[Ppnews] Angola 3 - New Orleans Magistrate: 30 years of solitary confinement cruel

[Political Prisoner News]

Magistrate: 30 years of solitary confinement may be cruel
8/28/2007, 9:20 a.m. CT
The Associated Press

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — It may be constitutional 
to keep an inmate alone in a tiny cell for a 
short time, but decades of such "terrible 
deprivation" are cruel and unusual punishment, a federal magistrate says.

It was the second time U.S. Magistrate Docia 
Dalby has refused to recommend throwing out a 
lawsuit filed by Herman "Hooks" Wallace and 
Albert Woodfox, serving life for killing a prison 
guard, and Robert King Wilkerson, freed in 2001.

"Not only (have the courts) consistently noted 
the severity and terrible deprivation associated 
with such confinement, it has long been the 
subject of research, and even of television and 
movies," Dalby wrote. "It is also a matter of 
common sense that three decades of extreme 
isolation and enforced inactivity in a space 
smaller than a typical walk-in closet present the 
antithesis of what is necessary to meet basic human needs."

A similar ruling in 2005 has been adopted by a judge.

In a 50-page report earlier this month, Dalby 
found that prison authorities should have known 
that "being housed in isolation in a tiny cell 
for 23 hours a day for over three decades results 
in serious deprivations of basic human needs."

Chief U.S. District Judge Ralph Tyson will 
consider Dalby's findings in deciding whether the 
7-year-old case will continue toward trial.

Wilkerson, Wallace and Woodfox all were Black 
Panther Party activists. They say they have been 
political prisoners at Angola because they have 
been continuously confined in the lockdown unit for decades.

Wilkerson was freed in 2001 after his 1973 
conviction of murdering a fellow inmate was 
overturned and he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to 
commit murder. Woodfox and Wallace were convicted 
of killing guard Brent Miller during a riot in 1972.

All three were put in "lockdown" in 1972. Woodfox and Wallace remain there.



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