http://themilitant.com/2016/8009/800902.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 9 March 7, 2016
(front page)
Woodfox is finally free after decades in solitary
Use victory to fight against prison barbarism!
Left, Militant/Betsey Stone
Albert Woodfox, right, last of the Angola 3 Black Panther political
prisoners, leaves prison Feb. 19 with his brother after more than four
decades in solitary confinement. Left, September 2014 rally in Oakland,
California, backs prisoners protesting isolation in Security Housing Units.
BY EMMA JOHNSON
When Albert Woodfox walked out of prison Feb. 19, his 69th birthday, he
had spent more than 43 years fighting his frame-up conviction for
murder, isolated in a 6-by-9-foot cell for 23 hours a day.
“I can now direct all my efforts to ending this barbarous use of
solitary confinement and will continue my work on that issue here in the
free world,” he said in a statement.
Woodfox, Herman Wallace and Robert King became known as the Angola 3 as
a result of a decades-long international campaign for their freedom. In
the early 1970s all three were part of one of the first prison chapters
of the Black Panther Party. They organized hunger and work strikes for
better conditions at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
Woodfox and Wallace were placed in solitary in April 1972, following a
riot in which prison guard Brent Miller was killed. They were framed up
and convicted in 1974 for Miller’s death, despite a lack of evidence and
several witnesses who said they were not at the murder scene. With the
exception of a three-year period for Woodfox, the men were kept in
solitary for the entire time.
A district judge in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, overturned Wallace’s
conviction Oct. 1, 2013, and granted his immediate release. Three days
later Wallace died of liver cancer. King’s separate conviction for
killing a fellow inmate in 1973 was overturned in 2001 and he was
released after spending 28 years in solitary.
Over the course of four decades, Woodfox’s conviction has been
overturned three separate times for a host of constitutional violations.
In June last year Federal Judge James Brady ordered his immediate
release. An appeals court reversed that order in November. That ruling
was on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court when the news about Woodfox’s
release broke.
“Although I was looking forward to proving my innocence at a new trial,
concerns about my health and my age have caused me to resolve this case
now and obtain my release with this no-contest plea to lesser charges,”
his statement said. He pled no contest, which is not an admission of
guilt, to charges of manslaughter and aggravated burglary and was freed
on time served.
The three men always maintained their innocence and pointed to the
political nature of their frame-ups.
“They pinned it on us, because we were militants, we were fighters, we
were members of the Black Panther Party,” King told the Militant after
Wallace’s death. “We wanted to bring consciousness to our fellow
prisoners that we are protected by due process, the 14th Amendment and
other constitutional grounds.”
In a 2008 deposition, Angola warden Burl Cain stated why he thought
Woodfox should remain in solitary. “The thing about him is that he wants
to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant. … I would
not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the
young, new inmates.”
“I thought my case, then and now, was noble,” Woodfox said in an earlier
statement on the Angola 3 website. “They might bend me a little bit,
they may cause me a lot of pain, they may even take my life, but they
will never be able to break me.”
Along with King and Wallace, Woodfox brought a civil lawsuit in 2000,
which is still pending, challenging the constitutionality of the state
of Louisiana’s use of indefinite solitary confinement.
In September last year a settlement was reached in a class-action
lawsuit initiated by a group of prisoners against the state of
California. The prisoners were leaders of three hunger strikes against
indefinite solitary confinement that included up to 30,000 inmates and
put the national spotlight on the conditions prisoners face. If fully
implemented the settlement will substantially reduce the number of
prisoners in isolation. At any one moment 80,000 people are held in
solitary confinement in the U.S. prison system.
Related articles:
Step up fight to end barbaric solitary
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
