[Ppnews] Southern Injustice: Herman Wallace and the Angola 3

[Political Prisoner News]

  http://www.opednews.com/articles/Southern-Injustice-Herman-by-By-James-Ridgeway-100104-969.html

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January 4, 2010

Southern Injustice: Herman Wallace and the Angola 3

By By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

For the better part of four decades, Victory Wallace, 70, has made a 
monthly trip from New Orleans to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at 
Angola to visit her brother Herman, who just turned 68. The 140-mile 
journey has shades of Heart of Darkness, following the course of the 
Mississippi River to a remote prison colony from which most inmates 
never return. At the dark heart of this former slave plantation, 
Herman Wallace has lived most of the past 37 years in solitary 
confinement, imprisoned alone for 23 hours a day in a 6-by-9-foot cell.

When Herman was moved in the spring of 2009 from Angola to Hunt 
Correctional Center near Baton Rouge, Vickie's trip got a bit 
shorter. But what she found when she arrived on her most recent visit 
was even worse than usual. Because of a disciplinary infraction, 
Herman had been placed in "extended administrative lock down." That 
meant Vickie was denied a contact visit, and was permitted to see her 
brother only through a glass partition as they spoke over a 
telephone. His hands were shackled to the table. (Other recent 
visitors reported that the shackles made it hard for him to hold the 
phone to his ear, while his hearing loss made communication over the 
telephone difficult.) Herman complained to Vickie that he was cold, 
and she thought that he had lost weight. His spirits, she said, were 
not the best.

For years, Herman Wallace's hopes have ridden on two cases that are 
inching their way through the courts--one challenging his conviction, 
the other challenging his long-term solitary confinement. Now, after 
a decade of starts and stops, obstacles and delays, both cases are 
advancing toward conclusions that will determine how he spends what's 
left of his life.

With the exception of a few brief intervals, Wallace has been living 
in lock down since 1972, when he was accused of murdering a young 
Angola prison guard. Along with another inmate named Albert Woodfox, 
he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life without parole. 
Wallace, Woodfox, and a third longtime prisoner called Robert 
King--who are known as the Angola 3--are also plaintiffs in a federal 
lawsuit alleging that their unparalleled time in solitary violates 
the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The 
<http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/06/life-permanent-lockdown?page=1>case 
[1]--which could potentially affect the estimated 25,000 American 
prisoners living in long-term lockdown--is expected to come to trial 
in the US District Court in Baton Rouge in early 2010.

Since 1990, Wallace has also been appealing his criminal conviction 
in the Louisiana state courts. He believes that he was targeted for 
the guard's murder because of his involvement in Angola's chapter of 
the Black Panther Party, which had been organizing against conditions 
in what was then known as "the bloodiest prison in the South." 
Wallace contends that the prosecution's witnesses--all of them fellow 
Angola prisoners--were coached, bribed, coerced, or threatened into 
giving false testimony against him by prison employees bent on 
revenge. "If they could have hung and burned the guys involved they 
would have," one inmate witness later told Wallace's lawyers. "But 
there was too much light on the situation."

Documents and testimony that have surfaced since the trial show that 
prosecutors knew a good part of their case was unreliable or 
manufactured. The state's own judicial commissioner, assigned to 
study the case in 2006, recommended that Wallace's conviction be 
overturned. Even the prison guard's widow has publicly stated that 
she now 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/03/nation/na-angola3>doubts [2] 
the guilt of the two men convicted of her husband's murder, and still 
wants to see his killers brought to justice. But the Louisiana 
courts, one after another, have rejected his appeal, providing no 
reasons for their decisions.

Now, Wallace has turned to the federal courts. On December 4, he 
filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus--basically, a plea for a 
reversal of his wrongful conviction. It is his last chance to win a 
new trial, and possibly his freedom. On his side are a team of 
skilled pro-bono attorneys who have assembled a brief full of 
evidence that was hidden or suppressed 35 years ago during his 
original trial. Against him is an increasingly conservative federal 
court system, along with two of the most powerful figures in 
Louisiana criminal justice: Angola's famous warden, Burl Cain, and 
the state's ambitious attorney general, James "Buddy" Caldwell, both 
of whom appear determined to fight to the bitter end to ensure that 
Herman Wallace never again sees the light of day.

The incident that condemned Herman Wallace to a life in lock down 
took place at a particularly explosive time in Angola's notoriously 
violent history. In the early 1970s, Louisiana's 5,000-man 
penitentiary was the nation's largest prison; it was also notorious 
for its high rates of murder, rape, and assault. The former slave 
plantation's 18,000 acres were farmed by prisoners working up to 96 
hours a week, overseen by armed inmate guards, known as "trusties." 
The trusties also oversaw gambling, drug-dealing, and a monstrous 
system of sexual slavery--sanctioned by some of the all-white 
corrections officers, who were referred to by staff and inmates alike 
as "freemen."

"Angola in those days was life and death, buying and selling people, 
and the officers knew it was happening," Howard Baker, a prisoner who 
testified at Wallace's trial, stated in a subsequent affidavit. 
"There was a goon squad of guards. If they came after you, you could 
get anything from a beating to being killed, and they'd call it being 
killed by trying to escape." In addition, Baker said, "Physical 
conditions were about as bad as you can get: hot, dirty, overcrowded. 
Weapons were everywhere. You could shake down for weapons one night 
and have just as many the next. I saw as many as four stabbings a 
week, week after week."

It was also a time of simmering tensions between longtime 
employees--many of whom had grown up in the staff community on the 
prison's grounds--and Angola's new "reformist" leadership. A few 
years earlier, Warden C. Murray Henderson and Deputy Warden Lloyd 
Hoyle had been brought in from out of state to "clean up Angola." As 
Wallace's habeas petition states:

Their arrival at Angola disrupted [the Louisiana State 
Penitentiary's] existing leadership, most of whom had worked their 
way up the ranks at Angola. Associate Warden Hayden Dees and the 
old-guard leadership notably resisted their reform efforts, 
particularly those aimed at ending racial segregation and those 
directed at according inmates in extended lockdown, known as CCR 
(closed cell restriction), with due process. Associate Warden Dees in 
particular believed that "a certain type of militant or revolutionary 
inmate, maybe even a communist type," should remain under lockdown 
conditions at all times; he wanted nothing to do with documenting 
decisions about who went into lockdown and for how long in compliance 
with federal court requirements.

Among the "militant" inmates were Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, 
both serving time for armed robbery. After they arrived at Angola 
they became active members of the prison's chapter of the Black 
Panther Party. This cadre of inmates organized petitions and hunger 
strikes to protest the horrendous conditions at the prison, and 
helped new inmates, known as "fresh fish," protect themselves from 
sexual assault and enslavement. For their efforts, some of the 
Panthers were placed in solitary confinement to suppress what was 
viewed as a threat to prison authority.

On April 17, 1972, 23-year-old guard Brent Miller was found in front 
of an inmate dormitory, stabbed 32 times. Investigators initially had 
no suspects, but they soon zeroed in on the activists. In a 
<http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Angola3/pdf/Herman_Wallace.pdf>written 
description [3] [PDF] of his case, Wallace stated that Hayden Dees, 
the associate warden, "went well out of his way to tie us in with the 
death for his own political gain. He claimed that Henderson and Hoyle 
were responsible for Miller's death by releasing the 'militants' (he 
linked me and Woodfox to those released)."

Statements from Henderson and Hoyle confirm that some of the guards 
considered them complicit in the killing. Three days later, Lloyd 
Hoyle, the deputy warden, was called from home to a meeting of staff 
members, who accused him of turning loose Miller's murderers. Hoyle 
was assaulted and pushed through a plate glass door, and nearly bled 
to death before one of the guards decided to drive him to the hospital.

Wallace was thrown into lock down the day of Brent Miller's murder. 
Within a few days, officials had obtained the evidence they needed to 
charge Wallace and three other so-called "militants"--Woodfox, 
Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montegut--with the crime. They were 
indicted by an all-white, all-male grand jury in nearby St. 
Francisville, Louisiana, which was home to many prison staff, their 
families, and friends.

A river town near the Mississippi border, St. Francisville proudly 
advertises itself as plantation country. It was also Klan country, 
and until the civil rights movement and the FBI arrived in the early 
1960s, no African American had registered to vote in the parish in 
more than 60 years. The defendants in the Miller case contested the 
indictment on the grounds that women and blacks had been 
systematically excluded from the jury pool. They were subsequently 
re-indicted by another grand jury, chosen through "the same or 
substantially the same grand jury selection procedures," according to 
Wallace's current brief.

Albert Woodfox was convicted of Miller's murder in a separate trial 
in 1973. After being granted a change of venue, the three remaining 
defendants--Wallace, Jackson, and Montegut--stood trial in East Baton 
Rouge in January 1974--before yet another all-white, all-male jury.
The prosecutors in the case presented no physical evidence to tie the 
three men to the crime. Although bloody fingerprints had been found 
near the guard's body, they matched none of the defendants'. 
According to evidence presented in Wallace's petition, no effort was 
made to match them to any of the 5,000 other inmate prints on file. A 
bloody knife, likewise, could not be connected to any of the men on 
trial. The evidence against them consisted entirely of testimony by 
other Angola prisoners obtained under highly dubious circumstances.

The prosecution's star witness was Hezekiah Brown, whose eyewitness 
testimony was indispensible to its case. An aging prisoner serving a 
life sentence for aggravated rape, Brown said that he had been in the 
dormitory on the morning of Brent Miller's death, and had seen the 
defendants stab the guard repeatedly. Former Angola prisoners have 
said in interviews that Brown was a notorious snitch. But it would be 
nearly 25 years before 
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96199165>proof 
emerged [4] showing just what happened behind the scenes to secure 
his testimony.

In 1998, lawyers for Wallace's co-defendant, Albert Woodfox, 
succeeded in obtaining previously suppressed witness statements, 
taped interviews, and other documents from the murder investigation 
carried out by prison officials, the county sheriff's office, and 
local prosecutors. These materials, supplemented by testimony by 
Warden Henderson and others, show that Hezekiah Brown was encouraged, 
if not coerced, to identify the prisoners already chosen as suspects. 
Henderson admitted he promised to seek a pardon for the lifer if 
Brown helped them "crack the case." A series of letters to judges, 
pardon board members, and the secretary of corrections shows that 
Warden Henderson kept his word, though it would be more than 10 years 
before Brown's pardon came through. In the meantime, Brown benefitted 
from an array of special favors, including reassignment to a private 
room at the low-security "dog pen" where the prison's bloodhounds 
were trained and a carton of cigarettes, the crucial prison currency, 
every week.

Another inmate witness, Joseph Richey, placed Wallace and the others 
at the scene of the crime; he was later found to be a schizophrenic 
who was heavily medicated with Thorazine. After the trial, Richey was 
transferred to a plum job at the governor's mansion and given weekend 
furloughs (during which he robbed several banks). Previously 
suppressed documents, obtained through the discovery process by 
Albert Woodfox's lawyers in 1998, show that Angola officials didn't 
believe Richey had seen anything. The state possessed these documents 
at the time of Wallace's trial, and presented his possibly perjured 
testimony nonetheless.

Howard Baker, yet another prisoner who testified at Wallace's trial, 
has since sworn an affidavit completely recanting his testimony. 
Baker had initially been a suspect in Miller's murder, and may have 
been seeking to protect himself. In the affidavit, Baker states:

So I looked at the situation like this, I got 60 something years, and 
I got a chance to help myself so I was going to do something to help 
me get out of this cesspool".So, I gave a statement on 10/16/72, to 
Warden Dees, which was a lie. And my testimony based on that 
statement was a lie. I really thought this would help me because Dees 
told me my statement would get my sentence commuted".It was all over 
the penitentiary that they [Wallace and Woodfox] were the ones that 
administration thought was involved. So I gave a statement.

The state played its ace-in-the-hole in the middle of the trial, when 
one of the four co-defendants walked in after a recess and sat down 
at the prosecution's table. Chester Jackson had turned state's 
witness, and would now testify against the others. The defense 
attorney, Charles Garretson, later testified that he "was in a 
complete state of shock"it took everything I could glean together to 
maintain professionalism and sanity and intelligence to go forward 
after this lunch break." The court gave him less than 30 minutes to 
prepare to cross-examine his own former client. Although he denied it 
on the stand, Jackson had clearly cut a deal; shortly after the 
trial, he would plead guilty to manslaughter. Garretson later said 
that he felt he was "the only one in the courthouse that didn't know 
this. I felt that--I know all the deputies knew it. I felt the judge knew it."

These allegations of widespread and deliberate suppression of 
evidence form the core of Herman Wallace's current appeal. His habeas 
petition states, "Mr. Wallace's defense strategy was to show that the 
State's inmate witnesses must be either mistaken or lying. Although 
the State possessed precisely the information Mr. Wallace's defense 
counsel sought--material which would show that the State's witnesses 
lacked credibility and the State's prosecution lacked integrity--the 
State disclosed none of it." This withholding of evidence, Wallace 
says, violated his constitutional right to due process.

Wallace's remaining co-defendant, Gilbert Montegut, had a prison 
guard to confirm his alibi, and was acquitted. Herman Wallace was 
convicted of the murder. His conviction happened to fall during a 
brief period when the Supreme Court had effectively struck down 
capital punishment--had it come at any other time, Wallace would 
likely have received a death sentence. Instead, he got life without 
parole and was placed in lockdown, along with Woodfox. The reason 
given for their confinement in solitary was the nature of the 
crime--the murder of a guard, which rendered them a threat to others 
in the prison community. Both Wallace and Woodfox remain there, 
ostensibly on the same grounds, 35 years later.

If the story of Herman Wallace's trial reads like a study in Southern 
justice, its sequel shows what has changed in Louisiana in the 
intervening decades--and what has remained the same. Wallace and 
Woodfox now have a small legion of active supporters and an 
impressive team of lawyers renowned for their death penalty appeals, 
including Nick Trenticosta, director of the Center for Equal Justice, 
in New Orleans, and George Kendall at the pro bono unit of Squire 
Sanders & Dempsey in New York. But even good lawyers can't vitiate 
the Louisiana justice system's apparent determination to keep Wallace 
and Woodfox locked up and locked down, for reasons that appear to go 
far beyond the facts of the 1972 murder of Brent Miller.

The two men believe that they were originally targeted for the murder 
because their political beliefs and activism represented a threat to 
the absolute power of prison authorities. Statements from Angola's 
current warden, Burl Cain, suggest they are being kept permanently in 
solitary for much the same reason. Cain has been widely 
<http://www.amazon.com/Cains-Redemption-Dennis-Shere/dp/1881273245>celebrated 
[5] for "transforming" Angola, largely through the institution of 
Christian "moral rehabilitation," which he sees as the only path to 
redemption for the sinners in his charge. There is no room, either in 
Cain's worldview or on his prison plantation, for people who question 
authority like Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have.

In a 2008 deposition, Cain declared, "The prison operates with one 
authentic authoritarian figure, the warden and the rule book." He 
also said that Woodfox's lack of deference made him a dangerous man: 
"The thing about him is that he wants to demonstrate. He wants to 
organize. He wants to be defiant. He wants to show to others that he 
is powerful and strong."

Woodfox's lawyers have pointed out that he had no record of violence 
and few disciplinary infractions in the past 20 years. They 
documented a similar record for Wallace in a 
<http://www.a3grassroots.org/casehistoryimages/08AlbertReleaseReqPt3.pdf>2006 
deposition [6] [PDF]: "Mr. Wallace's most recent disciplinary report 
for institutional violence occurred some 22 years ago," it said, and 
in recent years, Wallace's handful of infractions included 
"possessing handmade earrings and a poem, 'A Defying Voice'"; 
"wearing a handmade necklace with a black fist"; and "possessing the 
publication, It's About Time, a Black Panther publication 16 
containing articles/photos on the Angola three, characterized as, 
quote, 'racist literature' by security personnel." His most recent 
disciplinary report "was December 2005, when he was found in the 
possession of excess number of postage stamps, for which he received 
thirty days cell confinement."

But Cain believes "It's not a matter of write-ups. It's a matter of 
attitude and what you are." And to Cain, what Woodfox and Wallace are 
and will always be is Black Panthers. Associate Warden Hayden Dees 
previously said that "a certain type of militant or revolutionary 
inmate, maybe even a communist type" was dangerous enough to be kept 
in permanent lockdown. In 2008, Cain said that Woodfox belongs in 
solitary because "I still know that he is still trying to practice 
Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my 
prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have 
me all kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have 
the blacks chasing after them."

Wallace <http://www.alternet.org/rights/50663>says [7] that Cain at 
least once offered to release the two men into the general population 
if they renounced their political views and accepted Jesus Christ as 
their savior. He refused. Cain declared that "Albert Woodfox and 
Herman Wallace is locked in time with that Black Panther 
revolutionary actions they were doing way back when"And that's still 
their motive and that's still their goal. And from that, there's been 
no rehabilitation."

Louisiana's attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, also appears determined 
to keep the two men in prison at all costs--a vow that he will likely 
try to uphold even if Wallace's case succeeds in federal court. 
Caldwell's resolve has already been tested in the case of Woodfox: 
When a federal judge overturned Woodfox's conviction in 2008 and 
ordered him released on bail, the attorney general sprang into 
action--filing an emergency motion to keep him behind bars, sending 
fearmongering emails to the community where Woodfox was planning to 
stay with his niece, and telling the press that he was "the most 
dangerous person on the planet." Persuaded by Caldwell's plea and 
Cain's testimony about his dangerous nature, the federal appeals 
court granted the motion and denied Woodfox bail; he remains in 
lockdown, awaiting his appeal. In a recent letter, Wallace wrote of 
Caldwell, "Like most prosecutors, he will never admit he made a 
mistake, he's fighting to keep us imprisoned. The reputation of the 
Louisiana justice system is at stake here. If we gain our freedom it 
would expose the corruption that is rampant throughout the system."

The fate of both Wallace and Woodfox ultimately lies in the hands of 
the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans--and here, 
they are worse off than they might have been 40 years ago. In the 
1950s and 1960s, a small group of Fifth Circuit judges--mostly 
Southern-bred moderate 
Republicans--<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040503/bass>won a 
reputation [8] for advancing civil rights and especially school 
desegregation. But today the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, 
Texas, and Mississippi, is among the most ideologically conservative 
of the federal appeals courts. It is notable for its overburdened 
docket and for its hostility to appeals from defendants in capital 
cases, including claims based on faulty prosecution and suppressed 
evidence. In particular, the Fifth Circuit has kept the gurneys 
rolling in Texas' busy execution chamber. The court has even been 
reprimanded by the US Supreme Court, itself no friend to death row 
inmates: In June 2004, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/national/05texas.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1>wrote 
[9] that in handing down death penalty rulings, the Fifth Circuit was 
doing no more than "paying lip service to principles" of appellate law.

It will almost certainly be years before Herman Wallace's criminal 
appeal is finally resolved. While their case is exceptional, Wallace, 
now 68, and Woodfox, 62, are in certain respects emblematic of an 
entire generation of prisoners who came of age in a time of 
lengthening sentences and tightening parole restrictions--spared 
execution to live out their lives in prison, sometimes in complete 
isolation. "I'm in this cell or in the hall 24/7, 23 hours in the 
cell, one hour on the hall,'' he wrote in a letter earlier this year. 
"Either way you look at it I am locked up with no contact with any 
others. I use stacks of books for exercise and thereafter I am either 
writing or reading.'' Wallace keeps himself together by concentrating 
on his case. "I have no time for foolishness," his letter continues. 
"I am in a struggle against the state of Louisiana on two strategic 
fronts, and hear me when I tell you they are not fighting fair."

Perhaps the ultimate irony of Woodfox and Wallace's predicament is 
that while their political beliefs may have doomed them to a life in 
lockdown, these same beliefs have also given them the strength to 
endure it. In his New Yorker piece on solitary confinement as 
torture, Atul Gawande describes how frequently prisoners have 
mentally and physically disintegrated in such conditions. What is 
remarkable about Wallace and Woodfox is how lucid and resolute they 
remain. They stay in close touch with their supporters. They know 
every detail of their cases, and when they find the opportunity, they 
provide counsel to other prisoners. They take pride in refusing to 
submit to the dictates of the state or of the warden, to accept 
anyone else's rules or anyone else's god. It's what keeps them sane, 
and perhaps what keeps them alive.

Herman Wallace writes dozens of letters each week. He composes poems 
and makes drawings and elaborate paper flowers. For the past five 
years, he has also been collaborating on a project with Jackie 
Sumell, a young artist who first contacted him in 2002 with the 
question "What kind of a house does a man who has lived in a 
six-foot-by-nine-foot cell for over 30 years dream of?" Together they 
designed a <http://www.hermanshouse.org/>home [10], which Sumell has 
translated into architectural plans, models, a traveling exhibit, and 
a book of drawings and letters called The House That Herman Built. 
Wallace describes a house with "a swimming pool with a light green 
bottom and a large Panther in the center. I want flower gardens 
surrounding the house enclosed. A garage for two cars. A large tree 
in the backyard under which will be my patio.''

"To build this house is to build my soul," Wallace wrote in a 2006 
letter to Sumell. He continued, "I'm often asked what did I come to 
prison for; and now that I think about it Jackie, it doesn't matter. 
It doesn't matter what I came here for, what matters now is what I 
leave with. And I can assure you, however I leave, I won't leave 
nothing behind."

Among the activists who took up the cause of the Angola 3 were the 
late <http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/convicts-and-dame>Anita 
Roddick [11], founder of the Body Shop (and a former Mother Jones 
board member), and her husband, Gordon. The Roddick's family charity, 
the <http://www.theroddickfoundation.org/>Roddick Foundation [12], 
contributed funding for this story.

----------
This article was first published by Mother Jones. Permission is 
granted to reprint in full as long as Mother Jones is cited as the 
original source. URL:

<http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/herman-wallace-angola-3-solitary-confinement>http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/herman-wallace-angola-3-solitary-confinement

Links:
[1] 
<http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/06/life-permanent-lockdown?page>click 
here=1
[2] <http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/03/nation/na-angola3>click here
[3] <http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Angola3/pdf/Herman_Wallace.pdf>click here
[4] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96199165
[5] 
<http://www.amazon.com/Cains-Redemption-Dennis-Shere/dp/1881273245>click here
[6] 
<http://www.a3grassroots.org/casehistoryimages/08AlbertReleaseReqPt3.pdf>click 
here
[7] <http://www.alternet.org/rights/50663>http://www.alternet.org/rights/50663
[8] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040503/bass
[9] <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/national/05texas.html?_r>click 
here=2&pagewanted=1
[10] <http://www.hermanshouse.org/>http://www.hermanshouse.org/
[11] <http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/convicts-and-dame>click here
[12] <http://www.theroddickfoundation.org/>http://www.theroddickfoundation.org/


Read the Mother Jones series "Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude"



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