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

Garraway:
Didn’t you also tell him [Brown] that if he gave you the
information and proceeded to testify for the State, that you would also
promise to support a pardon application for him?
Henderson:
Yeah . . .
Garraway:
And did you do that?
Henderson:
I wrote letters for him.
Had Herman’s jury known about that deal, Morgan wrote, “it could have
seriously affected the jury’s determination of Brown’s credibility.” She
continued, “Such a promise, it is fair to say, could have even influenced him
to lie if he was so inclined. We should not overlook the fact that Mr. Brown
was not just any bystander but had served and was serving time for attempted
aggravated rape and aggravated rape, respectively. He was not a newcomer to
the prison system or a young naïve man. Warden Henderson’s promise was
made to him before he testified at trial.” Herman was elated. We all were. But
the commissioner’s report was merely a recommendation, not a final ruling.
Judge Michael Erwin of the 19th Judicial District still had to rule.

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Now that I had exhausted all avenues in state court I could appeal my
conviction in federal court. Attorney Chris Aberle, who won a new trial for
King in 2000, wrote my petition for habeas corpus and we filed it on October
11, 2006. The Latin term 
habeas corpus
means “produce the body.” Prior to
President Bill Clinton’s signing of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act, which weakened habeas corpus for everybody, it had been
referred to as the “Great Writ”—the legal procedure that prevented the
government from holding a person indefinitely without showing cause. In my
habeas petition we claimed that (i) prosecutors knowingly presented perjured
testimony and false evidence at my 1998 trial; (ii) they suppressed
exculpatory evidence, including proof that witnesses were lying and evidence
of my innocence; (iii) they violated the Confrontation Clause of the
Constitution by using and emphasizing out-of-court statements of Chester
Jackson; and (iv) racial discrimination tainted the selection of the foreperson
of the grand jury that indicted me. This federal habeas petition was assigned
to Judge James Brady in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of
Louisiana.
The next year, the efforts of George Kendall’s team in our civil case
against cruel and unusual punishment began to pay off. In August 2007, U.S.
Magistrate Judge Docia Dalby ruled that being locked down at the Louisiana
State Penitentiary for three decades could constitute cruel and unusual
punishment. In her 50-page decision Dalby wrote: “These men, now in their
60s, do not and have not for some time, presented a threat to the ‘safety,
security and good order of the facility.’” She noted that officials cited only
the “original reason for lockdown” as the reason we were being held in CCR,
even though, as she pointed out, the prison changed its policy in 1996 and
eliminated that as a justification for prolonged confinement. “By 1999,”
Judge Dalby wrote, “these plaintiffs had been in extended lockdown more
than anyone in Angola’s history, and more than any other living prisoner in
the entire United States.”
 
Judge Dalby stated that prison officials should have
known that “being housed in isolation in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day for
over three decades results in serious deprivations of basic human needs.” She
noted that lockdown may pass constitutional scrutiny if imposed for short
periods of time, but any reasonable officer would know that solitary
confinement may violate the Constitution when imposed for going on three
decades. Not only had the courts “consistently noted the severity and terrible
deprivation associated with such confinement,” wrote Judge Dalby, “it has

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long been the subject of research, and even of televisions and movies. . . . It is
also a matter of common sense that three decades of extreme isolation and
enforced inactivity in a space smaller than a typical walk-in closet present the
antithesis of what is necessary to meet basic human needs. With each passing
day,” she wrote, “its effects are exponentially increased, just as surely as a
single drop of water repeated endlessly will eventually bore through the
hardest of stones.”
This decision was a huge victory. It didn’t mean that we had won, but
now we would be allowed to litigate the question of whether long-term
solitary confinement violated the Constitution under the circumstances of our
case.
Then, we got devastating news. On September 10, 2007, Anita Roddick died
suddenly of a brain aneurysm. I felt hollowed out. Anita, full of life. Anita
wanted to transform the world. Her death was so unexpected. I couldn’t get
my bearings. She was my friend. King flew to London and spoke at Anita’s
memorial service. Herman and I sent statements that were read aloud,
expressing our sadness and love. Anita’s husband, Gordon, came to visit us.
He was on Herman’s visitors list and coordinated to arrive with someone on
my list so Herman and I would both be called out to the visiting room at the
same time. He wanted to talk to both of us. He told us he would fulfill
Anita’s dream for our freedom and pledged his continued support to the A3.
We were touched that in his grief he remembered us and took the time to see
us. Gordon and Anita’s daughter, Samantha, wrote to me, asking to be put on
my visitors list so she could visit me in place of her mom.
Before she passed away, Anita had told me that great progress was going
to be made in our case. After she died, many of her friends and associates,
who became aware of Anita’s work for the A3 at her memorial service,
stepped forward to help make that happen. Gordon put them in touch with
our existing committee through Marina Drummer and they became a de facto
advisory board. Organizer Chuck Blitz, a friend of Gordon’s, set up a weekly
call on Fridays, bringing everyone together to talk about A3 support
strategies. That call would take place every week for the next eight years.
Chuck and members of the advisory board worked with Marina to find a part-
time coordinator. They hired Tory Pegram, the former director of
development and public education for the ACLU of Louisiana, to fill that
role.

---

We now had an enhanced support committee. We had our core “on-the-
ground” grassroots supporters, some of whom had been with us for almost 10
years—since my trial—activists who voluntarily managed communications,
raised funds, spoke at conferences, staged protests, wrote articles, painted
murals, did mailings about us; who visited us, wrote to us, put money in our
accounts, accepted our collect calls, called prison officials to ask about our
welfare, and sent us puzzles, magazines, and books. And we had this new
advisory board that became part of our committee, composed of Anita’s and
Gordon’s friends, who were prominent social justice lawyers and experts;
social entrepreneurs and business leaders; architects of national political
campaigns; national NGO leaders; retired judges; communications
professionals; filmmakers and actors, all of whom were no less passionate but
who operated in a different stratosphere, through connections in politics and
media. The goals of our committee were unchanged: to use our stories to
spread the word about the horrors of solitary confinement in America, to get
us out of solitary confinement and into the general prison population, and to
free us.
I put Tory on my visitors list and she visited twice a month for a year,
updating me and Herman on A3 meetings, King’s schedule of events, press
reports about us, and the ins and outs of her work for what had now become
the International Coalition to Support the Angola 3. It would be impossible to
capture it all.
To truly represent all the hours that each person on our support committee
and advisory board spent toward freeing us, all the ideas they had, actions
they took, sacrifices made, the time and money spent, the frustrations
endured, the details of each victory large or small, the pain of each loss—to
name all that was done on our behalf would take another book.
Herman and I made a conscious decision to give our supporters a great
deal of autonomy. We could not micromanage our committee, the board, or
the individual activists who worked on our behalf because of the limitations
of being in prison. All our mail was read, our phone calls were recorded, the
visiting rooms were bugged. We couldn’t have meetings. Our stance to our
supporters was: if you act with integrity, we have your back.
We had a huge legal team, which was completely separate from the
support committee, and sometimes at odds with the committee, because often
the legal team wanted less exposure, less activism. Sometimes our supporters
disagreed with legal strategies. We never asked our legal team to change

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strategies based on pressures from our supporters. We never asked our
support committee to tone down actions that drew attention to our case. We
trusted that each group, separately, knew what it was doing, and we wanted
to make sure that nobody was ever prevented from contributing what he or
she did best.
On October 9, 2007, almost a full year after Commissioner Rachel
Morgan issued her recommendation to overturn Herman’s conviction, Judge
Michael Erwin of the 19th Judicial District Court denied Herman’s claim that
the state had withheld exculpatory evidence that Hezekiah Brown was paid
for his testimony before Herman’s 1974 trial. It was the first time in the
history of the state, to my knowledge, that a judge did not accept a
commissioner’s recommendation. Judge Erwin gave his response to the
commissioner’s 27-page recommendation on one page, in one sentence, with
no analysis: “This court does not agree with the Commissioner’s
recommendation that a valid Brady claim exists,” he wrote. Herman appealed
to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

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