It has been my experience that because of institutional and individual racism

Chapter 49
Forty Years
April 17, 2012, marked 40 years since Herman and I were first put in CCR.
Our support committee and Amnesty International held our annual
anniversary protest against solitary confinement; this year it was on the steps
of the state capitol. Under a banner that read 
SOLITARY IS TORTURE
, statements
from me and Herman were read aloud, and several others spoke. “For me this
day is bittersweet,” King said, “Bitter with a deep sadness that we have to
mark this day, but sweet, seeing our years of effort and struggle culminating
in this day. The tide is changing and the time for change is now. We have the
wind at our back and we need to keep on moving.” “To be honest,” I had
written, “I am not sure what damage has been done to me, but I do know that
the feeling of pain allows me to know that I am alive. If I dwelled on the pain
I have endured and stopped to think about how 40 years locked in a cage 23
hours a day has affected me, it would give insanity the victory it has sought
for 40 years.”
Amnesty campaigners reached out to Governor Bobby Jindal to try to get
a meeting. They wanted to hand him a petition demanding that Herman and I
be released from solitary confinement; it had been signed by more than
67,000 people in 125 countries around the world. The governor refused to
meet with Amnesty officials and King, referring them to the Louisiana
Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Secretary James M. Le Blanc
denied that conditions in lockdown 23 hours a day were inhumane and said
Herman and I were kept in CCR because we were a danger to prison
employees, other inmates, and visitors.
On May 13, 2012, the New Orleans
Times-Picayune 
reported that
Louisiana was the “prison capital of the world,” incarcerating more of its
people, per capita, than any other state. “First among Americans means first
in the world,” said staff writer Cindy Chang. “Louisiana’s incarceration rate

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is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.” Chang
reported that, at the time of the article, 1 in 86 adults in Louisiana was
incarcerated, nearly double the national average. Among black men from
New Orleans, 1 in 14 was behind bars. She reported on Louisiana’s harsh
sentencing laws: “In Louisiana, a two-time car burglar can get 24 years
without parole. A trio of drug convictions can be enough to land you at the
Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for the rest of your life.” The “hidden
engine behind the state’s well-oiled prison machine” she reported, “is cold,
hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities,
which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182
million industry will go bankrupt.” Later that month, three days before I was
to attend an evidentiary hearing in Baton Rouge regarding my habeas
petition, Amnesty International started a new online petition, asking
Secretary Le Blanc, who said I was a danger to myself and others, “Where is
the evidence?” “On April 17, 2012, you issued a statement that Albert
Woodfox and Herman Wallace are held separately from other prisoners to
protect prison employees, other inmates and visitors,” the petition read.
“Where is the evidence to back up this statement? Records show that neither
man has committed any serious disciplinary infraction for decades. Prison
mental health records indicate that the men pose no threat to themselves or to
others. . . . Where is the evidence?” Around 1,000 people who signed the
petition also emailed Secretary Le Blanc directly, calling on him to produce
evidence backing up his assertion that I was a danger to prison employees,
other inmates, and visitors.
My evidentiary hearing took place at the Federal District Courthouse in
downtown Baton Rouge. During the hearing I was held at the Elayn Hunt
Correctional Center, where Herman was, but I wouldn’t see him there. When
I arrived I was immediately placed in the dungeon. I protested, pointing out I
had no recent disciplinary reports in my record and that I never saw the
reclass board or disciplinary court at Hunt. I was told the decision came from
“higher up.” They confiscated my socks and never gave me my toiletries or
the clothes I brought from Wade. The other prisoners on the tier were loud,
screaming, moaning, talking to themselves day and night—it was their way
of dealing with the pressure. My lawyers tried to intervene, but prison
officials would not move me from the dungeon. I didn’t get any sleep. In the
morning, I would be in court.
The stakes couldn’t have been higher at this evidentiary hearing. My life

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was on the line. Because of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act, prisoners submitting habeas petitions are only allowed to raise issues
that had been originally preserved in their postconviction relief application,
and only those issues that had not previously been ruled on. I had two claims
left by the time I got to Judge James Brady in federal court in 2006. Judge
Brady had already ruled on one of my two claims: in 2008 he overturned my
conviction on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. The Fifth
Circuit reversed that. Now I was before Judge Brady on my last claim: that
my 1993 indictment by a West Feliciana Parish grand jury was tainted by
discrimination because the judge, who handpicked the grand jury foreperson,
almost exclusively selected white forepersons in a parish that was over 40
percent black. George Kendall, Sam Spital, Corrine Irish, and Carine
Williams had done a mountain of research to prepare for this hearing, to
prove the consistent underrepresentation of African Americans serving as
grand jury forepersons in the parish and to debunk the state’s case, which was
that the judge’s selections had been “race neutral.”
The hearing lasted three days, May 29–31, 2012. Each day before leaving
my cell I asked for my socks to wear under the restraints and my request was
denied. Without socks my ankles were cut and bruised. In the courtroom, the
state spared no expense in its attempt to defeat our claim, trying to prove the
West Feliciana judge’s selection of grand jury forepersons did not
discriminate against blacks, presenting witness after witness who testified
that objective factors, like education, supposedly made the appointments of
the grand jury forepersons in West Feliciana Parish “neutral,” even if they
were handpicked by the judges. George’s team refuted that, identifying
African Americans on the panel of prospective grand jurors and showing that
their employment and education were comparable to the qualifications of the
white forepersons actually selected.
At the end of the hearing, the matter was in Judge Brady’s hands. If he
agreed with us, I would get a new trial. If he agreed with the state, I wouldn’t.
Judge Brady asked each side to submit a final brief three weeks after the
transcript of the hearing was made available—which would take about
another three weeks—and submit a final rebuttal to those briefs 20 days after
that. In all it shouldn’t have taken longer than eight weeks to get everything
to the judge. The state dragged out the process, as usual, filing for extensions
before submitting briefs. We wouldn’t get a ruling for nine months.
When the hearing was over I expected to be transported back to Wade.

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Instead, I was kept in the dungeon at Hunt for nine more days. It was
excruciating. I wasn’t supposed to be in the dungeon, I hadn’t broken any
rules. Temperatures outside were in the 90s, and it was much hotter in the
cell. There was one fan for the tier. I had no phone privileges, no canteen, no
yard, no television, no ice, and no visits except with my lawyers. I wasn’t
allowed to call my brother. I was served food that was still frozen. I was only
allowed out of my cell 15 minutes a day for a shower. I had to wear leg irons
to the shower. I wasn’t moved back to Wade until my lawyers threatened
Hunt officials with contempt of court. (Later we sued Hunt officials for
ignoring all transfer, classification, and disciplinary procedures required to
justify putting me in the dungeon while I was there to attend my hearing. My
friend New Orleans lawyer Emily Posner filed the suit, along with attorney
Sam Dalton; it ended up being folded into our civil suit against cruel and
unusual punishment.)
When I got back to Wade, hundreds of letters were waiting for me.
Amnesty had launched a “Write for Rights” campaign for me and Herman,
asking members to write to us. I sat on my bunk and opened the letters and
cards from people all over the world, and I was deeply touched to read their
words. Many had sent beautiful pictures of nature on the cards they picked
out for me.
Preparing for the evidentiary hearing had taken George and his team
months. Now that it was over, they could get back to focusing on our civil
case and, we hoped, get us out of solitary confinement for good. The judge
who’d been handling the case, Judge Ralph Tyson, had died in 2011, and our
civil case was, coincidentally, passed to Judge James Brady, the same judge
presiding over my habeas petition. Judge Tyson had been sitting on a number
of pretrial motions regarding our civil case for more than two years; without
rulings we couldn’t move forward. Judge Brady ruled on them within a few
weeks. One of those motions was related to an order issued back in February
2010 by Magistrate Judge Docia Dalby, granting my lawyers access to emails
exchanged by Angola warden Burl Cain and Attorney General Buddy
Caldwell’s office that proved they colluded to manufacture a reason that
would allow them to move me and Herman out of the CCR dorm and back
into individual CCR cells in 2008.
In October, King received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Anglia
Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. As always, he spoke of me and

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Herman in his remarks: “My evolution began in prison—in Angola State
Penitentiary, in Louisiana—in an 18,000-acre former slave plantation,” he
said. “My experience in a six-by-nine-foot cell for 29 years in solitary
confinement taught me the difference between legality and morality. It made
me realize that despite the fact that the 13th Amendment allegedly abolished
slavery, slavery was never abolished. I learned that a person could be actually
innocent of a crime but convicted legally, and that this person would be
designated a legal slave—as it was in 1864 where the Constitution decreed
that if you were black being a slave was your lot. Modern-day slavery is alive
and well in America but it has taken on a different form—from the plantation
to the prison. . . . A case in point are my two comrades—Albert Woodfox and
Herman Wallace who are now serving their 40th year in solitary confinement
—and tens and thousands of others who have also been unjustly convicted
but remain in prison in America in slavery.”
Four months later, on February 26, 2013, U.S. District Court Judge James
Brady overturned my conviction again, this time on the issue of racial
discrimination in the selection of the grand jury foreperson. Judge Brady saw
through all the bullshit “science” state prosecutors spent a fortune creating in
their attempt to prove there was no racial discrimination in the selection of
the foreperson for my 1993 West Feliciana grand jury. I would get a new
trial. I was ecstatic. Judge Brady ruled in his 34-page decision that the state
had failed to show that “objective, race-neutral criteria”—such as education
and employment—were used in the selection process. Brady agreed that the
West Feliciana Parish judge who picked grand jury foremen favored the
appointment of white people for that role. He also again granted a motion for
my release on bail pending my appeal. The state immediately appealed to the
Fifth Circuit, asking it to overturn Brady’s ruling and for a stay of Judge
Brady’s order to release me on bail, because, the state claimed, I was “a
danger to the public and a flight risk.” The state argued that a stay would not
substantially injure me, because “he has already been incarcerated for several
decades.”
Thirty thousand people signed an online Amnesty International petition
calling for my immediate release after Judge Brady’s ruling. In response,
Attorney General Buddy Caldwell played his “rape card” again, replying to
these petitioners with the same rape accusations he had made against me in
2008. He wrote that I was guilty of killing Brent Miller, saying, “There are no

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flaws in [the] evidence” that convicted me and Herman, and that we were
never held in solitary confinement. “Contrary to popular lore,” he wrote,
“Woodfox and Wallace have never been held in solitary confinement while in
the Louisiana penal system. . . . They have always been able to communicate
freely with other inmates and prison staff as frequently as they want. They
have televisions on the tiers, which they watch through their cell doors. In
their cell, they can have radios and headsets, reading and writing materials,
stamps, newspapers, magazines and books. . . . They can exercise in the hall,
talk on the phone, shower and visit with the other 10 to 14 inmates on the
tier. At least three times per week, they can go outside on the yard and
exercise and enjoy the sun if they want.”
In the following weeks retired Louisiana Supreme Court chief justice
Pascal Calogero Jr., the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Funds of
New York and of New Orleans, and the nonprofit organization the Promise of
Justice Initiative filed “friends of the court” briefs in support of a new trial.
Former chief justice Calogero wrote about how grand jury forepersons can
exert influence over other grand jurors. “Although the state has come a long
way in eradicating racial discrimination throughout the grand jury foreperson
selection process, we must not turn our back on those convictions that were
tainted by the old system.” I disagreed that the state had “come a long way in
eradicating racial discrimination” in any part of the judicial system, and I still
believe that racial discrimination and gender discrimination are very
prevalent in today’s judicial system in America, but I was extremely grateful
for Calogero’s support.
One afternoon in May I was getting ready to go on the yard at Wade when
the guard who came to escort me said he had to strip-search me. I told him it
was against Department of Corrections regulations to strip-search prisoners
housed in maximum-security lockdown unless there was probable cause. I
knew this by heart, because it was a ruling that came down when I sued the
state on this issue back in 1978. “Going on the yard isn’t probable cause,” I
said. He told me he was obeying orders from the colonel; it was a new rule at
Wade. “I have to strip-search you,” he repeated. I handed him my jumpsuit,
my socks, and my tennis shoes. He went through them and handed everything
back. He told me to drop my drawers. “Raise your arms, open your mouth,
raise your tongue, raise your genitals, turn around, bend over, spread your
cheeks.”

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I wrote to Warden Goodwin and told him the strip searches were
unconstitutional, and about the 1978 19th Judicial District ruling on the
lawsuit I filed, which stated prisoners could only be strip-searched under
certain conditions. I asked him to stop the unlawful strip searches. I sent
copies to my lawyers. I never heard back from him.
I talked to the men on my tier, telling them we didn’t have to accept the
strip searches, because the prison was breaking the law. I asked them to join
me in fighting the strip searches; none of them wanted to get involved.
Nobody stood with me. My lawyers pleaded with me not to physically resist
the strip searches. “We’ll take it to court,” they said. Some sergeants and
guards didn’t do the strip searches; they didn’t have the taste for it. Others
acted as if it was their greatest pleasure to humiliate somebody. There were
days when I was strip-searched as many six times, before and after I left my
cell, even when I was only leaving my cell to walk to the guard booth—
escorted and always within sight of at least one guard—to take a phone call
from my lawyer. Having to bend over so a security officer can look at your
anus gives you a terrible sense of being violated. It’s one of the most
humiliating things that can be done to you. Even the courts recognized this.
As the ruling on my original suit stated, “Visual body cavity searches were a
humiliating procedure” and “should only be used rarely.” Some days I didn’t
leave my cell at all, to avoid being strip-searched.
That summer George Kendall asked me and Herman to meet with
psychologist Craig Haney again so that Haney could finish his report on us,
which would be used by our defense for our civil trial to show the impact of
solitary confinement on us. I told him that at times I felt empty. I was losing
interest in things. I said, “You don’t know the horrors of fighting for your
sanity.” The pressure of being locked in the cell required all of my mental,
emotional, and physical will to survive.

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