picture from google
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/09/release_herman_wallace_of_the_angola_three_he_is_about_to_die_of_cancer.html
Herman Wallace spent over four decades alone in a 6-by-9-foot prison
cell. For 41 years, he has stretched, wretched, ached, medicated,
grown, and deteriorated—all in the three paces he could take from his
toilet to his closed cell door.
This week, while awaiting a federal judge’s decision on a petition
he brought challenging the conviction that put him in solitary
confinement, Wallace, who is 73, stopped an ineffective chemotherapy
regime for a liver tumor. Because of the cancer diagnosis, Judge
Jackson agreed to an expedited ruling over a month ago, but hasn’t
issued it yet. Wallace, meanwhile, has been told he has two months to
live.
Wallace is one of the Angola Three, a trio of men who have become
fixtures in prisoner exoneration lore both for the evidence of
misconduct in their cases and for the political undertones of their
decades-long solitary confinement. They’ve been held in Louisiana’s
legendary Angola prison, which is named for the slave plantation that
once occupied the grounds. Angola is also referred to as “the Farm,”
and when you enter its gates after a long, lonely drive, you see
inmates, mostly African-American, tending fields of cotton, wheat, and
corn.
Wallace and Albert Woodfox entered Angola in 1971 for separate armed
robbery convictions. That same year, the men co-founded an Angola
chapter of the Black Panther Party to fight the systematic rape and
violence that plagued the prison in the 1960s and ’70s. In 1972,
following the murder of an Angola prison guard, Brent Miller, the men
were charged, convicted, and put in solitary confinement for the next
four decades. While the men admit to their armed robberies, they have
consistently maintained their innocence in the Miller case.
Robert Hillary King, the third member of the Angola Three, was also
active in the Black Panther Party. He did not arrive at Angola until
after the Miller incident. Yet he served 29 years in solitary
confinement for an inmate murder he did not commit before his release
in 2001.
The Angola Three have won national and international attention.
Amnesty International includes the men on its watch list of political
prisoners, and this June, the organization called on Gov. Bobby Jindal
to release Wallace on humanitarian grounds. In July, members of the
House Committee on the Judiciary, including Rep. John Conyers
(Michigan) and Rep. Cedric Richmond (Louisiana), sent a letter
to the U.S. Department of Justice, asking for a federal investigation
of Louisiana’s punishment practices. They drew particular attention to
the Angola Three and called the state’s treatment of Herman Wallace
“unconscionable.”
The murder case is embarrassingly weak and rife with evidence of
investigative and prosecutorial misconduct, including the bribing of
witnesses and the suppression of exculpatory evidence. Even Brent
Miller’s widow has come out in support of revisiting the men’s
convictions. The case rests on four inmate witnesses, each of whom gave
statements inconsistent with their testimony. Wallace’s lawyers learned
decades later that the witnesses were promised all sorts of favors,
including cigarettes, food, and even the possibility of a pardon in one
case, in exchange for their testimony. One of the Angola wardens at the
time has been recorded saying of the state’s primary witness, Hezekiah
Brown: “you could put words in his mouth.” A bloody fingerprint and
a number of other prints found at the scene matched none of the
defendants, yet the prison didn’t try to find a match among the rest of
the prison population.
In 2009 federal Magistrate Judge Docia Dalby wrote that the extreme
length of Wallace’s and Woodfox’s isolation was “so far beyond the pale
that this Court has not found anything even remotely comparable in the
annals of American jurisprudence.” So why has it continued?
In a 2008 deposition,
Angola Warden Burl Cain said “Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace is
(sic) locked in time with that Black Panther revolutionary actions they
were doing way back when, and that they’re still hooked up to that.”
Asked to assume Woodfox was innocent of the Miller murder, Cain still
insisted he should remain isolated. Otherwise “I would have me all
kinds of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks
chasing after them. I would have chaos and conflict, and I believe
that.” Courts and legislators usually defer to prison officials like
Cain—a central reason that 80,000 prisoners are currently in solitary
confinement in American jails and prisons.
If Judge Jackson overturns Wallace’s murder conviction, he could be
released on bail. Rep. Cedric Richmond wrote a letter Thursday
encouraging Jackson to take this step. But Louisiana Attorney General
James “Buddy” Caldwell has indicated he will do what it takes to keep
Wallace locked up. Caldwell has also denied that Wallace was held in
solitary. "Let me be clear," he concluded
in a statement last spring, "Woodfox and Wallace are GUILTY and
have NEVER been held in solitary confinement." In 2008, Judge Jackson
overturned Woodfox’s conviction and ordered release on bail, at which
point Caldwell requested an emergency appeal. The famously conservative
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed Jackson before
Woodfox’s release could even be processed.
Jindal could also let Wallace out of prison, with the consent of a
pardon board, by granting him clemency. But the governor won’t discuss
the matter, either with Wallace’s supporters or with the press.
After his cancer diagnosis in June, Wallace was moved out of
solitary so that he could receive treatment in the prison infirmary
without being shackled during transport. He had already lost 45 pounds
over a span of six months at that point. He is still out of solitary,
living in a prison hospital room, but after three months of
chemotherapy, he is quite literally depleted.
Now, nearing the end of his physical battles, Wallace is looking
ahead. For years, he has been collaborating with artist Jackie Sumell
to design a dream house—a conceptual escape from his solitary cell that
is also a project to build a real house that will serve as a youth
center in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward. In July, a documentary about the
project, Herman’s
House, debuted on public television. Wallace is using his last days
to focus on fundraising for it. He gave Sumell a bit of encouragement
on a recent visit: “Kiddo, you gotta get on your game. You’re going to
be the face of this now.”
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