Louisiana Attorney General Says Angola 3 “Have Never Been Held in Solitary Confinement”

March 21, 2013 By 4 Comments
woodfox wallace 70s

Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace in the early 1970s, when they were placed in solitary confinement. (Photo from “In the Land of the Free.”)

James “Buddy” Caldwell, attorney general of the state of Louisiana, has released a statement saying unequivocally that Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, the two still-imprisoned members of the Angola 3, “have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system.”

In fact, Wallace, now 71, and Woodfox, 66, have been in solitary for nearly 41 years, quite possibly longer than any other human beings on the planet. They were placed in solitary following the 1972 killing of a young corrections officer at Angola, and except for a few brief periods, they have remained in isolation ever since.

The statement from Caldwell follows on the heels of a ruling by a federal District Court judge in New Orleans, overturning Albert Woodfox’s conviction for the third time–in this instance, on the grounds that there had been racial bias in the selection of grand jury forepersons in Louisiana at the time of his indictment. Subsequently, Amnesty International, along with other activists, mounted a campaign urging the state of Louisiana not to appeal the federal court’s ruling. In the absence of an appeal, Woodfox would have to be given a new trial or released.

Caldwell’s statement–which was rather mysteriously sent out to an email list that included numerous prisoners’ rights advocates who have supported the Angola 3–begins: “Thank you for your interest in the ambush, savage attack and brutal murder of Officer Brent Miller at Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP) on April 17, 1972. Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace committed this murder, stabbing and slicing Miller over 35 times.”

Caldwell clearly states that he has every intention of appealing the District Court’s decision to the notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit: “We feel confident that we will again prevail at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. However, if we do not, we are fully prepared and willing to retry this murderer again.” Caldwell asserts that the evidence against Woodfox is ”overpowering”: “There are no flaws in our evidence and this case is very strong.”

These statements belie the fact that much of the evidence that led to Wallace and Woodfox’s conviction has since been called into question. In particular, the primary eyewitness was shown to have been bribed by prison officials into making statements against the two men. (For more details on the case, see our earlier reporting in Mother Jones, here, here, here, and here.) The two men believe that they were targeted for the murder, and have been held in solitary for four decades, because of their status as Black Panthers and their efforts to organize against prison conditions. (The third member of the Angola 3, Robert King, convicted of a separate prison murder, was released after 29 years in solitary when his conviction was overturned in 2001).

But Caldwell’s most controversial assertion is that Wallace and Woodfox’s conditions of confinement over the past 40 years do not qualify as solitary confinement:

Contrary to popular lore, Woodfox and Wallace have never been held in solitary confinement while in the Louisiana penal system. They have been held in protective cell units known as CCR. These units were designed to protect inmates as well as correctional officers. 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 cells they can have radios and headsets, reading and writing materials, stamps, newspapers, magazines and books. They also can shop at the canteen store a couple of times per week where they can purchase grocery and personal hygiene items which they keep in their cells.

These convicted murderers have an hour outside of their cells each day where 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. This is all in addition to the couple of days set aside for visitations each week.

These inmates are frequently visited by spiritual advisors, medical personnel and social workers. They have had frequent and extensive contact with numerous individuals from all over the world, by telephone, mail, and face-to-face personal visits. They even now have email capability. Contrary to numerous reports, this is not solitary confinement.

Caldwell’s description does not, in fact, refute the fact that the two men are held for 23 hours a day in closed cells that measure approximately 6 x 9 feet–smaller than the average parking space. CCR, or Closed Cell Restricted, is the Louisiana prison system’s euphemism of choice for solitary confinement. [Read more...]

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Torturous Milestone: 40 Years in Solitary for the Angola 3

April 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

Today marks 40 years in solitary confinement for Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox. Our article on the Angola 3 appears today on MotherJones.com.

On the world stage, Guantanamo may well stand as the epitome of American human rights abuses. But when it comes to torture on US soil, that grim distinction is held by two aging African-American men. As of today, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have spent 40 years in near-continuous solitary confinement in the bowels of the Louisiana prison system. Most of those years were spent at the notorious Angola Prison, which is why the pair are still known as members of the Angola 3. The third man, Robert King, was released in 2001—his conviction was overturned after he’d spent 29 years in solitary.

Wallace and Woodfox were first thrown into the hole on April 17, 1972, following the killing of Brent Miller, a young prison guard. The men contend that they were targeted by prison authorities and convicted of murder not based on the actual evidence—which was dubious at best—but because they were members of the Black Panther Party’s prison chapter, which was organizing against horrendous conditions at Angola. This political affiliation, they say, also accounted for their seemingly permanent stay in solitary.

For four decades, the men have spent at least 23 hours a day in cells measuring 6 x 9 feet. These days, they are allowed out one hour a day to take a shower or a stroll along the cell block. Three days a week, they may use that hour to exercise alone in a fenced yard. Wallace is now 70; Woodfox is 65. Their lawyers argue that both have endured physical injury and “severe mental anguish and other psychological damage” from living most of their adult lives in lockdown. According to medical reports submitted to the court, the men suffer from arthritis, hypertension, and kidney failure, as well as memory impairment, insomnia, claustrophobia, anxiety, and depression. Even the psychologist brought in by the state confirmed these findings.

Read the rest of the article for updates on the Angola 3′s legal challenges to solitary confinement, as well as to their convictions. We also cover the latest from the two men who are determined to keep Wallace and Woodfox in prison and in solitary: Angola Warden Burl Cain, who says the two men are too “militant” to be in the general population, and Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, who has said he opposes releasing them “with every fiber of my being.”

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox in the 1970s, with Angola prison in the background. From the film "In the Land of the Free."

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“God’s Own Warden”: Inside Angola Prison

July 28, 2011 By 6 Comments

Editor’s Note: The latest issue of Mother Jones magazine includes James Ridgeway’s long article on Burl Cain, warden of the nation’s largest prison, and possibly its most notorious. The former slave plantation is known for the fact that 90 percent of its more than 5,000 prisoners will die behind bars, and also for holding two members of the “Angola 3″ in solitary confinement for nearly 40 years. More recently, it has also become known for the “miracle” wrought by its controversial warden, who is said to have transformed the prison with the help of Christianity.

It took the threat of an ACLU lawsuit for James Ridgeway to gain access to Angola. The resulting article offers an alternative narrative on the miracle at Angola. The opening section of the article follows; the full article can be read on MotherJones.com.

It was a chilly December morning when I got to the gates of Angola prison, and I was nervous as I waited to be admitted. To begin with, nothing looked the way it ought to have looked. The entrance, with its little yellow gatehouse and red brick sign, could have marked the gates of one of the smaller national parks. There was a museum with a gift shop, where I perused miniature handcuffs, jars of inmate-made jelly, and mugs that read “Angola: A Gated Community” before moving on to the exhibits, which include Gruesome Gertie, the only electric chair in which a prisoner was executed twice. (It didn’t take the first time, possibly because the executioners were visibly drunk.)

Besides being cold and disoriented, I had the well-founded sense of being someplace where I wasn’t wanted. Angola welcomes a thousand or more visitors a month, including religious groups, schoolchildren, and tourists taking a side trip from their vacations in plantation country. Under ordinary circumstances, it’s possible to drive up to the gate and tour the prison in a state vehicle, accompanied by a staff guide. But for me, it had taken close to two years and the threat of an ACLU lawsuit to get permission to visit the place.

I was studying an exhibit of sawed-off shotguns when I heard someone call my name. It was Cathy Fontenot, the assistant warden in charge of PR. Smartly dressed in a tailored shirt and jeans, a suede jacket, and boots with four-inch heels, she introduced me to a smiling corrections officer (“my bodyguard”) and to Pam Laborde, the genial head spokeswoman for the Louisiana department of corrections who had come up from Baton Rouge to help escort me on my hard-won tour of Angola.

Everyone was there except the person I had come to see: Warden Burl   Cain, a man with a near-mythical reputation for turning Angola, once   known as the bloodiest prison in the South,  into a model facility. Among  born-again Christians, Cain is revered  for delivering hundreds of  incarcerated sinners to the Lord—running the  nation’s largest  maximum-security prison, as one evangelical publication put it, “with an  iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.” To Cain’s more secular  admirers,  Angola demonstrates an attractive option for controlling the  nation’s  booming prison population at a time when the notion of  rehabilitation  has effectively been abandoned.

What I had heard about Cain, and seen in the plentiful footage of  him, led me to expect an affable guy—big gut, pale, jowly face,  good-old-boy demeanor. Indeed, former Angola inmates say that prisoners  who respond to Cain’s program of “moral rehabilitation” through  Christian redemption are rewarded with privileges, humane treatment, and  personal attention. Those who displease him, though, can face harsh  punishments. Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning former Angolite  editor who is probably Angola’s most famous ex-con, says when he first  arrived at the prison, Cain tried to enlist him as a snitch, then sought  to convert him. When that didn’t work, Rideau says, his magazine became  the target of censorship; he says Cain can be “a bully—harsh, unfair,  vindictive.”

“Cain was like a king, a sole ruler,” Rideau writes in his recent memoir, In the Place of Justice.  “He enjoyed being a dictator, and regarded himself as a benevolent  one.” When a group of middle school students visited Angola a few years  ago, Cain told them that the inmates were there because they “didn’t  listen to their parents. They didn’t listen to law enforcement. So when  they get here, I become their daddy, and they will either listen to me  or make their time here very hard.”

Another former prisoner, John Thompson—who spent 14 years on death  row at Angola before being exonerated by previously concealed  evidence—told me that Cain runs Angola “with a Bible in one hand and a  sword in the other.” And when the chips are down, Thompson said, “he  drops the Bible.”

Who is the man who wields so much untempered power over so many human  beings? I wanted to find out firsthand—but when I requested permission  to visit the prison and interview Cain, back in 2009, Fontenot turned me  down flat. Cain, she said, was not happy with what I had written about  the Angola Three, a trio of inmates who have been in solitary longer  than any other prisoners in America. Two years and much legal wrangling  later, I was here at Fontenot’s invitation, ready to see the Cain  miracle for myself…

Read the rest on MotherJones.com.

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Amnesty International Calls for Angola 3′s Release from 40 Years of Solitary Confinement

June 7, 2011 By 1 Comment

Amnesty International has issued a press release, action alert, and detailed report on the case of the Angola 3, which has been extensively documented in Mother Jones (here, here, and here). The press release, issued yesterday, concerns the two members of the Angola 3 who remain in prison and have now entered their 40th year in solitary confinement.

The US state of Louisiana must immediately remove two inmates from the solitary confinement they were placed in almost 40 years ago, Amnesty International said today.

Albert Woodfox, 64, and Herman Wallace, 69, were placed in “Closed Cell Restriction (CCR)” in Louisiana State Penitentiary – known as Angola Prison – since they were convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972. Apart from very brief periods, they have been held in isolation ever since.

“The treatment to which Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have been subjected for the past four decades is cruel and inhumane and a violation of the US’s obligations under international law,” said Guadalupe Marengo, Americas Deputy Director at Amnesty International.

The action alert urges readers to sign a petition to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. The twelve-page report describes the apparent miscarriages of justice involved in Woodfox and Wallace’s original murder conviction, and then asks, “Why are they still in isolation?” It goes on to explain:

In the early 1970s, conditions at Angola were brutal. Racism was rife. Inmates were racially segregated and guarded exclusively by white officers, as well as armed white inmates. The culture of violence that infused prison life was reflected in the high number of murders and the widespread use of sexual slavery among inmates.

In this toxic environment, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, who were both imprisoned for unrelated cases of armed robbery, founded a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). They were later joined by Robert King and together the men campaigned for fair treatment and better conditions for inmates; racial solidarity between black and white inmates; and an end to the rape and sexual slavery that was then endemic in the prison.

“They tried to change conditions… the prison was considered the worst in the nation. They brought people together and brought in an ideology that said that despite the fact that you were prisoners, you still had some rights. Because of this, the administration saw them as being threats and they have paid dearly.” –Robert King, 2011

Throughout the long years of isolation, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have consistently maintained that they did not kill Brent Miller. They believe that they were falsely implicated in the murder because of their political activism in prison as members of the BPP. During the many years of litigation in the case, evidence has emerged to suggest that the decision to keep them in solitary was based at least in part on their political activism and association with the BPP.

“I would still keep [Albert Woodfox] in CCR. I still know he has a propensity for violence. I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates. I would have me all kinds of problems, more than I could stand, and I would have the blacks chasing after them. I would have chaos and conflict and I believe that. He has to stay in a cell while he’s at Angola.” –Burl Cain, Angola prison Warden, 2008. These remarks were made despite a finding by a US district judge in November 2008 that Albert Woodfox had maintained a clean conduct record for 20 years.

Since 1972, the prison review board has reviewed the prison’s original decision to keep the men in solitary on more than 150 occasions. At each review, without giving the men an opportunity to participate in the process or dispute the decision, the review board has determined that Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace should continue to be held in CCR due to the “nature of the original reason for lockdown”.

In 1996, Louisiana prison policy was changed to remove “original reason for lockdown” as a factor to be taken into account by the review board when considering whether to continue an inmate’s confinement in CCR. This change has never been applied to reviews of the continued isolation of Albert Woodfox or Herman Wallace; the board simply continues to note “Original reason for lockdown” on all of the documents explaining why release from CCR has been denied.

Records show that neither man has committed any serious disciplinary infractions for decades and prison mental health records indicate that the men pose no threat to themselves or to others. However, none of this appears to merit consideration in the view of the prison Warden who in 2006 said of Herman Wallace: “his record… doesn’t really matter a lot. The original sentence, that’s why he’s there, that’s why he’s there and that’s why he’s going to stay there”.

Amnesty International believes that the men’s continued classification as CCR inmates serves no legitimate penal purpose. Under the direction of Warden Cain, who has dismissed the men’s clean disciplinary record as irrelevant, the review board has effectively ignored Louisiana prison policies for 15 years. It has failed absolutely to provide a meaningful review of the men’s continued isolation. By simply rubberstamping the original decision to confine the men in CCR, successive prison review boards have subjected Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace over the course of decades to conditions that can only be described as cruel, inhuman and degrading.

The Amnesty report goes on to describe in detail the conditions in which these men, both now in their sixties, continue to live.

Throughout their prolonged isolation, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have endured very restrictive conditions. Herman Wallace was transferred to the Elaine Hunt Correctional Center in 2009 and, the following year, Albert Woodfox was transferred to the David Wade Correctional Center. But although both men have now been moved out of Angola prison, the conditions in which they are held have not changed. They are confined to their cells for 23 hours a day. When the weather is fine, they are allowed outside three times a week for an hour of solitary recreation in an outdoor cage measuring 1.8×4.5m. For four hours a week, they are allowed to leave their cells to shower or walk, alone, along the cell unit corridor.

Their cells measure 2x3m. All they can see from inside the cell is a small area just beyond the bars at the front. Each cell has a toilet, a mattress on a steel bed platform, sheets, a blanket, a pillow and a small metal bench attached to the wall. Natural light is limited to a very small window at the back of the cell.

They have restricted access to books, newspapers and TV. Throughout their imprisonment, they have been deprived of opportunities for mental stimulation; they have never been allowed to work or to have access to education. Social interaction has been restricted to occasional visits from friends and family and limited telephone calls .

Lawyers report that both men are suffering from serious health problems caused or exacerbated by their years of close confinement. In the case of Herman Wallace, this includes osteoarthritis aggravated by inadequate exercise, functional impairment, memory loss and insomnia. Albert Woodfox is described as suffering from claustrophobia, hypertension, heart disease, chronic renal insufficiency, diabetes, anxiety and insomnia.

Decades of solitary confinement are also having a clear psychological effect on the men. After being held together in the same prison for nearly 40 years, they are now subjected to equally harsh conditions, but 250 miles apart in separate institutions. Herman Wallace is being held on a tier alongside mentally ill people and says that the shouting and screaming of inmates is making it very difficult for him to sleep.

The report concludes with a call for the United States to honor its obligations under international treaties.

Amnesty International believes that the conditions in which the two men are held, including the length of time they have spent in isolation, violate international human rights treaties to which the USA is a party.

The USA has an obligation under international standards to ensure that all prisoners, regardless of their background, are treated humanely and that any security measures that may be necessary conform to this requirement. The prolonged and indefinite isolation of Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace without meaningful review runs directly counter to this obligation.

The USA has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, both of which prohibit torture and other ill-treatment. The relevant treaty monitoring bodies (the Human Rights Committee and the Committee against Torture) have found that prolonged solitary confinement can amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Both bodies have expressed concern that the harsh conditions of long-term isolation in some US segregation facilities are incompatible with the USA’s treaty obligations. Amnesty International believes their findings are particularly significant in the case of Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace given that few, if any, other prisoners have spent so long in solitary confinement in recent times.

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Our Father Who Art in Prison

June 21, 2010 By 7 Comments

Sweatshirt for sale in the Angola Museum gift shop reads "Angola: A Gated Community"

You sometimes have to wonder why the state of Louisiana doesn’t just transform Angola prison into a year-round Christian camp meeting. As I’ve written before, under the tutelage of Warden Burl Cain, Angola has become a place where the only kind of rehabilitation on offer is Christian redemption.

I respect any kind of spiritual life prisoners might turn to for guidance or comfort. But pushing a particular doctrine on the ultimate captive audience is something else altogether. Fifteen years after Cain’s arrival at Angola, there are seven evangelical churches on the prison’s grounds. Its educational programs, inmate organizations, and to some extent even the venerable prison publication The Angolite are all dominated by a Christianity that leans powerfully toward the Southern Baptist Church. At today’s Angola, being a self-proclaimed Christian–or better still, becoming a convict preacher–appears to be the best way to gain the kinds of special privileges that make prison life more bearable. Anyone who isn’t interested is free to rot in a hell on earth–presumably in preparation for their eternal fate, since few men emerge from Angola’s gates alive.

Yet the press tends to eat this stuff up, celebrating Burl Cain as a visionary who has transformed hardened criminals into hard-working, God-fearing souls. He has done this by governing the 5,000-man prison plantation, as one Baptist publication put it, ”with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.”

The latest homage to Cain appeared Saturday in USA Today, in anticipation of Father’s Day. It seems that the warden has instituted programs to help prison dads–that is, some prison dads–spend more time with their kids. Lest anyone think this is being done simply to bring some humanity or even joy into the lives of prisoners and their families, the article reminds us that it also serves a sociological purpose.

More than 1.7 million children across the USA have a parent in U.S. prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The number of children with a father in prison grew by 77% from 1991 through mid-2007. And those children are two to three more times likely to wind up behind bars themselves, says Christopher Wildeman, a University of Michigan sociologist who has studied the effects of imprisoned parents.

To try to snap that trend, Angola and other prisons across the country sponsor two programs aimed at reconnecting prison dads with their children: Returning Hearts, a day-long carnival-like celebration where inmates spend eight hours with their kids, and Malachi Dads, a year-long training session that uses Bible passages to help improve inmates’ parenting skills.

Inmates must show good behavior to participate in the programs, Warden Burl Cain says. Once they feel reconnected to their family, their attitudes improve, he says. Around 2,500 inmates have participated in Returning Hearts since it began in 2005. Malachi, which started in 2007, currently has 119 men.”The ones who were problematic before are not problematic anymore,” Cain says. “Prison didn’t straighten them out; their kids straightened them out.”

I am all for encouraging more contact between prisoners and their kids. And technically, only one of these programs requires inmates to be Christians; the other simply requires “good behavior.” But former prisoners have told me that at Angola, the shortest route to proving good behavior runs straight through the alter. If you have not embraced Jesus–and specifically, Cain’s Jesus–things can be quite a bit more difficult.

Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore has been at Angola for three decades, and spent most of them in solitary confinement. Like the members of the Angola 3, Whitmore was active with the Black Panthers in the 1970s, and believes his relegation to permanent lockdown has to do with his political beliefs. The unit where Whitmore resides is called CCR–Closed Cell Restricted–which is Angola’s name for long-term solitary confinement.

Prisoners in CCR have no opportunity to spend long days with their children on Angola’s spacious ground. But they are supposed to have access to a limited numbers of ”contact visits” with their families–which simply means they can sit with them in a guarded room, not separated by bars or glass. According to a recent post on the blog maintained by Whitmore’s friends, even these visits do not always take place as planned.

Recently inmates housed at Louisiana Penitentiary’s CCR…units have been denied normal contact visits and privileges. Even after contact visits have been approved and some visitors have travelled across the country at considerable expenses…Inmates at LA State Prison are allowed ten (10) people at any time on their Approved visiting list. This list constitutes those individuals who have completed the prison’s necessary paperwork and who have submitted to a comprehensive police background check. Upon acceptance the applicant is listed on the inmate’s approved visiting list and may then visit up to 2 times a month…

Contact visiting is the normal policy for inmates at Angola. Only those inmates assigned to punitive housing units are restricted to non-contact visits. While CCR is a non-punitive housing unit, CCR inmates are allowed only 2 contact visits a month. All other visits received in a month by CCR inmates are held in CCR’s non-contact visiting booths (small, closet like spaces with inmates and visitor separated by a thick mesh screen). The reason given for this policy is the lack of visiting space for large numbers of contact visits on the RC CCR unit…Consequently, only 5 contacts may be scheduled each visiting day for the roughly 90 inmates housed in CCR.

Given such limited space for contact visits at CCR the units policy requires inmates to submit requests for approval often months in advance to reserve an available date. When a CCR inmate submits a request for contact visitation he is merely reserving a date. On that date any visitor from his visiting list who arrives – up to a total of 5 – may enjoy a visit under normal contact visiting procedures. This requirement is merely to insure that no more then 5 contact visits are scheduled for any visiting day. CCR inmates are NOT required to also seek approval for those visitors, since they are already on the Approved visiting list.

Whitmore claims that in some cases, “Visitors, upon arriving at Louisiana State Prison are being allowed into the prison–but upon arrival at the CCR unit–being denied a contact visit and forced into non contact visiting booths” because, they are told, they lack the proper approvals. So for these fathers and sons, mothers and wives, there will be no heartwarming family reunions, except in adjoining boxes across a wire screen.

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Louisiana Sues Its Own Death Row Prisoners

February 12, 2010 By 28 Comments

The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections last Friday sued every inmate on death row, in an effort to block any one of them from challenging the state’s lethal injection procedures. Each of the 84 prisoners in the “death house” at Angola State Penitentiary was personally served papers in the suit, said Nick Trenticosta, who has represented numerous clients on Angola’s death row.

Trenticosta, who is also director of the non-profit Center for Equal Justice in New Orleans, knows of no other instance in which a state sued its death row inmates en masse over legal questions relating to their execution. “I’ve been hanging around death penalty cases for 25 years,” Trenticosta said in a phone interview this morning, “and I have never seen anything like this.”

The Corrections Department’s litigation is a countersuit, filed in response to an earlier lawsuit claiming that Louisiana’s lethal injection procedure is in violation of state law. That suit was filed by the Capital Post Conviction Project of Louisiana (CPCPL) on behalf of death row prisoner Nathaniel Code. It stated that Louisiana had not met the requirements of its own Administrative Procedures Act in creating guidelines for execution by lethal injection. The state procedure ought to specify exactly what drugs should be used to kill prisoners, the CPCPL argued, rather than simply calling for the administration of drugs. Without such stipulations, Trenticosta said, “They’re saying if we want to pour boiling oil into your veins, we can do it.”

Just over a month ago, on January 8, a state district court in Baton Rouge dismissed Nathaniel Code’s suit, which would have halted all executions in Louisiana until the Corrections Department brought its procedures in line with state law. Attorneys for the state argued that Louisiana’s three-drug lethal injection protocol was not subject to the Administrative Procedures Act; the judge agreed, and threw out the suit.

All this happened the day after Gerald Bordelon was executed by lethal injection in Angola’s death chamber for the murder of his 12-year-old stepdaughter. The execution on January 7 was the first to take place in Louisiana for eight years, and proceeded after Bordelon chose to waive post-conviction appeals. According to the Associated Press, the hearing on Code’s suit “was purposely scheduled the day after Gerald Bordelon’s execution,” because Bordelon’s attorneys had told the judge “he did not want anything to disrupt his execution.”

Nathaniel Code’s attorneys said they would appeal the judge’s ruling to Louisiana’s First Circuit Court of Appeal. “The law is being violated. It was violated yesterday,” CPCPL director Gary Clements said, referencing Bordelon’s execution.

The state of Louisiana, however, has already initiated offensive maneuvers against further challenges to its methods of execution. Immediately after the ruling in Code’s suit, the Corrections Department filed its countersuit against all death row inmates. The department’s attorney, Wade Shows, told the Baton Rouge Advocate that Louisiana was asking the court “to formally declare—‘once and for all’—that the state’s lethal injection protocol is not subject to the Louisiana Administrative Procedure Act.” Such a ruling, Shows said, “‘means you don’t have to go through the rule-making process….It’s sort of an internal management decision.’”

Similar challenges in other states have yielded mixed results. According to the AP, “Courts around the country have split over whether states should have to follow the administrative procedures in adopting a lethal injection protocol.” Courts in Maryland, Nebraska, California, and Kentucky have ruled that the procedural requirements do apply to the execution method. In these states, executions were suspended while proper procedures were carried out, often including public hearings. Courts in Missouri and Tennessee have ruled that the procedures do not apply. Only Louisiana, however, has dealt with the issue by suing the residents of its own death row.

On a larger scale, execution by lethal injection–which is used in 35 states–has faced several legal challenges in recent years, on the grounds that it violates the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. These challenges were propelled in part by several horribly botched execution attempts, in which prisoners were stuck with IV needles numerous times over periods of up to two hours, and in a few cases returned to their cells when attempts failed. Opponents have also argued that the later drugs in the three-drug protocol may cause excruciating pain, which dying prisoners cannot express because the initial drugs have paralyzed them.

In April 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that lethal injection was not unconstitutional; it is the “method of execution believed to be the most humane available,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “If administered as intended, that procedure will result in a painless death.” The decision put an end to a de facto six-month moratorium on death by lethal injection, but some states have yet to resume their execution schedules.

Louisiana seems determined to have the choice to execute if and when it wants to, without interference from prisoner lawsuits alleging administrative technicalities. This despite the fact that in recent years, the state has shown relatively little zeal for carrying out executions, compared to neighboring Texas. While Angola’s death chamber has been made famous by the films Dead Man Walking and Monster’s Ball, only three executions have been carried out there in the last ten years.

Angola Warden Burl Cain, who oversees all executions in Louisiana, has indicated that it causes him pain to put prisoners to death. But Cain, famously, appears more focused on heavenly justice than on the earthly variety. Cain executed his first prisoner in 1995, and later said, “I felt him go to hell as I held his hand.” He told the Baptist Press, “I decided that night I would never again put someone to death without telling him about his soul and about Jesus.”

If executions were ever to resume in Louisiana at the rates common in the 1980s, heavenly justice might be all that’s available to some of the inmates on death row. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “Since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Orleans Parish juries have condemned 38 defendants to death. But a recent tally by attorneys for death-row inmates calculated that courts have found errors in 25 of those sentences, or nearly two-thirds. In some cases defendants were retried, resulting in convictions on lesser charges, while in others defendants were released.”

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, death row, Eighth Amendment, human rights, lawsuits/litigation, Louisiana, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

ACLU Gets One Angola Prisoner Released from Solitary

January 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana is kept busy trying to safeguard the basic constitutional rights of the state’s 45,000+ prisoners. According to the group’s web site:

Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We have 13 state prisons and a staggering 108 local jails. Our prisons rival Mississippi as the most abhorrent in terms of violence and horrible living conditions. People get killed in Louisiana’s prisons.

At the ACLU of Louisiana, we receive more than 80 prison complaints per month. The complaints we get include are about beatings from guards, inadequate medical care, squalid living conditions, and being denied access to a lawyer.

The ACLU also notes that “Louisiana subjects a disproportionate number of prisoners to isolation despite the extensive evidence of harm of solitary confinement.” The most notorious instance of long-term lockdown is the Angola 3, kept in isolation for more than three decades. But there are many others, as well. One of these prisoners released from solitary after the ACLU protested his confinement in a letter to Angola’s Warden Burl Cain. Hymel Varnado had been in isolation for 12 years, for no ostensible reason. As the ACLU of Louisiana reports:

“For over a century, it’s been clear that prolonged isolation has severe medical consequences, and in 1890 the US Supreme Court found that it can cause mental illness and that it is often too severe a punishment,” said Marjorie R. Esman, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “It shouldn’t have taken over a century for the Warden of Angola to recognize that no one should be isolated from human contact without a very good reason.”
    
Varnado, who has no record of escape attempts, assaulting staff or harming himself or others, was transferred to a shared cell on Dec. 30, 2009, after ACLU lawyers wrote to Angola’s Warden Burl Cain urging that Varnado be placed in a less restrictive setting and explaining the many medical reports and court rulings showing that prolonged isolation is dangerous and cruel.

Since his arrival at Angola in May 1997, Varnado has spent almost his entire time in an individual cell 23 hours a day. He was allowed to exercise alone in a fenced yard three times a week. His isolation caused him to experience psychological torture on a daily basis, including sleep deprivation and acute psychological pain.  

Varnado was placed in solitary confinement not because of his behavior while in prison, but because he was young – 21 – at the time of his incarceration.  In fact, he was released from solitary into a dormitory for several months last year and although he did well there and his health improved, he was returned to solitary when the dorm was closed.

“Logic, as well as human decency, demand that we allow people to interact with others,” said Esman.  “The evidence has been clear for long enough that isolation causes illness. Hymel Varnado did not need to be isolated from other prisoners, and he spent years deprived of his ability to function for no reason other than that he was young when he committed his crimes. We’re delighted that Mr. Varnado will now be able to have human companionship.”

Angola’s practice of keeping prisoners in permanent lockdown will soon be challenged in court, on grounds similar to those outlined in the ACLU’s letter. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Louisiana on behalf of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox–the two members of the Angola 3 who are still being held in solitary–is expected to come to trial this spring. The suit argues that the men’s 37 years in solitary confinement have caused serious physical and psychological damage, constituting cruel and unusual punishment, and that their continued isolation serves “no legitimate penological purpose.”

Filed Under: Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, Louisiana, physical effects, psychological effects, solitary confinement Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Mark of Cain: God and Man at Angola Prison

January 7, 2010 By 13 Comments

The Associated Press today put out a laudatory piece on Warden Burl Cain’s program of Christian education at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. The article, which was picked up by the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and dozens of other publications, is sure to advance Cain’s reputation as a great prison reformer.

The AP piece depicts Angola as a onetime den of violence and despair that has been transformed by Cain into a safe and orderly community where “everyone has a job” and where “students crowd into classrooms to study toward a college degree.” The prison’s bloody past, Cain tells the AP, was “all because of a lack of hope”–a situation the warden has treated with the dual remedy of education and redemption, in part through a degree program in Christian Ministry.  

There’s another side to this story, of course, and it’s a whole lot grimmer than the AP piece would suggest. More than 90 percent of the 5,200 men Angola will die there, thanks to the states harsh sentencing policies. Much of the work on the 18,000-acre former slave plantation consists of backbreaking labor in the cotton, corn, and soybean fields, presided over by armed guards on horseback. Some inmates do not work at all because they are kept in isolation in their cells, in the prison’s notorious Camp J disciplinary unit or in long-term solitary confinement. (Among Angola’s most widely known prisoners are former Black Panthers Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, members of the Angola 3, who have been in solitary for more than 37 years.)

An inmate’s fate at Angola depends upon how he measures up to the warden’s standards, which are rooted firmly in his personal religious dogma. Cain believes that there is only one path toward rehabilitation, and it runs through Christian redemption. (According to Herman Wallace, Cain has at least once offered to release him from solitary if he renounced his political beliefs and accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.)

“The warden says it takes good food, good medicine, good prayin’ and good playin’ to have a good prison,” an assistant warden told Truthout in 2008, “Angola has all these.” To make sure there is ample opportunity for “good prayin’,” Cain has raised funds to construct 18 Christian chapels on the prison’s grounds. (One of several recent corruption charges against Cain involved shaking down a contractor for a donation to the prison chapel fund.) 

Likewise, inmates at Angola can gain access to higher education only by embracing Cain’s brand of Christianity.  According to the prison’s own web site, while Angola offers literacy and GED classes and technical training in things like auto mechanics, horticulture, and welding, the only college degree program it offers is in Christian Ministry from the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. Only a few hundred prisoners are admitted to his program. 

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits challenging some of Angola’s policies as constitutional violations of the prisoners’ freedom of religion; in one statement, the ACLU remarked: “Cain’s job is to be Warden of Angola, not the Chaplain of Angola.” But even some Christians would find Burl Cain’s vision of both human and divine justice unsavory.

A glowing 2008 article in the Baptist Press praised Cain for ”govern[ing] the massive prison on the Mississippi River delta with an iron fist and an even stronger love for Jesus.” The iron fist includes Cain’s determination to keep certain “dangerous” prisoners in permanent lockdown, a condition that many have denouced as torture. Cain also presides over the state’s executions. The Baptist Press article noted Cain’s special dedication to delivering souls from the death chamber into the hands of Christ. When he supervised his first execution as warden, Cain said, “I didn’t share Jesus” with the condemned man, and as he received the lethal injection, “I felt him go to hell as I held his hand.” As Cain tells it, “I decided that night I would never again put someone to death without telling him about his soul and about Jesus.”

In fact, Cain will get an opportunity to put his mission into practice a few hours from now, when the state of Lousiana carries out its first execution in eight years, in the death chamber at Angola prison.

This post was written in collaboration with Jean Casella. Full disclosure: We have written several articles about the Angola 3 for Mother Jones. Last year I also requested permission to  interview Burl Cain, as well as Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, and to  visit Angola; all requests were denied by the Louisiana Department of Corrections.

Filed Under: death row, lawsuits/litigation, Louisiana, political prisoners, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Southern Injustice: 37 Years in Solitary

January 5, 2010 By 1 Comment

Over the past year, I’ve been writing about the Angola 3 in a series of stories for Mother Jones. Earlier stories have highlighted the men’s federal lawsuit, which claims violations of their constitutional rights, and on Albert Woodfox’s criminal appeal. The latest story, by Jean Casella and myself, focuses on Herman Wallace, and was published last week.

For the better part of four decades, Victory Wallace, 70, has made a monthly trip from New Orleans to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola to visit her brother Herman, who just turned 68. The 140-mile journey has shades of Heart of Darkness, following the course of the Mississippi River to a remote prison colony from which most inmates never return. At the dark heart of this former slave plantation, Herman Wallace has lived most of the past 37 years in solitary confinement, imprisoned alone for 23 hours a day in a 6-by-9-foot cell.

When Herman was moved in the spring of 2009 from Angola to Hunt Correctional Center near Baton Rouge, Vickie’s trip got a bit shorter. But what she found when she arrived on her most recent visit was even worse than usual. Because of a disciplinary infraction, Herman had been placed in “extended administrative lockdown.” That meant Vickie was denied a contact visit, and was permitted to see her brother only through a glass partition as they spoke over a telephone. His hands were shackled to the table. (Other recent visitors reported that the shackles made it hard for him to hold the phone to his ear, while his hearing loss made communication over the telephone difficult.) Herman complained to Vickie that he was cold, and she thought that he had lost weight. His spirits, she said, were not the best.

For years, Herman Wallace’s hopes have ridden on two cases that are inching their way through the courts—one challenging his conviction, the other challenging his long-term solitary confinement. Now, after a decade of starts and stops, obstacles and delays, both cases are advancing toward conclusions that will determine how he spends what’s left of his life….

Full the story at Mother Jones.com.

Herman Wallace's drawing of his cell, from a letter to Jackie Sumell.

Filed Under: Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, Louisiana, political prisoners, psychological effects, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , , , ,