Vol. 80/No. 9 March 7, 2016
(front page)
Woodfox is finally free after decades in solitary
Use victory to fight against prison barbarism!
“I can now direct all my efforts to ending this barbarous use of solitary confinement and will continue my work on that issue here in the free world,” he said in a statement.
Woodfox, Herman Wallace and Robert King became known as the Angola 3 as a result of a decades-long international campaign for their freedom. In the early 1970s all three were part of one of the first prison chapters of the Black Panther Party. They organized hunger and work strikes for better conditions at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
Woodfox and Wallace were placed in solitary in April 1972, following a riot in which prison guard Brent Miller was killed. They were framed up and convicted in 1974 for Miller’s death, despite a lack of evidence and several witnesses who said they were not at the murder scene. With the exception of a three-year period for Woodfox, the men were kept in solitary for the entire time.
A district judge in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, overturned Wallace’s conviction Oct. 1, 2013, and granted his immediate release. Three days later Wallace died of liver cancer. King’s separate conviction for killing a fellow inmate in 1973 was overturned in 2001 and he was released after spending 28 years in solitary.
Over the course of four decades, Woodfox’s conviction has been overturned three separate times for a host of constitutional violations. In June last year Federal Judge James Brady ordered his immediate release. An appeals court reversed that order in November. That ruling was on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court when the news about Woodfox’s release broke.
“Although I was looking forward to proving my innocence at a new trial, concerns about my health and my age have caused me to resolve this case now and obtain my release with this no-contest plea to lesser charges,” his statement said. He pled no contest, which is not an admission of guilt, to charges of manslaughter and aggravated burglary and was freed on time served.
The three men always maintained their innocence and pointed to the political nature of their frame-ups.
“They pinned it on us, because we were militants, we were fighters, we were members of the Black Panther Party,” King told the Militant after Wallace’s death. “We wanted to bring consciousness to our fellow prisoners that we are protected by due process, the 14th Amendment and other constitutional grounds.”
In a 2008 deposition, Angola warden Burl Cain stated why he thought Woodfox should remain in solitary. “The thing about him is that he wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant. … I would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young, new inmates.”
“I thought my case, then and now, was noble,” Woodfox said in an earlier statement on the Angola 3 website. “They might bend me a little bit, they may cause me a lot of pain, they may even take my life, but they will never be able to break me.”
Along with King and Wallace, Woodfox brought a civil lawsuit in 2000, which is still pending, challenging the constitutionality of the state of Louisiana’s use of indefinite solitary confinement.
In September last year a settlement was reached in a class-action lawsuit initiated by a group of prisoners against the state of California. The prisoners were leaders of three hunger strikes against indefinite solitary confinement that included up to 30,000 inmates and put the national spotlight on the conditions prisoners face. If fully implemented the settlement will substantially reduce the number of prisoners in isolation. At any one moment 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system.
Related articles:
Step up fight to end barbaric solitary
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