Albert Woodfox

Thanks to Tory Pegram, Campaign Director of the Angola 3 Project (and Friends of Justice board member), for providing these handy links to three compelling pieces that aired this week on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.  Advocates of the Angola 3 get their say along with the folks who are trying to keep Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox in prison.  You can’t listen to these well-produced stories without believing that there has been a tragic miscarriage of justice in this case.  Listen and let us know what you think.

For those preferring cold print, I have pasted the website narrative below.

Part 1: Doubts Arise About 1972 Angola Prison Murder

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96030547

Part 2: Favors, Inconsistencies Taint Angola Murder Case

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96199165

Part 3: Why Did Key Angola Witness Go To The ‘Dog Pen’?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96255685

Deep in Louisiana, a long winding road dead ends at Angola, a prison unlike any other. The size of Manhattan, 30 miles from the nearest town, it’s really a place unto itself.

It was in this faraway place that a 23-year-old corrections officer was stabbed to death with a lawnmower blade in 1972. In the almost 40 years since, those are about the only details of the crime anyone can agree on.

Two men – Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox – were quickly convicted of killing Brent Miller. A judge sentenced them to life and the prison placed them in solitary confinement – for 36 years. It’s the longest any inmate has spent in isolation in modern U.S. history. Now, all these years later, the murder seems even more unsettled and elusive than it did then, and there are questions about their guilt.

Most of the people who were there at the time of the crime are dead. Those who are left seem to want to bury this case in a place where no one will find it.

Angola’s current warden Burl Cain, for instance, is closed to discussion.

“We don’t talk about those, just can’t do it,” he says in his office. “Really, that’s not the deal.”

Many other former and current officials say they will never talk about what happened that early April morning. But across the Louisiana hills, Miller’s death hangs in the air like Spanish moss.

The prison firing range is named after him. His picture hangs at the front of the prison museum. And every 90 days for the past 36 years, the warden at Angola stamped a paper keeping two men in solitary confinement.

A few months ago, the men were moved to a maximum-security wing. But to grasp how two men could spend almost four decades in isolation, you have to understand Angola.

“Small town America, that’s exactly what you have,” says Melody Spragg, the hospice coordinator at Angola and an unofficial tour guide.

She’s looking past a flawlessly manicured stretch of lawn to hundreds of perfectly painted homes. This, too, is the prison; Angola’s correctional officers live on site. It was here at B-line, as they call it, where Miller was born and raised.

“We’ve got trees, we’ve got a park for the residents of B-line,” Spragg says. “I think they started a skateboard park. We have a pool over there, a family rec center.”

In this part of Angola, there’s not really anything that connotes maximum-security prison – except for the inmates. All day long, men in white uniforms are cutting grass, painting houses, planting gardens, free of cost to the prison staff. It’s a tradition at this historically black prison run largely by white officers.

While most inmates are sent to the fields to work, these jobs go to those who are considered the best-behaved.

Inmate Ricky Hawthorne apparently fit the officer’s bill. He meticulously waters a bed of marigolds for the third time today.

“They brought these over here and told me to just keep them watered and they would grow and they would be beautiful,” he says, answering every question with a snappy “yassuh” the way all the inmates here seem to do.

Down the road, a group of inmates are sitting under a tent waiting to wash officers’ cars. The wardens and deputy wardens have what they call “House Boys” – inmates who cook for their families and clean their homes. When there’s a chore to do, officers just pull an inmate from the prison camps.

“Angola is home to me,” says Dora Rabalais, who has been living in the neighborhood since Miller was just a boy, playing football in these streets with his brothers. “It’s a family – a family of people that work together, play together, pray together and even have their own little family fights just like any other family would have.”

Like most families here, Rabalias’ son and grandson now work at the prison, where she and her husband worked for decades. In a place so remote, it’s hard to know what’s nepotism. There’s simply no one else to hire.

Here at Angola, the officers aren’t called officers, or even guards. They’re called Freemen. Just down the road is acre after acre of corn, soybeans and cotton. In the distance on this day, 100 black men toil, bent over in the field, while a single white officer on a horse sits above them, a shotgun in his lap.

And just past these fields, hovering next to this idyllic little neighborhood where Miller grew up, are the prison dorms where he went to work – the dorms where he died, when Angola was known throughout the country as “the bloodiest prison in America.”

“I tell you, that was appalling,” says Lloyd Hoyle, the deputy warden at the time. “I tell you, I wasn’t even working there, and I almost shed tears because of the conditions of that prison you would not believe it.”

Hoyle was a prison warden from Iowa. He still remembers when Warden Murray Henderson asked him to come look around the penitentiary.

“I looked at it,” he remembers, “and I says, ‘Murray, there’s nothing you could do to this prison, nothing, that wouldn’t be an improvement.'”

Hoyle says there were 200 armed convict guards, who abused and tortured the inmates. Many of the paid guards were illiterate. There was a prisoner slave trade and rampant rape; inmates slept with JC Penny catalogs tied to their waists for protection.

Wilbert Rideau was an inmate at the time and former editor of the prison newspaper, The Angolite.

“Angola was a lawless jungle,” Rideau says, flipping through an old issue of the paper. Inside is a tally. In 1971, there were 82 stabbings, three inmates died. In 1972, there were 52 stabbings, eight died. In 1973, you had 137 stabbings, 13 died.

“It was getting progressively worse,” Rideau says, shaking his head.

To keep order, there were fewer than 300 correctional officers, men like Bert Dixon.

“It was rough, inmates killing inmates, yes it was bad,” Dixon says. “We didn’t have the personnel they have now, to be able to watch the inmates. The inmates were on their own.”

With so little to lose, an inmate tried to escape almost every day, running fast and furiously from the cotton fields. Dixon and his father ran the bloodhounds through the woods, chasing all of them down.

“Back in those days when an inmate escaped, we didn’t come back until we caught him,” he says. “I’ve gone to sleepwalking at night, I be so tired.”

Within the prison, a war was brewing between the inmates and the guards for control. Years of racial and political turmoil were boiling over. Many inmates were turning to radical political movements, and in some cases, violence. Just one day before Miller was killed, a group of inmates attacked a guard shack with a fire bomb, injuring an officer.

Angola officials would not allow me to interview inmates who were at Angola in 1972. But those I did talk to, on the condition I not give their names, say they remember the two men convicted of Miller’s murder.

At the time, they were both serving 50 years: Woodfox for armed robbery, Wallace for bank robbery. Inmates say they used to hold meetings behind the dorms, saying they were starting a Black Panther chapter within the prison. Tall, lean and muscular, they walked around wearing black berets, talking about revolution in a segregated, entirely white-run, southern prison.

Wallace and Woodfox are still at Angola. But none of the inmates have seen them in 36 years, not since Miller was murdered on the floor of a prison dorm.

Brent Miller was born and raised in Louisiana’s Angola Prison, in a special neighborhood built just for correctional officers. It was there that he fell in love with a girl who lived just up the street. One morning, three months after they were married, the young bride’s sister came running to find her.

“My sister said there had been an accident, that Brent was hurt,” recalls Leontine Verrett.

Decades later, Verrett still remembers how worried her husband had been that morning. The day before, an officer barely escaped when inmates firebombed a guard shack. Be careful, she had told him. But her sister’s face told her it had not been enough.

“I wanted her to take me to him, and that’s when she said that he was dead,” Verrett recalls. “I remember going home and seeing my mom and dad, and my brother. Everybody was there. Everybody was just so broken.”

The death of 23-year-old Miller turned the small insular prison community upside-down. But four decades have brought no more clarity to the crime than there was then. Two men were convicted, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. They spent the next 36 years in solitary confinement – the longest any inmate is known to have been in isolation in the United States. But now, all these years later, questions are surfacing about the witnesses and evidence that led to their convictions. Core pieces of the story are no longer fitting together.

A Disorganized Investigation

State prosecutors say that around 7:30 a.m. on April 17, four inmates – Wallace, Woodfox, Chester Jackson and Gilbert Montegut – walked into the Pine 1 dormitory and stabbed Miller to death.

“Not once, but 38 times,” says Angola’s deputy warden at the time, Lloyd Hoyle, who took charge of the investigation with his boss. “[Miller had] just been recently married. He hadn’t been at the prison very long, all of sudden he’s annihilated, assassinated.”

The response was swift. Prison officials rounded up more than 200 inmates, looking for radicals – Black Panthers like Wallace and Woodfox – and brought them to a makeshift interrogation center, one floor above death row.

“You heard hollering and screaming and the bodies being slammed against the walls,” says Billy Wayne Sinclair, a white inmate on death row in 1972. “Upstairs you could smell tear gas bombs. They would come in there and set them off. So we would have to wet stuff and put it to our faces and turn our fans on and hope that we could suck as much out as we could. We heard the beatings that were going on for weeks after that.”

Several inmates said it was a bad month to be black at Angola. According to court records, prison officials never questioned a single white inmate.

Sinclair said he and his fellow death row inmates would talk about how there didn’t seem to be any logic to who was being interrogated.

“These redneck prison guards didn’t have any systematic way of investigating something,” Sinclair said. “The only thing they knew is beat the hell out of a person to make him give up what he knew.”

A Witness Emerges

But then there was a sudden breakthrough in the form of inmate Hezekiah Brown, a serial rapist with a life sentence. When he was first questioned, he said he didn’t know anything. But a short time later, prison officials reported that Brown witnessed the crime.

Brown testified that he was alone in the dorm that morning, making coffee for Miller. He said the four men burst in, grabbed Miller and began stabbing him furiously.

Woodfox and Wallace were convicted by all white juries in less than two hours. Chester Jackson took a deal for a lesser charge and testified for the state. Gilbert Montegut was found guilty of only a minor charge after an officer provided an alibi. Jackson and Montegut have both since died.

“Hezekiah Brown was a very good witness,” says Anne Butler, who heard him testify. “And he saw what he saw.”

Butler wasn’t there when Woodfox and Wallace were first convicted in the early 1970s. But in the 1990s, when Woodfox got a new trial, she was forewoman of the grand jury that re-indicted him.

“For somebody black in the prison at that time when it was so out of control to testify against Black Panthers who had other members out in the prison population, took a lot of courage on his part,” Butler said from the porch of her southern antebellum home, just down the road from the prison.

Influence And Favors

In 1996, shortly after Butler heard him testify, Brown died.

But there’s a lot more to this story. Butler wasn’t just an average citizen doing her civic duty on the local grand jury; she’s the former wife of Angola warden Murray Henderson, the man who led the Brent Miller investigation. She also wrote a book, which she says she passed around to fellow jurors, about how Woodfox and Wallace did it. Even she wonders what she was doing on that jury.

“I went to the [district attorney] and said, ‘You are going to put me off of this’ and he said no,” she said.

It’s one of a number of problems that seem to litter the trial history of Woodfox and Wallace. Take Hezekiah Brown. He repeatedly said he received no favors or promises in exchange for his testimony. But that’s not entirely true. A few years before Brown died, Henderson admitted he in fact promised him a pardon.

And sure enough, buried in the prison’s records, is letter after letter Henderson wrote to state officials asking for a pardon.

In one 1975 letter to a New Orleans judge, Henderson wrote, “It is my personal opinion that the state had an obligation to try to help this individual in some way.”

In 1986, Gov. Edwin Edwards set Brown free.

“I was on death row with Hezekiah Brown. Hezekiah Brown was a professional snitch,” remembers Billy Sinclair, who was sentenced to death for shooting a store clerk. His sentence was later amended to life with parole, and he is now free.

“[Brown] forever did everything he could to ingratiate himself to white authority,” Sinclair says. “All the other inmates knew that if you were going to do anything wrong, don’t let Hezekiah Brown see you.”

Even the deputy warden at the time didn’t think too highly of him. Hilton Butler wouldn’t talk to NPR about the murder or Brown. But, in a taped conversation with Anne Butler for her book, he says you could make Brown say anything you wanted him to say.

“Hezekiah was one you could put words into his mouth,” Hilton Butler told Anne Butler. (The two are not related.)

Sinclair says that’s what he remembers about Brown, too.

“I know that Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox and Chester Jackson and Gilbert Montegut did not kill Brent Miller in front of Hezekiah Brown and let him live,” Sinclair said. “It is no way in the world they would put themselves in jeopardy of killing a freeman in the presence of the most notorious snitch in the entire prison complex. That is not going to happen.”

Sinclair and several other inmates who were there at the time say there was a feeling that prison officials grabbed the wrong men.

An Incinerating Story

Months after the crime, the state found four other witnesses, inmates who said they saw one, two or all four men running from the Pine 1 dormitory – though oddly none of the witnesses saw each other. One of the four was legally blind. One was heavily medicated at the time. And the other two have recanted. One of those, Howard Baker, said he made the story up because prison officials told him they’d help him get out of Angola.

He originally testified that he watched Wallace run from the crime scene, enter the license tag plant and burn his bloody clothes in the incinerator. Thirty years later, when he changed his story, Baker said he could never believe in all those years no one ever picked up on the one huge problem with his statement: There is no incinerator in the license tag plant.

 Louisiana’s Angola prison is often referred to as “The Farm.” On one edge of its vast acres of corn and cotton are the prison’s isolation cells, where two inmates, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, spent the past 36 years in solitary confinement. On the other side, high on a hill is a far more comfortable place: the dog pen.

“This is the place to be, I mean look around,” says inmate Randolph Matthews, standing in front of a dozen barking dogs separated by cages. “There’s no fences, you live in a house, you have perks. If you didn’t know it, you would never know you were even in prison.”

Matthews and a few other inmates live in a beige house next to the dogs. This select group doesn’t have to deal with correctional officers or eating with other inmates. Rather than working in the fields, dog pen residents spend their days caring for the bloodhounds and attack dogs that chase down escapees.

It took Matthews almost two decades to work his way to the dog pen. It took Hezekiah Brown only a few days.

Brown was the state’s main witness in the case against Wallace and Woodfox, who were charged with the brutal murder of a young correctional officer named Brent Miller in 1972. Now all these years later, questions are being raised about the testimony on which the case stands.

Favors For Brown?

Brown testified he saw Wallace, Woodfox and two others stab Miller to death with a lawn mower blade. He also testified he received no favors for implicating Wallace and Woodfox.

But as it turns out, that’s not entirely true. The warden at the time, Murray Henderson, admitted years later that he promised Brown a pardon in exchange for his statement. Brown also got to live at the dog pen, and it seems there may have been a little something else.

According to old prison records reviewed by NPR, once a week for years, an officer would drive up to the dog pen and give Brown a carton of cigarettes. At a time when inmates would pay another inmate a pack of cigarettes to stab someone, former prisoners say a whole carton could get you a lot.

Henderson’s deputy, Lloyd Hoyle, says he had no idea Henderson was supplying Brown with a carton a week.

“I’m his deputy warden and that’s the first time I ever heard that,” Hoyle, 81, says, sitting on the couch in his living room just a few miles from Angola. “If Murray would have told me, ‘Hey I want you to give this inmate a cartoon of cigarettes,’ I would have said, ‘You can shove it.’ I’m not giving no convict no carton of cigarettes. Forget it.”

Hoyle pauses for a minute and then says, “I never used informants, because they always wanted something. I always felt if they’re going to give it to you, they should give it because you’ve treated them appropriately.”

A ‘Vulnerable Time’ In Louisiana

So it comes down to this: Did Brown, the man almost solely responsible for the conviction of two people, make up the entire story to help himself out? Louisiana’s Attorney General James Buddy Caldwell says absolutely not.

Caldwell says he believes Brown, and more importantly, so did the justice system.

“Two grand juries, two Louisiana juries, the Louisiana Supreme Court, the Louisiana appellate court system apparently believed Hezekiah Brown,” Caldwell says. “That’s what the system is about.”

Caldwell says far from getting favors, Brown put his own life at stake by coming forward and standing up to political radicals. (Wallace and Woodfox were members of the Black Panthers.) He says Brown was sent to the dog pen for his own safety.

“This is the murder of a prison guard at a very vulnerable time in the state of Louisiana,” he says.

Life In Solitary

Wallace has been appealing his case in state court. But a few months ago, Woodfox’s case was examined by a federal magistrate. Under that scrutiny, prison officials moved the two out of solitary and into a maximum-security wing of the prison. It’s possible for NPR to interview the inmates by phone, but Angola officials say if they knew such an interview took place, the men would be returned to solitary confinement.

Woodfox and Wallace spent 23 hours a day in a windowless concrete cell that contained only a cement bed, table and single light. Over the years, they learned to pass the time. Woodfox has read every page of every law book at Angola. Wallace perfected the art of making flowers out of paper; it can take up to a whole day just to make one bunch.

And on the outside, many officials, like former deputy warden Hoyle feel justice was done.

“I have no doubt that they’re guilty. Period,” he says. “Believe me they were on that yard and they killed that boy. If it was your son or your husband, how would you feel?”

When asked how she feels, Brent Miller’s widow, Leontine Verrett said, “very, very angry.”

“All these years, I believed that these men did it, I believed it,” she says. “Why would the state lie? But now I’m finding out that maybe these men did not do this. It’s very frustrating.”

Who Else Could Have Killed Miller?

One former inmate at the time, Billy Wayne Sinclair, thinks they didn’t do it either. He says an inmate named Irvin Breaux, whose nickname was “Life,” told him he killed Miller.

Sinclair and other inmates say Breaux was involved with the inmates who firebombed a guard shack the day before Miller’s murder. Buried in FBI reports is a note that a group calling themselves the The VanGuard Army took credit for the bombing and promised more attacks.

Sinclair says Breaux told him Miller walked in on him and other inmates plotting an attack. They panicked and killed him.

“I [knew] Life personally,” Sinclair says. “He had no reason to lie to me. He had no reason to try to impress me or make himself out to be some dangerous person. It was well known he was one of the most dangerous inmates at the prison.”

Breaux, like so many others involved in this case, is dead. But one man is still alive. His name is Colonel Nyati Bolt. Bolt lives off the grid – no phone, barely an address. It took four inmates and an old post office box to find him.

Another Witness?

Bolt is standing in his vegetable garden behind a small trailer. At first, he isn’t sure he wants to talk about Wallace and Woodfox. He says he barely knew them in 1972 and talking about them never brought him anything but trouble. But after a while, he agrees to tell the story again, just like he did 36 years ago.

“Albert was with me,” he says intently. “We walked from the dormitory straight on up to the chow hall.”

Bolt says he was with Woodfox at the dining hall when Miller was murdered, and he says he told that to prison officials. The response was swift. Officers transferred him to solitary confinement.

“[The officers] said, Colonel, we’re transferring you to [solitary confinement],” Bolt recalls. “I said for what? He said, didn’t you have something to do with this thing down here? I said, you got to be out of your mind.”

But the officers moved him that day to isolation.

“Next thing I knew, I never saw daylight since,” Bolt says shaking his head. “After that I never saw the walk no more.”

Bolt never saw the prison walk, the yard, the grass, the stars. He testified at Woodfox’s trail, which seemed only to seal his fate. For the next 20 years, he was kept in isolation in a windowless concrete cell. But he never changed his story.

In 1992, Bolt was released. By the time Woodfox’s second trial came around, he had disappeared.

On his arms, as Bolt leans over a tomato plant, you can see old green tattoos from another life. He says it’s hard for him to talk about all those years he spent alone. But he says he would do it all the same, if he could do it over.

“When I made my statement, I made it honest, I made it out of my heart,” Bolt says. “They can say whatever they want to say because that’s the way it went. And I can’t cut it any other way than that.”

But whether you believe Bolt or Sinclair or Brown, there is one more piece of evidence. Next to Miller’s body was a single bloody fingerprint. It doesn’t match Wallace, Woodfox or the other two men originally charged with the crime (who have since died).

The print doesn’t match any of the officers or the inmates who moved the body. But deep in a drawer in an office at Angola there are identification cards bearing the fingerprints of every inmate housed at the prison in 1972.

Louisiana’s attorney general Buddy Caldwell says the state will never test the print.

“A fingerprint can come from anywhere,” Caldwell explains. “We’re not going to be fooled by that.”

‘The Most Dangerous Person On The Planet’

Caldwell says he’s so sure Woodfox and Wallace are guilty, he will fight this case all the way to the Supreme Court. And he may have to. A federal judge recently overturned Woodfox’s conviction, saying he had ineffective lawyers. He told Caldwell: Release him or retry him.

Caldwell is appealing, but in the meantime, a judge could grant Woodfox bail, possibly within the next two weeks.

“This is a very dangerous person,” Caldwell says. “This is the most dangerous person on the planet.”

That’s the same reason prison officials give for keeping the two men in solitary for 36 years.

As you leave Angola, you can see the dormitories, the officers in their guard shacks, the men bent over in the cotton fields. It’s the same as it looked 40 years ago, and 100 years ago.

At the last guard post, there is an inscription. It’s a Bible verse, Philippians 3:12. It says we can’t change the past; we can only press on to the future. But the past is as much a part of this place as it ever was.

Herman Wallace