as in prior centuries, the writ is a bulwark against convictions that violate ‘fundamental fairness.’” He wrote that he shared Judge Brady’s lack of confidence in the state to provide a fair third trial. He wrote, “Clearly, the wrongful harm done to Woodfox, not only as a litigant but also as a human being by his two unconstitutional convictions and his egregious four decades of solitary confinement, cannot be rectified by the usual remedy of reversal and reprosecution.”
Judge Dennis also pointed to the recent allegations made by grand jury foreperson Deidre Howard that proceedings at my third grand jury were improper. “Recently surfaced allegations that the State made inflammatory statements to the third grand jury in order to obtain a third indictment create even greater uncertainty as to Woodfox’s ability to obtain a fair trial in the State’s third prosecution,” he wrote, quoting a supplement citing the state’s “‘inequitable conduct’ during the [grand jury] proceedings as one factor weighing in favor of barring reprosecution.” Judge Dennis went on to say that “these myriad prejudices” might be “easier to swallow if there were strong evidence of his guilt, but the evidence against him is, at the very best, extremely equivocal. Although there was an abundance of physical evidence available at the crime scene, none of this evidence incriminated Woodfox, and other evidence has emerged since the first trial that casts even further doubt on the State’s case against him.”
The court returned the case to Judge Brady, with instructions that he would have to issue an ordinary conditional writ that would require the state to release me only if it failed to retry me within a reasonable period of time.
In November, I got the news that one of our most dedicated supporters, Leonard “Mwalimu” Johnson, a longtim
e prisoner activist and mentor to hundreds of prisoners, had died after a long illness. He was 78. Mwalimu came up in poverty. “The choice was either sit around and starve or step beyond the law,” he would later write. He was imprisoned for robbery in the sixties. In prison he almost died of pneumonia in a strip cell—where prisoners were placed naked, with nothing except a hole in the floor. “I had to lie there completely naked,” he wrote, “my cell flooded with water, drawing upon my spiritual, mental and physical faculties in order to survive.” He was sent to Angola in 1977 and spent the next 15 years there. He documented 62 cases of abuse by personnel while he was there, some of which resulted in prisoners dying. After he was released he spent many years working at the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana. I never met Mwalimu personally, but he was beloved in our support committee, an unwavering light at every protest and event, always committed to peace and justice. “Initially I was unable to entertain any thought of forgiveness,” he wrote in 2010, “but slowly I came to realize that bitterness only creates bitterness. Negative experiences are a kind of cancer, and my choice as a human being is either to encourage the spread of that cancer or to arrest it and apply a solution. I opt to be part of the solution, part of the healing.”
Thanksgiving was approaching. Normally holidays meant nothing to me. The only thing different about a holiday in prison was sometimes there would be a different item of food on your tray. At Angola, they once handed out oranges to prisoners in CCR on Christmas Day. This Thanksgiving would be different. The warden at the West Feliciana jail told prisoners that we could each get two plates of food from our families at Thanksgiving: one plate for dinner, the other for dessert. It would be my first home-cooked meal in over 40 years. My good friend Professor Angela Bell and my brother Michael cooked my favorite dishes: stuffed crab, hot sausage, turkey, seafood stuffing, and creamed corn. Angie added slices of homemade pies, cake, and cookies, packaging two layers of food on two of the largest dishes she could find that could still be considered plates. She drove to the West Feliciana jail on Thanksgiving Day to drop off the plates. The lengths to which she and Michael went to cook for me and deliver the food on Thanksgiving touched me a lot. The prisoners around me were grateful too. I shared both plates with them.
In December, George Kendall petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to restore Judge Brady’s exceptional writ. This would be one of 10,000 petitions the Court receives each year, about 80 of which are heard. George believed the country’s highest court might be persuaded to hear my case—which he felt fueled a national debate about solitary confinement—because six months earlier, Justice Anthony Kennedy seemed to invite a constitutional challenge to the use of solitary confinement. The case, Davis v. Ayala, centered on an unrelated issue—the exclusion of a defense attorney from part of a hearing on jury selection. The defendant in the case, though, had been kept in solitary confinement for the better part of 20 years. That seemed to touch a chord with Justice Kennedy, who wrote a concurrence on the issue, laying out the history and brutality of solitary and citing the case of Kalief Browder, a teenager who spent more than two years in solitary confinement (and three years total) on Rikers Island while being held, without a conviction, for allegedly stealing a backpack. After his release Browder committed suicide.
In closing Kennedy wrote: “In a case that presented the issue [of solitary confinement], the judiciary may be required, within its proper jurisdiction and authority, to determine whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.” In light of my settlement, we voluntarily withdrew our petition for review by the Supreme Court.
Chapter 54
A Plea for Freedom, Not Justice
In January 2016, I was waiting for two trials to be scheduled by the courts, one for our civil suit challenging the use of solitary confinement, and another for a murder I didn’t commit. I was looking forward to both. I believed we could prove our decades in solitary confinement constituted cruel and unusual punishment and I wanted to be exonerated of the murder of Brent Miller. I had the best lawyers in the world.
By early 2016, though, we had lost many important pretrial motions for my criminal defense. Judge William Carmichael would not grant us a change in venue. My third trial would be in St. Francisville, in West Feliciana Parish. Billy Sothern and Rob McDuff appealed the judge’s decision to a higher court, but we lost on appeal too.
The judge sided with the prosecution and ruled that the testimony from certain dead witnesses, Joseph Richey, Hezekiah Brown, and Paul Fobb, could be read to jurors, meaning this critical testimony would be delivered by actors reading a script. In another blow to fairness, the courts found that I would have a nonunanimous jury, meaning that only 10 jurors had to agree on a verdict instead of 12. Louisiana and Oregon are the only two states in America where defendants can be convicted by fewer than 12 jurors, a system created to marginalize the votes of black jurors when courts were first required by law to allow blacks on juries. Since it is easier to get a conviction with a nonunanimous jury, the system was also established in Louisiana to help fill its prisons when it relied on convict labor to replace slave labor during Reconstruction.
For some incomprehensible reason, Judge Carmichael would not allow us to test the bloody fingerprint left at Brent Miller’s murder scene against the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) database. He ruled we would only be able to test the bloody fingerprint against Angola files—whatever was left of them—from 1972. We didn’t know what condition those 1972 files were in. The judge did grant our motion to DNA-test various pieces of physical evidence, but the state prosecutors claimed to have lost the clothing they said I wore, so I wouldn’t be able to prove the clothes they said I was wearing weren’t mine. The state also lost the bloody tennis shoes investigators found and hid from my defense, so we couldn’t test them either.
On January 11, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives Jeff Landry, a Republican and Tea Party member, was sworn into the office of Louisiana attorney general.
Deidre Howard wrote to the new attorney general, twice. “Please hear me out,” she wrote. “I am exhausted from my attempts to be heard. . . . My friends at work who see me exhausted and stressed tell me that I have done all that I can do. I just look at them and say that it will never be over for me.” My lawyers went to meet with Landry, hoping that he could look at my case without the biases of Caldwell’s office.
George Kendall and Carine Williams came to see me. They got to the point. Given a new attorney general to work with now, they asked me if I would consider taking a deal for time served instead of going forward with the retrial. They weren’t asking me to plead guilty. They knew I wouldn’t consider that. I had never once thought, even in my loneliest moments in more than 40 years of solitary confinement, that I would do “whatever it takes” to get out of CCR, or prison. I was offered a chance to get out of CCR if I gave up my political beliefs, and I refused. I was offered a chance to lie about Herman to benefit myself, and I refused. Before Attorney General Landry took office, I had been offered a chance to plead guilty for the murder of Brent Miller, and I refused. They asked me to think about a plea of “nolo contendere,” which means “no contest.” They didn’t know if they could get it, but with a nolo contendere plea I could maintain my innocence but my conviction would stand. If I took the plea I would not be admitting guilt, but I would be implicitly acknowledging that the state had enough evidence to convict me again at trial. I knew the state had no evidence that I killed Brent Miller, but I also knew I could still be reconvicted for his murder.
With a nolo contendere plea deal, George said, the outcome would be certain: freedom. A trial in St. Francisville, George said, “is like a trip to Vegas. We don’t know the outcome.” George and Carine didn’t press me. They knew it would be a difficult decision. I told them I would think about it. Before she left that day Carine told me she beli
eved I’d be more useful to people in the free world than locked up in prison. When I talked to Michael he urged me to take a plea. He reminded me I could begin a relationship with my daughter. I hardly knew her. He knew that weighed on me. “You can get to know your great-grandchildren,” Michael said. “You can be in their lives.”
Billy and Rob, who were appealing a number of Judge Carmichael’s rulings to the Louisiana Supreme Court—including the judge’s denial of my unanimous jury—also visited me. “We will fight for you in court,” Billy told me. “We will do everything we can to convince the jury to find you not guilty.” But he asked me to weigh the outcomes. “What if you are convicted?” he asked me. We both knew that meant life in prison. “If you take a plea,” he said, “you will be free immediately.” He reminded me my trial hadn’t even been scheduled yet. There was no guarantee I would get a trial in 2016. “You deserve to be happy, Albert,” Billy told me. “You deserve to have a life outside Angola prison.”
I thought of the next to last time I saw Herman. We were temporarily alone in the visitation room of the prison hospital, after our lawyers left. He was sitting in a wheelchair, covered in blankets. He started talking about being free, about freeing me, about my freedom. At first, I thought he was drifting off onto a tangent because he was tired. Then he said, “Albert, we both know I’m dying, you’re not.” He paused. “What if I say . . . ?” I stopped him, “Hooks, don’t go there.” He said, “They’ve already offered me a deal. You can go free.” Our eyes met. I wanted to knock him out. I knew he was coming from a place of love—revolutionary love, brotherly love, soul to soul. We were family. “I will never forgive you if you do anything like that,” I told him. He nodded and closed his eyes. He knew I could never live with myself knowing that he had lied for me. Now, I was asking myself, could I live with myself for lying to take a plea?
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