http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/01/angola_3_louisiana_5th_circuit.html
on January 06, 2014 at 9:59 PM, updated January 07, 2014 at 4:44 AM
For the second time in three years, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals
will decide whether Angola 3
member Albert Woodfox deserves another retrial for his now decades-old
murder conviction of prison guard Brent Miller.
Woodfox's case spans four decades and three courts, during which
time he has been reconvicted once and has had the conviction overturned
three times, twice by the same judge in the past few years. But while
the case's history is complex, the legal arguments to be heard by the
three New Orleans-area appellate judges on Tuesday are fairly narrow.
Woodfox's attorneys, hailing from as near as St. Charles Avenue in
New Orleans and as far away as Los Angeles, will argue that Woodfox did
not receive a fair trial the second time around because the process by
which Woodfox was charged by the grand jury was discriminatory, in that
the Grand Jury foreperson did not represent the racial makeup of the
parish in question, in this case West Feliciana. Woodfox is black. The
grand jury foreperson was white. Woodfox's attorneys have presented
data that they argue shows a pattern of discriminatory grand jury
foreperson selection in West Feliciana over several years.
The state will argue Woodfox has been twice convicted of Miller's
murder -- in 1974 and 1998 -- adding the state court heard Woodfox's
discrimination claim in his second trial and decided it had no merit.
Woodfox and fellow Angola inmate Herman Wallace were convicted in
separate trials by all-white juries of the 1972 brutal stabbing of
Miller, a young and popular guard at the state penitentiary also known
as Angola.
The incident occurred during a particularly tumultuous time in the
prison's history, when rape and violence were rampant and relations
between the all-white cadre of guards and the inmates they oversaw were
tense.
After their convictions, Woodfox and Wallace continued to maintain
their innocence and stated their implication in the murder was in
retribution for starting the prison's first Black Panther chapter. The
two soon found themselves in permanent lockdown, spending at least 23
hours a day in solitary confinement for more than four decades.
A third inmate, Robert Hillary King (formerly Wilkerson), was also
key in forming the chapter. Soon after he came to Angola, he was
convicted of murdering a fellow inmate and also incarcerated in
solitary confinement, defined as a 6' x 9' single-occupancy cell with
extremely limited, sometimes no, access to anyone but prison staff.
Lost for years in the system, the three inmates were unknown to the
wider world until the early 1990s, when former Black Panther Malik
Rahim publicized how long Woodfox, Wallace and King had been held in
solitary confinement. They soon became known as the Angola 3.
While King was offered a plea deal and released in 2001 after 29
years in solitary, Wallace spent nearly 42 years in lockdown before a
district judge overturned his sentence and ordered
his release in October. He was reindicted the next day, but died
three days later of advanced liver cancer.
Woodfox is the only member of the Angola 3 still behind bars. He has
been kept in solitary, what the state calls "closed-cell restriction"
for 42 years, a practice
criticized by Amnesty International and the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Torture, who
called it unacceptable under international human rights law.
Woodfox's 1974 murder conviction was first overturned in 1992 by a
state court due to "systemic discrimination." He was then reindicted
in 1993 by a new grand jury and reconvicted five years later.
But District Court Judge James J. Brady overturned this second
conviction in 2008, stating Woodfox's defense counsel was ineffective.
The state
appealed, and the case made its way for the first time to the 5th
Circuit.
Once there, the court reversed Brady's ruling and determined that
while his trial "was not perfect," Woodfox couldn't prove there would
have been a different outcome with different counsel.
Woodfox's attorneys then focused in on the discrimination issue,
arguing there were also issues with the 1993 indictment because black
grand jury foreman were woefully underrepresented in West Feliciana
Parish in the previous 13 years.
Brady again agreed, overturning Woodfox's conviction a second time
in May 2012. The case was kicked up to the 5th Circuit after the
state appealed. While the outcome for Woodfox's counsel in previous
years has not been especially successful, the team remained hopeful
ahead of Tuesday's hearing.
"The case (has) a tremendous, extraordinary history to it and one
that Albert has always maintained his innocence," said George Kendall,
a member of Woodfox's legal team. "The law is very solidly in our
corner."
Oral arguments will be heard at 9 a.m. in Room 209 of the John Minor
Wisdom United States
Court of Appeals Building at 600 Camp Street.
Each side will be limited to 20 minutes for oral argument. Read the
appellate brief filed by the state of Louisiana by
clicking here. Read the appellate brief for Albert Woodfox by
clicking here.
. . . . . . .
Lauren
McGaughy is a state politics reporter based in Baton Rouge. She can be
reached at lmcgaughy@nola.com or on Twitter at @lmcgaughy.
--
Freedom Archives
Freedom Archives
--
SIGN THE JERICHO COINTELPRO PETITION!
Free All Political Prisoners!
www.jerichony.org
No comments:
Post a Comment