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

Party. I told him I worried about becoming desensitized. “There is a part of
me,” I said, “that is gone, that has been taken—my soul. I had to sacrifice that
part in order to survive. It was the price of being able to make it with my
principles intact.”
Herman expressed similar feelings about how difficult it was to deal with
emotions, telling Haney, “I stay away from things, emotional things that I
skillfully put aside. I feel like there is a dam of emotions, feelings, and tears
that could burst forth. I must be able to hold back. It’s a reflex, the way we
function in here, it is a survival mechanism. You have to repress and deny
your feelings. You worry about what would happen if you release your
feelings and your tears. . . . You can’t break down, you can’t moan out loud
—if I don’t [keep control] I don’t know what will happen to me. I’ve seen too
many guys let their emotions come loose and they’ve never returned from it.

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I fight every day against that.”
In his report Haney wrote, “All three men have relied on a belief system
that has helped to keep them strong in the face of severe deprivations. They
see themselves as representing something larger than themselves—as leaders
who have stood up in the name of improving the prison system at Angola—
and they do not want to succumb, or even give any indication that they might
be weakening, out of concern for what this would mean to others who look to
them for guidance, strength and example. Thus, it is especially difficult for
them to admit their own vulnerability to the harsh conditions around them.”

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Chapter 46
2008
On January 14, 2008, James “Buddy” Caldwell, an Elvis impersonator and
the former district attorney for the Sixth Judicial District in Louisiana, was
sworn in as the new attorney general for the state of Louisiana. One of his
first moves was to hire the prosecutor at my 1973 trial, John Sinquefield—
Caldwell’s childhood friend—to be “first assistant,” the number two position
in the office. Unsurprisingly, we were on Caldwell’s radar right away. There
was the Sinquefield connection, and the fact that my case was in the attorney
general’s office; it had been transferred there before my 1998 trial. Also,
George Kendall’s team was pressing ahead with our civil lawsuit, filing
motions and deposing dozens of witnesses, including current and former
Angola officials. Our support committee had done a tremendous job
challenging what they considered to be the lies and misrepresentations of the
state’s case against us. The pressure was on the state to respond, and Buddy
Caldwell saw an opportunity to make a name for himself. It wasn’t long
before he would launch a smear campaign against me.
But first, I got news that Brent Miller’s widow, Leontine “Teenie”
Rogers, had written a letter supporting me and Herman, asking the state to
admit its mistakes in the case, reopen the case, and find the real killers of her
husband. Rogers had learned our side of the story a few years before, from an
investigator, Billie Mizell, who was initially asked by our attorneys to look
into our case. When I first heard that Billie wanted to talk to Brent Miller’s
widow I wasn’t optimistic. Teenie Rogers was 17 years old when her
husband was killed. She grew up hearing the story that “racist” Black
Panthers killed her husband because he was white. She would later say she
didn’t know why she let Billie into her house on that first visit. But she
thought of Brent, the “love of her life,” every day. Maybe his murder always
felt unresolved for her. In the year after Miller’s death, Rogers sought

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damages from the state since her husband had lost his life at his workplace.
The state responded by maligning Miller, saying it was his fault he got killed
because he should have been in the guard booth, not in a prisoner dorm.
Rogers’s case was dismissed and she received just $45 a week in workmen’s
compensation for a limited period of time.
Teenie Rogers told Billie Mizell on that first visit that she didn’t go to my
trial, because it was too painful, but she’d always believed what she had been
told: that bloody fingerprints left at the scene of Brent’s murder and other
evidence proved they had the murderers who killed Brent. Over a series of
visits with Rogers, Billie laid out the evidence that pointed to Herman’s and
my innocence—the bloody fingerprint that didn’t match us and was never
tested against the prisoners who lived on the walk, the bloody tennis shoes
that were never given to the crime lab or brought up at our trials, all the
contradictory testimony that pointed to lying “witnesses.” In between Billie’s
visits, Rogers would later say, she did her own investigation, including
talking to former Angola guards. She came to believe that a terrible
miscarriage of justice had taken place. She wrote to Governor Bobby Jindal,
asking him to find out who killed her husband.
In January 2008, our stories were taken to Washington, DC. King, Tory
Pegram, Chuck Blitz, Gordon Roddick, and several other members of our
advisory board, including Barry Scheck, the cofounder of the Innocence
Project; Denny LeBoeuf, a Louisiana death penalty defense attorney who was
directing the ACLU’s efforts in Guantánamo at the time; Joan Claybrook, the
founding executive director of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen; Ira Glasser, the
former executive director of the ACLU’s national office; Ira Arlook of
Fenton Communications; Webb Hubbell, President Bill Clinton’s associate
attorney general and former chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court; the
actor and anti–death penalty activist Mike Farrell; and Gordon’s close friend
and colleague Ben Cohen from Ben & Jerry’s, met with as many legislators
and other potential national advocates as they could.
At one of these meetings Louisiana state representative Cedric Richmond
(Orleans Parish), who was chair of the Louisiana House Judiciary
Committee, Teenie Rogers, Billie Mizell, Tory, and King met with Rep. John
Conyers, who was head of the federal House Judiciary Committee at the time
and had assembled some of his colleagues. Our case was laid out. Then Billie
introduced Teenie, who read aloud the letter she wrote to Governor Jindal.

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Brent and I both grew up on what everyone calls “The B-Line,” which is a neighborhood behind
the gate of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. As kids, we knew that Angola was a prison
and a farm—but we just called it “home.” Angola is where we lived, it is where we went to
church, it is where we went fishing and hiking and played ball with our friends, and it is where
Brent and I said our wedding vows. Not a day has passed in the last 36 years that I have not
thought of Brent and the love we shared and the life we could have had. April 17, 1972 still feels
like yesterday to me. I dropped Brent off that morning where he clocked in for duty and then I
drove to beauty school in Baton Rouge. A few hours later, my sister showed up to tell me that
Brent was dead. My brother, who was also a guard at Angola and on duty that day, had to see
Brent’s body—he never returned to work after that. My father also quit his job and we all left
Angola. My husband, and my home, were taken from me by the men who stabbed Brent 32 times.
For over three decades, I believed those men were Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace. In
1972, I wanted both of them dead and would have killed them with my own hands if I could have.
Even though I was too devastated to read the newspapers or attend the trials, I had no reason to
doubt that the men who had been charged were the men who murdered my husband. Everyone on
the B-Line had heard that a bloody fingerprint had been found at the crime scene, and when a
fingerprint is discovered inside a prison, it does not take much effort to find out who left it there—
the population is captive and each inmate has a set of fingerprints already on file with the state. I
assumed that a fingerprint left in my husband’s blood provided the administration with an open
and shut case against his killers. I had also heard that a bloody tennis shoe and a bloody knife had
been found and that Woodfox and Wallace themselves had blood on their clothes so, for 33 years,
I never doubted that the right men were behind bars. . . . What I found out was that there was a lot
I did not know.
Since that day . . . I have learned that the bloody fingerprint found at the crime scene did not
match Woodfox or Wallace. I was even more shocked to find out that no real attempt was made to
find out who the fingerprint did belong to, which should have been a very simple thing to do. I
have learned that the bloody tennis shoe never made it to the crime lab. I have learned that the
knife could not be tied to Brent’s death at all. I have learned that the clothes that the state claimed
belonged to Albert Woodfox were missing from the crime lab for a week and only had a few tiny
specks of what might have been blood. Since my husband was stabbed 32 times, that seems a bit
unbelievable to me. I have learned that the entire case against Wallace and Woodfox came down
to inmate testimony—because NO physical evidence could tie them to the crime—and yet more
inmates testified on their behalf than testified against them. I have learned that the state’s
witnesses received rewards ranging from transfers to pardons to cigarettes and most of them have
now admitted that they lied. I have learned that there was such a rush to judgement that a man
named Robert King was also taken to solitary confinement and eventually told he was there under
investigation for Brent’s murder. He was left in solitary for 29 years, even though he could not
possibly have committed the killing since he did not even arrive to Angola until days after Brent
was murdered. I have recently met Mr. King, who is a gentle and kind man and is somehow not
bitter about what was done to him.
I do not know what it is like to spend three decades in solitary for something I did not do, but I
do know what it is like to lose a loved one to a senseless murder. Every time another newspaper
article or TV news story runs and every time a reporter calls me, I have to relive April 17, 1972 all
over again. I do not know if you have ever lost someone you love to such a brutal crime, but I can
tell you that it changes you—the grief overwhelms you, the “what ifs” haunt you. And now I have
to live with another tragedy—the two innocent men, who have already spent 36 years in solitary
confinement, who remain in prison for a crime that they did not commit. This is a tragedy that the
state of Louisiana seems willing to live with. I am not. I hope you aren’t either. . . . After over 36
years, there can be no excuse to deny justice for one more day. It is time for the state of Louisiana
to finally compare the bloody prints found at the crime scene to every inmate who was

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incarcerated at Angola on the date of Brent’s murder and find out who left his fingerprint on the
wall of that prison dormitory before he walked out and left Brent there to die. I believe the recent
promises to clean up the past corruption of Louisiana, so I am asking you to use the power of your
office and your personal commitment to justice to put an end to this. Brent Miller was an
employee of this state who was just doing his job. The state of Louisiana owes him justice.
After Rogers read her letter, nobody said anything. Some in the room
were crying. While our group was still in his office, Congressman Conyers,
who had described all black prisoners “political prisoners” at that New
Orleans prison conference back in 1972, wrote to Attorney General Michael
Mukasey, asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into our
cases. He wrote to FBI director Robert Mueller asking for any files on our
case. And he wrote to Warden Burl Cain, asking to visit me and Herman at
Angola, along with “other members of Congress and interested persons” he
planned to bring with him.
That same month, January 2008, Herman, King, and I were deposed
separately by the state’s lawyers in preparation for our civil trial. Louisiana’s
attorneys asked me if I had sufficient clothing and I told them I did because I
had family members and supporters who sent me money so I could buy
clothes. Indigent prisoners, on the other hand, would put in a request for
underwear and wait six months for a pair, I told them. They asked if we had
fans in the summer. Yes, we did; but when it’s over 100 degrees in the cell,
fans don’t help. They asked me if we were alleging anyone abused us in the
lawsuit. “Not physical abuse,” I said. “We’re claiming the fact that we’ve
been here in the cell so long constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.” Our
suit wasn’t about the beatings, the dungeon, or the abuse by inmate guards or
freemen that happened to us and all prisoners at Angola. It wasn’t about yard
time or blankets or medical care. Still, while deposing us, the state’s lawyers
repeatedly asked us questions trying to get us to say, one way or another, that
being locked down 23 hours a day in CCR wasn’t that bad. We had color
TVs, we had ventilation, we had mattresses. Repeatedly we told them our
complaint was not about having TVs. It was about how being locked down
for 23 hours a day was cruel and unusual punishment and a violation of our
constitutional rights. Our complaint was also that we were not given true
meaningful equal treatment compared with other prisoners because, while
dozens of other prisoners came and went in CCR, we weren’t able to get out.
We were denied our right to due process.
Louisiana’s lawyers also examined our disciplinary reports trying to find

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legitimate reasons that could justify locking us up for decades. But, in all our
time in Angola, we never got serious disciplinary write-ups. I was written up
for declaring myself an emergency when I had the rash around my waist in
the eighties. I was written up when I got sick on the Camp J work line and
requested an ambulance. I was written up for having a “spear” in my cell.
Brent Hicks was the lawyer for the state who questioned me about that
incident.