Angola 3 News: June 2012

Monday, June 18, 2012

Prolonged Solitary Confinement on Trial --An interview with law professor Angela A. Allen-Bell

**Watch the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on solitary confinement in US prisons here!

RELATED COVERAGE: Prof. Bell interviewed by Wanda Sabir, Democracy Now, The Atlantic (parts 1, 2, 3), Time Magazine, UK Guardian

Angela A. Allen-Bell speaks in Baton Rouge at the Louisiana State Capitol on April 17, 2012 when Amnesty International delivered a 67,000 signature demanding Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox's immediate release from solitary confinement.

Prolonged Solitary Confinement on Trial

--An interview with law professor Angela A. Allen-Bell

By Angola 3 News

A diverse grassroots movement confronting the widespread use of prolonged solitary confinement in US prisons appears to be gaining momentum. On the morning of Tuesday, June 19, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights is having an important public hearing on “Reassessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal and PublicSafety Consequences,” presided over by Chairman Dick Durbin.

Angola Three: 40 Years of Solitary, 40 Years of Cruel and Unusual Punishment (Statement to Senate Judiciary Committee)

A3 supporters at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge, April 17, 2012, exactly 40 years after Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox were put in solitary confinement at Angola State Prison.

(Note: below is the statement by the Angola 3, submitted to the US Senate Judiciary Committee for their hearing on June 19, 2012 entitled, “Reassessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal and Public Safety Consequences." In April 2011, Congressmen Bobby Scott, John Conyers, and Cedric Richmond all hosted a Congressional Briefing on “The Abuses of Solitary Confinement in the U.S. Criminal Justice System” that included a screening of "In The Land of the Free," a full length feature documentary film about the A3 civil and criminal cases narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.)

Dear Chairman Durbin and Ranking Member Graham:

My name is Robert Hillary King. I spent 29 years in solitary before I was freed in 2001 after proving my innocence. Since then I have worked tirelessly speaking and traveling around the world to raise awareness about prison conditions in the US, and to bring attention to the remaining two members of the Angola 3—Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox—who are still actively fighting to prove their innocence in federal court. Both remain behind solitary bars in Louisiana today after 40 years.

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly article on the Angola 3 by Prof. Angela A. Allen-Bell

Vikki Wallace, sister of Herman Wallace, holds a photo of Albert Woodfox and Herman, standing outside the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge, April 17, 2012.

**Read Prof. Bell's statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee about solitary confinement and the Angola 3 here.

(Note: This law journal article has been reprinted in full by permission of the author. All rights are reserved. Please email the author for permission to reprint: BellA6@cox.net. The article's footnotes are reprinted in full at the end of the article, and are designated throughout the body of the article by [FN]. For ease of citation, we have preserved the original page numbers from the printed Hastings CLQ article. The page break notations and corresponding page numbers are designated as [*]. For example, in the first paragraph, [*764] marks where page 763 ends and 764 begins.)

Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly
Volume 39, Number 4
Summer 2012
Pages 763-821

PERCEPTION PROFILING & PROLONGED SOLITARY CONFINEMENT VIEWED THROUGH THE LENS OF THE ANGOLA 3 CASE: WHEN PRISON OFFICIALS BECOME JUDGES, JUDGES BECOME VISUALLY CHALLENGED, AND JUSTICE BECOMES LEGALLY BLIND [FN1]

Angela A. Allen-Bell [FNa1]

Copyright (c) 2012 University of California, Hastings College of the Law; Angela A. Allen-Bell

Introduction

Incarceration has crept its way into the mainstream of American society. It no longer conjures an emotional reaction. In fact, for [*764] many populations, it is a predictable destination. For others, it is a fate easily justified. “Since the mid 1990s, the war on drugs, the war on gangs, the war on terror, ‘zero tolerance’ and sentencing policies such as ‘three strikes and you're out[,]’ ‘mandatory minimum sentences[,]’ and ‘truth in sentencing’ have all contributed to the dramatic increase in the number of people sent to prison in the United States and in the length of sentences they serve.” [FN2]

Angola 3 Basics

(Download a flyer version of this fact sheet here.)

In 1972, deep in rural Louisiana, three young black men were silenced for trying to expose continued segregation, systematic corruption, and horrific abuse in the biggest prison in the US, an 18,000 acre former slave plantation called Angola.

Peaceful, non-violent protest in the form of hunger and work strikes organized by inmates caught the attention of Louisiana’s elected leaders and local media in the early 1970s. They soon called for investigations into a host of unconstitutional and extraordinarily inhumane practices commonplace in what was then the “bloodiest prison in the South.” Eager to put an end to outside scrutiny, prison officials began punishing inmates they saw as troublemakers.

At the height of this unprecedented institutional chaos, Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox, and Robert King were charged with murders they did not commit and thrown into 6x9 foot solitary cells where they remained for decades.

Their struggle for justice continued until Robert was released in 2001, Herman in 2013, and Albert in 2016.

Despite a number of reforms achieved in the mid-70s, many officials repeatedly ignored both evidence of misconduct, and of innocence.

The State’s case was riddled with inconsistencies, obfuscations, and missteps. A bloody print at the murder scene did not match Herman, Albert or anyone charged with the crime and was never compared with the limited number of other prisoners who had access to the dormitory on the day of the murder. In 2008, NPR asked Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell why the state refused to test the print. "A fingerprint can come from anywhere," Caldwell explained. "We're not going to be fooled by that."

Potentially exculpatory DNA evidence was “lost” by prison officials—including fingernail scrapings from the victim and barely visible “specks” of blood on clothing alleged to have been worn by Albert.

Both Herman and Albert had multiple alibi witnesses with nothing to gain who testified they were far away from the scene when the murder occurred.

In contrast, several State witnesses lied under oath about rewards for their testimony. The prosecution’s star witness Hezekiah Brown told the jury: “Nobody promised me nothing.” But new evidence showed Hezekiah, a convicted serial rapist serving life, agreed to testify only in exchange for a pardon, a weekly carton of cigarettes, TV, birthday cakes, and other luxuries.

“Hezekiah was one you could put words in his mouth,” the Warden reminisced chillingly in an interview about the case years later.

Notably, Teenie Rogers, the widow of the victim, prison guard Brent Miller, after reviewing the evidence believed Herman and Albert’s trials were unfair, expressed grave doubts about their guilt, and called upon officials to find the real killer. "“Each time I look at the evidence in this case, I remember there is no proof that the men charged with Brent’s death are the ones who actually killed him. It’s easy to get caught up in vengeance and anger, but when I look at the facts, they just do not add up,” said Rogers in 2013.

Herman’s conviction was finally overturned in October 2013 by a Federal Judge. Although his trial was riddled with evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and other constitutional violations, it was the systematic exclusion of women from his jury in violation of the 14th Amendment that freed him. Unfortunately he was released in the late stages of advanced liver cancer and only experienced 3 days of freedom. Sadly for Herman, justice delayed was justice denied.

Albert’s conviction was overturned three times by judges citing racial discrimination, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense, and suppression of exculpatory evidence. While the case worked its way through endless appeals, Louisiana officials refused to release Albert from solitary, even when no longer convicted of the crime, because “there’s been no rehabilitation” from “practicing Black Pantherism.”4

In June 2015, a Federal Judge courageously ordered Albert's immediate release and barred a retrial stressing the “Court's lack of confidence in the State to provide a fair third trial." This extraordinary remedy was also frozen pending yet another series of appeals.

Finally, Albert was released in February of 2016, 43 years and 10 months after first being put in isolation for a crime he didn’t commit.

Louisiana today has the highest incarceration rate in the US—thus the highest in the world.

Three-fourths of the 5,000+ prisoners at Angola are African American. And due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the nation, 97% will die there.

Reminiscent of a bygone era, inmates still harvest cotton, corn and wheat for 4 to 20 cents an hour under the watchful eye of armed guards on horseback.

We believe that only by openly examining the failures and inequities of the criminal justice system in America can we restore integrity to that system.

We must not wait.

We can make a difference.

As the A3 did years before, now is the time to challenge injustice and demand that the innocent and wrongfully incarcerated be freed.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

In 2000, Herman, Albert and Robert filed a civil lawsuit challenging the inhumane and increasingly pervasive practice of long-term solitary confinement. Magistrate Judge Dalby described their decades of isolation as “so far beyond the pale” she could not find “anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence.” Over the course of 16 years, this seminal case detailed unconstitutionally cruel and unusual treatment and systematic due process violations at the hands of Louisiana officials and inspired worldwide action to end long term solitary.