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

Chapter 47
Never Apart
Back in our CCR cells, we were still a problem for Buddy Caldwell.
Exposure about our case was growing. George Kendall told me and Herman
to prepare to be separated for good. Apparently, Caldwell had approached
Burl Cain and asked him to move me and Herman to separate prisons. We
heard that Cain agreed because, in part, the publicity about the A3 was
hurting the Angola brand. They moved Herman first, in March 2009, to the
Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, about 12 miles southeast of
Baton Rouge, creating a brand-new CCR there to house Herman (and adding
other prisoners to fill it).
Herman and I were used to being apart. Except for the nine months total
we’d spent together at Angola, in the dorm and in CCR, we had not lived
together. We stayed close by sharing books, photos, music, and constant
correspondence, passed back and forth over the years in the hands of
orderlies, trustees, and sometimes even prison guards. We gave each other
birthday bags filled with zuzus (snacks) and items from the prison store.
When one of us was on the yard the other would call down from the window
if he was out on his hour.
But the extraordinary, mysterious, and inexplicable success of our
friendship was based on something else. In different cells, on different tiers,
sometimes in different buildings, and now in different prisons, our keepers
could never come between us. Herman had my back. I had his. If I needed
him he was there. Not physically, but instantly. I’m not religious. I don’t
believe in God. But I believe in the human spirit and I believe human beings
have a greater capacity than we understand. Behind the pain, the betrayals,
the brutality, and the disappointments, Herman, King, and I existed
somewhere, unhurt and together. After we were moved to different prisons,
Hooks and I wrote to each other at least once a week, sometimes more. I

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adjusted. So did he. It’s what we did best.
Later that year, on October 9, 2009, the Louisiana Supreme Court
summarily denied Herman’s application for review. He would have to seek
relief in federal court. By now George Kendall and his team had taken over
Herman’s criminal case, as well as mine. George, Corrine Irish, Carine
Williams, and Sam Spital were already working on Herman’s first federal
appeal, his petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
There were six claims in the writ, including that the state failed to correct
false testimony it had presented against Herman, noting, for example, the
statement from Howard Baker recanting his 1974 testimony, admitting that
he lied when he said he saw blood on Herman and stating that it would have
been impossible for Herman, or anyone, to burn clothes at the tag plant
because there was no furnace there. The state also withheld impeachment
evidence and exculpatory information from Herman’s defense, failing to
disclose, for example, an April 20, 1972, statement given by an inmate
named Charles Evans. George said in the writ:
According to the statement, Evans lived in the Pine 2 dormitory, next door to Pine 1. Evans stated
that on April 17, 1972, he was awakened at 7:51 a.m. to see [a] “large group of people standing
between Pine 1 and Pine 2. I heard somebody in [the] crowd say that it was a free man that was
fighting. I saw an old man I know as ‘Hezekiah’ standing at the door of Pine 1.” Evans further
stated that he saw “a free man running toward Pine from Walnut dormitory.” Unfortunately, prison
officials failed to record any more details of Evans’ recollections. What is clear, however, is that
Charles Evans’ recollection of events on the morning of April 17th, 1972 was inconsistent with the
State’s theory of the case and undermined the credibility of the State’s witnesses. Certainly,
Evans’ testimony would have been valuable impeachment evidence for Mr. Wallace, inasmuch as
it would have called into question the testimony of all four inmate witnesses against him, each of
whom—denying at times even the presence of each other—claimed that few people were present
at the murder scene.
Moreover, if defense counsel had been provided Mr. Evans’ statement, he could have
investigated further, to interview Mr. Evans and to seek the names of other prisoners who were
part of this “crowd” present at the time of the murder. One among the crowd may have had
information as to who actually killed Brent Miller.
Another claim in Herman’s writ was that he was “impermissibly
convicted” because of the discriminatory selection of the grand jury that
indicted him. His first grand jury indictment, in 1972, was quashed because
the grand jury excluded blacks and women. When Herman was reindicted, in
1973, his second grand jury also excluded blacks and women. He filed a
motion to quash that indictment as well. At a hearing on January 7, 1974, just
before his trial, his judge denied Herman’s motion. George’s team went back
and looked at the testimony at that 1974 hearing and at the law during that era

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and found that women were systematically excluded from grand juries at that
time. According to Article 402 of the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure
at the time, “A woman shall not be selected for jury service unless she has
previously filed with the clerk of court of the parish in which she resides a
written declaration of her desire to be subject to jury service.” Ruth P.
Daniels, a member of the West Feliciana Parish Jury Commission at that
time, testified that registered voter lists compiled and sent to the jury
commission only included male registered voters because “no [woman] had
ever asked to serve.”
“The trial court’s refusal to quash the second indictment requires reversal
of Mr. Wallace’s conviction,” George wrote, “because the systematic
exclusion of female citizens from grand jury service violated the equal
protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” On December 4, 2009,
Herman’s habeas writ was filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District
of Louisiana before Judge Brian A. Jackson.
In 2010, King and one of our longtime A3 supporters in England, Nina
Kowalska, met with Tessa Murphy, who headed the U.S. research team for
Amnesty International, about our case. Nina, I later learned, pretty much told
those gathered for the Amnesty meeting that she wasn’t leaving until they
took us on. It didn’t have to come to that. Amnesty wanted to look at the
issue of solitary confinement in the United States and issued a press release,
stating that our incarceration in solitary confinement was a violation of
human rights and calling for our release from solitary.
That June brought a crushing blow. I lost the habeas relief that had been
granted by the district court. A sharply divided three-judge panel of the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed Judge Brady’s ruling,
reinstating my conviction. The Fifth Circuit ruled Brady “erred” in
concluding I had ineffective counsel in my second trial and maintained that
while my trial “was not perfect,” I couldn’t prove there would have been a
different outcome with different counsel. The court used President Bill
Clinton’s Anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act as the primary reason for
reinstating my conviction. That statute requires that federal courts defer to
rulings made by the state courts as long as those rulings are not
“unreasonable” or “contrary to clearly established federal law.”
I was depressed. I tried to sound upbeat with my brother Michael, my
attorneys, and my friends. This news was just as hard on them as it was on

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me. So many people worked and fought so hard for me—my lawyers Chris
Aberle and Nick Trenticosta, who had drafted my habeas petition and worked
on the appeal; George Kendall and his team, who had joined my habeas case
in 2008 while working on our civil lawsuit; all my friends and our supporters,
who were raising awareness on the street and in Washington; my brother,
keeping my spirits up in the prison visiting room. I couldn’t believe the
sacrifices they made for me, the commitment they made to me, I couldn’t let
them know the pain I was in. I fell back on self-discipline to fight depression.
I kept up with my routine. I went on the yard when I was allowed, even
though the thrill of being there was gone for me. I got no pleasure from that
yard anymore. I only went outside to force myself to exercise. Herman wrote
to me, asking how I was. I wrote back, “This one hurts but I’ll be all right.
It’s just taking a li’l’ longer to catch my breath on this one. It’s strange
rearranging my hopes, dreams, plans, and expectations but I’ll get it done.”
There was one saving grace in the Fifth Circuit’s ruling. The higher court
sent my case back to Judge Brady for a determination concerning my final
claim: that racial discrimination influenced the selection of my grand jury
foreperson in 1993. This would be my last chance to get out of prison. The
courts had already ruled on all of the other issues I was eligible for. A
prisoner can only go to federal court on issues that were preserved in his
original appeal. If the courts decided that this claim didn’t warrant relief, then
I would die in prison. I would get an evidentiary hearing on this issue.
I forced myself not to be discouraged, I forced myself not to give up
hope, I somehow found the determination to fight on. But I wasn’t unscarred
by this back-and-forth, my hopes being raised and crushed over and over.
Meanwhile, our civil suit claiming that our years in solitary confinement
constituted cruel and unusual punishment progressed; we were told we might
have a trial date soon. Psychologist Craig Haney came back to prison to
interview me and Herman again. He noted “unmistakable, dramatic change in
appearance and demeanor” in both of us. He wrote that I seemed “down,
defeated and somber.” Herman, he wrote, was “hesitant . . . voice cracking.”
Herman told Haney he was worried he’d reached “the end point” and was
afraid he “can’t stand up to it.” “Herman began to tell me that he felt sad, but
was trying to stay strong,” Haney wrote. “And then he began to cry. After he
regained his composure, he talked about the pain he could see in the men in
the cells around him. He told me they ‘act up terribly’ but also that he
understood it was not their fault.”

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On November 1, 2010, it was my turn to be moved out of Angola. I was
taken to David Wade Correctional Center, a four-hour drive north, in Homer,
Louisiana. I was now in the northernmost prison in the state; it is Louisiana’s
Siberia. Herman was in the southernmost. There was no CCR at Wade, so
they created one, filling it with twelve prisoners from Angola who were
moved with me. I never got the impression the other prisoners blamed me.
They knew that I had no control over this move and had done nothing to
cause it.
I’d heard about Wade. It was built as a “punishment prison” for the
“worst of the worst” back in 1980. Angola officials told us our move wasn’t a
punishment. But it was impossible to view the move as anything but a
punishment. I’d now be a six-hour drive from New Orleans, the base of my
support. It would be impossible for someone to drive from New Orleans to
visit me and return on the same day. I knew I’d be very isolated at Wade.
The day we arrived the guards were immediately in our faces, speaking
harshly and being unnecessarily rude. “You have five minutes to get that gum
out of your mouth,” one of them yelled at a prisoner when we got out of the
van. The man beside me looked at his hands, cuffed to his waist with a black
box over them, obviously taking a second to figure out how to remove the
gum from his mouth without his hands. The guard yelled at him again. Not
all guards at Wade spoke in a rough and demeaning manner, but most
corrections officers there had mastered the art of how to treat prisoners in the
most degrading way possible. They did it because they could. Nobody was
there to show them a different way. I also had the impression we were thrust
on them without warning, that they were already overwhelmed and they
aimed their anger and frustration at us.
It looked like they had emptied the cells of the new CCR tier the day
before we got there. I could smell the disinfectant used to clean them. I had to
tell the guards we were supposed to live under the same rules and have the
same privileges that we had at CCR in Angola. The guards didn’t know
anything about CCR rules and privileges. They told me their rules: At Wade,
there were no contact visits. There was no microwave for prisoners to use. No
ice. We got yard only three times a week and didn’t have the option to stay
on the tier on yard days. That meant that if we didn’t go to the yard we had to
go straight back into our cells after we showered. At Angola, there were five
TVs on the tier; each TV was shared by three prisoners and could be
programmed separately based on what those three prisoners wanted to watch.

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At Wade the four TVs were programmed together, so all prisoners on the tier
had to watch the same program. That would mean getting 12 men to agree on
TV programming every hour of the day. There was less TV time, which was
a great loss to guys who arranged their whole day around what would be on
television. By the time I left Angola, the TVs had a chip in them so the
volume came through radios in the cells. At Wade the TVs were blasting at
full volume; the noise was deafening. By the time I left Angola we could
have a phone in our cells when we made a call. To use the phone at Wade we
had to stand at the end of the tier, in restraints, by the glass wall of the control
booth.
The cell door shut behind me. It was steel mesh instead of bars, so
prisoners couldn’t pass anything through the doors or hold mirrors out to look
down the tier. There was no space under the door to pass anything. The food
slots had hinged flaps on them and could be locked from the outside. There
were no slots in the cell doors to put restraints on our ankles or wrists, so
every time we left the tier we’d have to hold our hands to the food slots to
have handcuffs put on, then back away from the door as the guards opened it,
face the back of our cells, and kneel on the floor so they could put leg irons
on us. At 63, I had degenerative arthritis in my knees. I knew it would be
painful for me to kneel on the concrete floor. I sat on my bunk. If I’d allowed
myself to feel an emotional connection to my reality in that moment I would
have gone insane. But I didn’t feel the highs and lows that people in society
feel anymore. I lived in the middle of every emotion.
The next day the warden and his assistant, a lieutenant colonel who was
in charge of the South Side, where I was housed, called me out. I was put in
restraints and taken to see them in a small room. They started questioning me
about being in CCR and Angola and I felt they were dancing around
whatever they wanted to talk to me about so I interrupted them. “Look,” I
said. “I assume you all called me out here trying to figure out my state of
mind. Most rules don’t apply to me because I don’t participate in any prison
games or bullshit. If your officers respect me, I’ll respect them. If your
officers disrespect me, I will disrespect them. If you put your hand on me
you’re going to have to kill me because I will fight you as hard as I can until
I’m unconscious or dead. Other than that, you won’t know I’m here.” They
looked at one another. The warden said, “We’re glad to hear you aren’t going
to be a problem.”
As I was being led back to my tier, I knew I was going to be a problem.

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Prisoners at Wade were treated like shit. We didn’t have the CCR privileges
that we were supposed to have under the state’s own rules. As soon as my
possessions were delivered I got out my writing materials and wrote to the
warden, listing the privileges we had at CCR and asking when we could
expect to have them, starting with contact visits.
The only privilege the warden turned over quickly was contact visits; we
got those in a couple of weeks. For everything else, it took three to six
months of pushing just to get an abbreviated version of what we had at
Angola. The other prisoners worked with me. We all knew what they were
doing was wrong. Acting by consensus I got petitions signed, wrote to the
warden, filed ARPs. Throughout, guards routinely cursed at us and spoke to
us disrespectfully, all of it unprovoked and uncalled for. Even on the walk
from our cell to the shower we’d be harassed. Guards would call out to us,
“Hurry up. Get in the shower, keep moving.” If there was a sporting event on
TV and prisoners on the tier cheered too loudly a guard would yell, “Get
down on the fucking noise before I come down and put some of you
motherfuckers in the dungeon.”
Eventually we got ice. The day they put a microwave at the end of our
tier it was such a novelty that security guards from all over the prison came to
look at it. One of the guards said, “I never thought I’d live to see the day
they’d have a microwave on a tier at David Wade.” We couldn’t use the
microwave ourselves; we had to pass whatever we wanted heated into the
guard center at the end of the tier and then get it passed back to us.
Some things the prison officials wouldn’t change, no matter how much I
protested and fought them. They refused to give us a shower curtain. The
shower was directly across from the control center. We had to stand buck
naked in the shower in full view of where the guards sat, including female
guards. Wade was also not as clean as Angola. There were more insects and
rodents at Wade; they sprayed insecticide only in the halls, not in the cells.
They didn’t pass out brooms or mops as often. When medical personnel
needed to do lab work or other tests, they came to get us in the middle of the
night—anytime from one to three in the morning. We had less access to legal
material. This didn’t affect me directly, because I was lucky enough to have
lawyers who helped me. But it was a big loss for the other prisoners at CCR
in Wade.
We finally got Wade to agree to let us stay on the tier if we wanted,
instead of going out on the yard for our hour, but they put a line down the

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hall in yellow tape, one-third out from the wall, and told us we had to stay on
that one-third side of the tier when we were out on our hour and not cross the
line. That was a pain in the ass. It was hard to exercise or give things to
people on the tier from the other side of the yellow line. If I was heating up a
cup of coffee for someone in the cell or handing him a book I had to keep my
toes behind the yellow line and lean over it. They used the yellow line as
punishment for the whole tier because one of the prisoners programmed a
porn channel on the DirecTV using the remote and security failed to catch it
for a few hours. To punish everyone for the actions of a few, or even of just
one prisoner, is the policy at every prison. We were always forced to live at
the level of the lowest common denominator. That philosophy would
eventually ruin our contact visits at Wade. When we first got contact visits
we didn’t have to wear restraints. Then a prisoner apparently threatened
another prisoner, saying he was going to beat him and his family in the
visiting room. After that we were all forced to wear shackles and handcuffs
during our visits. That was Wade’s solution to the problem.
Some months after I arrived the warden, Jerry Goodwin, called me out of
the cell. I was taken to the room where the review board met. “I’ve got
something I want to talk to you about,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk
about it, it’s OK with me. Either way, I’m telling you now, this conversation
never happened. I will deny it ever took place.” He paused. “Now, if you still
want to hear it, tell me.” “Well, yeah,” I said, “What?” He said, “I talked with
Buddy Caldwell at one of the budget meetings and he told me to tell you to
be smart, and if you wanted to give testimony against Herman Wallace,
you’d better make a deal now.” I told him I’d think about it. As soon as I got
back to my tier I called George Kendall to tell him to visit me so that I could
tell him what Warden Goodwin said. Nothing came of it. There was nothing
we could do. Caldwell’s offer came from a third party, which gave him
deniability.
Soon after that I was reading when a crew of workers came onto the tier
and started oiling and hammering the hinges on the rusty metal flaps that
covered the food slots. I asked the guard on duty what they were doing and
was told they were ordered to start locking the food slots in CCR after every
meal. When they were done they locked all the flaps and left the tier. When a
meal came the flaps were unlocked and the tray was passed to us. After we
ate the trays were picked up and the flaps were locked again. We couldn’t
pass a book, a newspaper, or anything else when someone was out on his

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hour with the flaps locked. We couldn’t open the flap to see the face of the
person talking to us from the tier. There was no penological reason for it. It
wasn’t happening on any other cellblock. This was a punitive action created
for CCR at David Wade Correctional Center. It added to our isolation. It
made the cell seem more confining and it took time to adjust to that. I wrote
to the warden to protest the action. When I told my lawyers about it they got
involved. It took more than six months, but with my attorneys’ help we got
them to keep the food slots unlocked.
I was still getting claustrophobic attacks but that was nothing new. It
always started the same way. I felt that the air around me was pressing down
on me and the cell was getting smaller and smaller. If it was late at night or
early in the morning and everyone was locked in his cell I would get naked. I
couldn’t stand the feel of clothes on me; my T-shirt and underwear felt five
times too small. If the guard came down the tier for a count I would sit on the
toilet until he passed, because I didn’t want him to know. We were pushing
this image, like Herman’s poem, of men of steel. We hid weaknesses from
security. Sometimes listening to opera helped. If I could find it on the radio I
would sit on my bunk, close my eyes, and imagine the walls moving back to
their normal distance from me. Most of the time there was no opera on the
radio. Walking off the attacks usually worked better anyway. I paced the cell,
back and forth. When it was summertime there would be a trail of sweat
underneath me that formed a stripe down the middle of my cell floor, from
one end to the other.

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