For virtually all of the past forty-three years, Albert Woodfox, a sixty-eight-year-old man in poor health, has been in solitary confinement in a six-by-nine-foot cell. He’s allowed out of his cell for an hour each day, to walk his cellblock, shower, or exercise in the yard, while still remaining in isolation. This treatment would be cruel and inhumane regardless of the crime for which Woodfox was convicted. But Woodfox has never received a valid conviction for the crime for which he has been imprisoned.
Woodfox was serving time for armed robbery in the notoriously violent Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola, in 1972, when a prison guard named Brent Miller was stabbed to death. Woodfox and a fellow-prisoner, Herman Wallace, were accused of Miller’s murder, despite the fact that no physical evidence linked them to the crime and that both men consistently maintained their innocence. They claimed they were framed by the prison authorities because of their membership in the Black Panther Party and their outspoken criticism of prison conditions. Louisiana juries convicted Woodfox in the early seventies and again in the late nineties, but both convictions were thrown out for racial discrimination in grand-jury selection. Meanwhile, the appeals process dragged on, and Woodfox remained in solitary confinement for decades. (Wallace was also held in solitary confinement until his conviction was overturned, also on grand-jury-discrimination grounds, in 2013, just a few days before his death.)
[For more of this story, written by David Cole, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...solitary-confinement]
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