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<font face="Verdana" size=2><b>September 29, 2008 at 15:53:59<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>Headlined on 9/29/08:<br>
<a href="http://www.opednews.com/articles/-Angola-3-Black-Panther-c-by-Michael-Richardson-080929-4.html">
'Angola 3' Black Panther conviction reversed after 35 years; attention
now turns to 'Omaha Two' case</a><br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2><i>by
<a href="http://www.opednews.com/author/author3874.html">Michael
Richardson</a> <br><br>
<br>
</i></font>
<img src="http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/uploaded/woodfox-20080929-194.jpg" width=320 height=240 alt="[]">
</i><font face="verdana" size=2><b> </b> <br><br>
U.S. District Court Judge James J. Brady in Baton Rouge, Louisiana has
ordered the state to either free or retry Albert Woodfox after almost
three dozen years in solitary confinement. Woodfox, tried with two
other co-defendants, was convicted for the 1972 murder of prison guard
Brent Miller at Angola Prison where Woodfox was serving a sentence for
armed robbery.<br>
<br>
After a controversial trial and an even more disputed second trial in
1998 when he was retried following appeal of his first conviction,
Woodfox may see freedom from the infamous prison where he has been held
in virtual isolation for over three decades.<br>
<br>
Woodfox had been active in a prison chapter of the Black Panthers in
racially-charged Angola Prison, a vast plantation-style penitentiary in
rural Louisiana. Following conviction for the stabbing murder of
Miller, a life sentence was imposed and Angola officials decided that for
security reasons Woodfox and fellow Panther Herman Wallace would be held
in solitary confinement. The 6' by 9' isolation cells would become
home, night and day, for thirty-five years.<br>
<br>
Magistrate Docia L. Dalby has described the punishment meted out to the
two Panthers as, "durations so far beyond the pale that this court
has not found anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American
jurisprudence."<br>
<br>
Judge Brady, after a careful review of the trial record and
recommendation of Magistrate Judge Christine Noland, determined that
Woodfox had not received a fair trial; that his attorney failed to
adequately represent him; and that the state's chief witness, Hezekiah
Brown, had gotten a reduced sentence for naming Woodfox. Further,
exculpatory information about the physical evidence in the case,
bloodstains, was withheld from the jury.<br>
<br>
While Woodfox waits for a prosecutor's decision on his future, another
Black Panther in the Nebraska State Penitentiary, Ed Poindexter, waits
for a ruling from the Nebraska Supreme Court on his request for a new
trial. Poindexter and fellow Panther activist Mondo we Langa
(formerly David Rice) were convicted in April 1971 for the bombing murder
of Omaha police officer Larry Minard.<br>
<br>
Unlike Woodfox, who was an inmate at the time of his alleged crime,
Poindexter and Langa were free and officers in the Nebraska Committee to
Combat Fascism and were Omaha's most vocal police critics. On
August 17, 1970, police were lured to a vacant house investigating a
report of a woman screaming when a bomb killed Minard and injured seven
other police officers. Within two days of the bombing, J. Edgar
Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who had targeted
the Black Panthers, ordered Ivan Willard Conrad, director of the FBI
national crime laboratory to withhold information that was not favorable
to the prosecution of Poindexter and Langa for Minard's murder.<br>
<br>
Hoover was at war with the Black Panthers and secretly directed a
clandestine "no holds barred" operation, code-named COINTELPRO,
to put the group out of existence. Using illegal tactics, FBI
agents engaged in a nationwide campaign that encouraged violence, planted
evidence, withheld evidence, obtained false arrests, and took a host of
other measures that would later be denounced by the U.S. Senate Select
Committee to Study Government Operations commonly known as the Church
Committee.<br>
<br>
At question in the Minard killing was the identity of the unknown caller
who made the emergency call to police headquarters. Hidden for
years behind a secrecy stamp, Omaha Asst. Chief of Police Glen W. Gates,
in a confidential COINTELPRO memo to Hoover, asked the FBI to abandon the
search for the killer who made the call because it might "prejudice
the police murder trial" against Poindexter and Langa.<br>
<br>
Ultimately a 15 year-old, Duane Peak, confessed to the crime and claimed
he made the phone call and that Poindexter and Langa put him up to the
murder. Peak's story falls apart if someone else made the deadly
call. The tape recording, which was withheld from the jury that
convicted the two Panther leaders, did not sound like Peak but rather
resonated with the voice of an older man.<br>
<br>
The tape was destroyed by local authorities after the trial only to have
a duplicate recording emerge years later. The duplicate tape was
subjected to modern vocal analysis in 2006. Expert Tom Owens has
testified that the voice on the tape is not that of Peak, thus leaving an
unidentified accomplice on the loose.<br>
<br>
Poindexter is seeking a new trial over the withheld evidence and the
Nebraska Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case this week.
No date has been set for a decision. Poindexter and Langa are
serving life sentences at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. Both men
deny any involvement in the crime.<br>
<i>Permission granted to reprint</i></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>
<br><br>
</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Michael Richardson is a freelance
writer based in Boston. Richardson writes about politics, law, nutrition,
ethics, and music. Richardson is also a political consultant.<br><br>
<br><br>
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