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

The
Angolite
, he had a deep knowledge of Angola and its administration and
history. He was known outside the prison for work he did in the community
while he was still a prisoner. In his first letter to my lawyer, Sinclair wrote of
an encounter he had with Hezekiah Brown: “In the early 1980s 
The Angolite
did a feature on Angola’s infamous ‘Dog Pen.’ . . . Brown was assigned to
the Dog Pen after his testimony against Wallace/Woodfox. The prison took
care of him back there. I spoke to him briefly at the Dog Pen—‘a niggah got
to do what a niggah got to do to get by—white folks run this prison,’ he said
to me. In convict parlance, that was his way of saying . . . that he had lied for
the State in exchange for the lifetime position at the Dog Pen.”

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In the summer of 2015, while Buddy Caldwell was running for office for the
third time, 18 members of the Louisiana House of Representatives introduced
a resolution (HR 208, 2015) asking the attorney general to withdraw his
appeal of Judge Brady’s ruling to release me, barring further prosecution of
me. The resolution didn’t pass, but I believe press coverage of the legislators’
bill may have helped expose Caldwell’s unreasonable actions against us,
including how he used taxpayer money to indict Herman Wallace on his
deathbed. In November, Buddy Caldwell was voted out of office. In the eight
years he was in office, this self-serving demagogue acted as if he was
obsessed with finding justice for Brent Miller, and yet he refused to test the
bloody fingerprint left at the scene of Brent Miller’s killing against the
fingerprints of all the prisoners on the walk that morning. He brought no
integrity to the office of attorney general or to the state of Louisiana. Instead
of prosecuting cases based upon the merits of the evidence, he was more
interested in publicity. He abused his authority as attorney general and he
made our case a personal vendetta. I was happy the majority of the people of
Louisiana saw through him and voted him out of office. Unlike a court ruling,
it couldn’t be undone.
On November 9, 2015, in response to the state’s appeal of Judge Brady’s
exceptional writ, a randomly selected three-judge panel in the Fifth Circuit—
different from the one that had ruled on my case previously—agreed with the
state and ruled that Judge Brady overstepped his authority when he denied
the state the right to retry me. It was a split decision. Judge Carolyn Dineen
King wrote that my case did not “present a constitutional defect that cannot
be cured at retrial” and that Judge Brady was wrong to assume the state
courts would not provide me with a fair retrial. Judge Priscilla Owen agreed.
The court vacated Judge Brady’s order to release me without a retrial. I

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would go to trial. In a powerful dissent, Judge James L. Dennis wrote, “If
ever a case justifiably could be considered to present ‘exceptional
circumstances’ barring reprosecution, this is that case.
“The writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for
safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action,”
Judge Dennis wrote. “Today, as in prior centuries, the writ is a bulwark
against convictions that violate ‘fundamental fairness.’” He wrote that he
shared Judge Brady’s lack of confidence in the state to provide a fair third
trial. He wrote, “Clearly, the wrongful harm done to Woodfox, not only as a
litigant but also as a human being by his two unconstitutional convictions and
his egregious four decades of solitary confinement, cannot be rectified by the
usual remedy of reversal and reprosecution.”
Judge Dennis also pointed to the recent allegations made by grand jury
foreperson Deidre Howard that proceedings at my third grand jury were
improper. “Recently surfaced allegations that the State made inflammatory
statements to the third grand jury in order to obtain a third indictment create
even greater uncertainty as to Woodfox’s ability to obtain a fair trial in the
State’s third prosecution,” he wrote, quoting a supplement citing the state’s
“‘inequitable conduct’ during the [grand jury] proceedings as one factor
weighing in favor of barring reprosecution.” Judge Dennis went on to say that
“these myriad prejudices” might be “easier to swallow if there were strong
evidence of his guilt, but the evidence against him is, at the very best,
extremely equivocal. Although there was an abundance of physical evidence
available at the crime scene, none of this evidence incriminated Woodfox,
and other evidence has emerged since the first trial that casts even further
doubt on the State’s case against him.”
The court returned the case to Judge Brady, with instructions that he
would have to issue an ordinary conditional writ that would require the state
to release me only if it failed to retry me within a reasonable period of time.
In November, I got the news that one of our most dedicated supporters,
Leonard “Mwalimu” Johnson, a longtime prisoner activist and mentor to
hundreds of prisoners, had died after a long illness. He was 78. Mwalimu
came up in poverty. “The choice was either sit around and starve or step
beyond the law,” he would later write. He was imprisoned for robbery in the
sixties. In prison he almost died of pneumonia in a strip cell—where
prisoners were placed naked, with nothing except a hole in the floor. “I had to

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lie there completely naked,” he wrote, “my cell flooded with water, drawing
upon my spiritual, mental and physical faculties in order to survive.” He was
sent to Angola in 1977 and spent the next 15 years there. He documented 62
cases of abuse by personnel while he was there, some of which resulted in
prisoners dying. After he was released he spent many years working at the
Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana. I never met Mwalimu
personally, but he was beloved in our support committee, an unwavering light
at every protest and event, always committed to peace and justice. “Initially I
was unable to entertain any thought of forgiveness,” he wrote in 2010, “but
slowly I came to realize that bitterness only creates bitterness. Negative
experiences are a kind of cancer, and my choice as a human being is either to
encourage the spread of that cancer or to arrest it and apply a solution. I opt
to be part of the solution, part of the healing.”
Thanksgiving was approaching. Normally holidays meant nothing to me. The
only thing different about a holiday in prison was sometimes there would be a
different item of food on your tray. At Angola, they once handed out oranges
to prisoners in CCR on Christmas Day. This Thanksgiving would be
different. The warden at the West Feliciana jail told prisoners that we could
each get two plates of food from our families at Thanksgiving: one plate for
dinner, the other for dessert. It would be my first home-cooked meal in over
40 years. My good friend Professor Angela Bell and my brother Michael
cooked my favorite dishes: stuffed crab, hot sausage, turkey, seafood
stuffing, and creamed corn. Angie added slices of homemade pies, cake, and
cookies, packaging two layers of food on two of the largest dishes she could
find that could still be considered plates. She drove to the West Feliciana jail
on Thanksgiving Day to drop off the plates. The lengths to which she and
Michael went to cook for me and deliver the food on Thanksgiving touched
me a lot. The prisoners around me were grateful too. I shared both plates with
them.
In December, George Kendall petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, asking
it to restore Judge Brady’s exceptional writ. This would be one of 10,000
petitions the Court receives each year, about 80 of which are heard. George
believed the country’s highest court might be persuaded to hear my case—
which he felt fueled a national debate about solitary confinement—because
six months earlier, Justice Anthony Kennedy seemed to invite a constitutional
challenge to the use of solitary confinement. The case,