Court Rules Against Angola 3′s Albert Woodfox: No End in Sight to 38 Years in Solitary Confinement

June 22, 2010 By 8 Comments

Herman Wallace, Robert King, and Albert Woodfox in 2008, during a rare break from solitary

 Albert Woodfox has spent nearly all of the last 38 years in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. His case has brought protests from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who argue that Woodfox’s decades in lockdown constitute torture, and from a growing band of supporters, who believe that he was denied a fair trial. For more than ten years, he has been fighting for his release in the courts. But yesterday, a ruling by a federal appeals court ensured that for the forseeable future, Albert Woodfox will remain right where he has been for nearly four decades: in a 6 x 9 cell in the heart of America’s largest and most notorious prison.   

It’s been nearly two years since a federal district court judge in Baton Rouge overturned Woodfox’s conviction for the 1972 murder of a guard at Louisiana’s Angola prison. Judge James Brady’s 2008 ruling, which ordered the state to retry Woodfox or release him, brought new hope to the 63-year-old Woodfox, who has been in Angola–originally for armed robbery–since he was 24. A member of the group known as the Angola 3, Woodfox has always contended that he was effectively framed for the guard’s murder–and then thrown into permanent lockdown–because of his involvement with the Black Panther Party, which was organizing against conditions in what was then known as the “bloodiest prison in the South.” 

Without drawing any conclusions about Woodfox’s guilt or innocence, Judge Brady of the Federal District Court, Middle District of Louisiana, concluded that Woodfox had not received a fair trial in 1998 (at what was itself a replacement for a faulty 1973 trial). The main grounds for overturning Woodfox’s conviction were ineffective assistance of counsel, which allowed questionable evidence and irregular practices to stand without challenge. Woodfox had argued that better lawyers could have shown that his conviction was quite literally bought by the state, which based its case on jailhouse informants who were rewarded for their testimony. (Woodfox’s case was described in full in this 2009 article for Mother Jones.) 

Judge Brady agreed, and in July 2008 he granted Woodfox’s Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, ordering that his conviction and life sentence be “reversed and vacated.” But some of the most powerful figures in the Louisiana justice system were committed to keeping Woodfox in prison and in lockdown. After his conviction was overturned, Attorney General James “Buddy” Caldwell declared, “We will appeal this decision to the 5th Circuit [Court of Appeals]. If the ruling is upheld there I will not stop and we will take this case as high as we have to. I will retry this case myself…I oppose letting him out with every fiber of my being because this is a very dangerous man.”  

Caldwell put his case before the federal Fifth Circuit in March 2009–and in yesterday’s decision, he prevailed. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of three federal appellate judges ruled that Judge Brady had erred in overturning Wallace’s conviction. Their decision is not only a crushing blow for Woodfox, but also a manifestation of how far the rights of the accused have fallen in recent decades.  

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals once had a reputation as one of the finest appellate courts in the land. In the 1960s, a small group of Fifth Circuit judges—mostly Southern-bred moderate Republicans—was known for advancing civil rights and especially school desegregation.  But today the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, is seen as among the most ideologically conservative of the federal appeals courts. It is notable for its overburdened docket and for its hostility to appeals from defendants in capital cases, including claims based on faulty prosecution and suppressed evidence. The court has even been reprimanded by the U.S. Supreme Court, itself is no friend to death row inmates: In June 2004, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that the Fifth Circuit was “paying lip service to principles” of appellate law in handing down death penalty rulings.  

In addition, the decision in Woodfox’s case shows the crippling effect on prisoners’ rights of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) which was passed under Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. That legislation has become the bane of anti-death penalty lawyers and activists, and of thousands of other prisoners seeking to challenge their convictions–a pursuit which AEDPA now renders nearly impossible.  

As the Fifth Circuit noted in its ruling, “The AEDPA requires that federal courts ’defer to a state court’s adjudication of a claim’” unless the state court decision ran “‘contrary to…clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court,’” or was ”‘based on an unreasonable determination of the facts in light of the evidence presented in the State court proceeding.’” And as the judges pointed out, ”An unreasonable application of federal law is different from an incorrect or erroneous application of the law.” 

In other words, the state courts could be wrong, they just couldn’t be so far out as to be undeniably “unreasonable.” And in the end, the Fifth Circuit judges agreed with the State’s argument that in the case at hand, ”the district court failed to apply the AEDPA’s heightened deferential standard of review to Woodfox’s ineffective assistance claims.” Woodfox’s conviction may have been wrong, but it was not, in the eyes of the Fifth Circuit, “unreasonable”–so there will be no new trial for him. This is how justice works in post-AEDPA America.

For Woodfox, this means that his time in prison stretches before him with no obvious end in sight. His lawyers have promised to return to his case with new evidence, but that could take years, and the outcome might still be the same. In the meantime, Woodfox and fellow Angola 3 members Herman Wallace and Robert King have mounted a constitutional challenge to their solitary confinement, which may come to trial before the end of this year. (Wallace was Woodfox’s co-defendent in the guard’s murder, and has also been in solitary for 38 years. King, sentenced to life for another prison killing, had his murder conviction overturned and was released from Angola in February 2001 after 29 years in lockdown; he remains a plaintiff in this suit, which covers time he was in solitary.) That case, too, will eventually go before the Fifth Circuit–and even a win would mean only a release from permanent lockdown, not from Angola.  

Woodfox’s release from solitary, as well as his criminal appeal, is vehemently opposed by Angola’s warden, Burl Cain, who has likened the Black Panthers to the KKK, and is adamant that the aging Woodfox is and always will be a menace to society by virtue of his political beliefs. He has said that Woodfox is “locked in time with that Black Panther revolutionary actions they were doing way back when…And from that, there’s been no rehabilitation.”

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, legislation, Louisiana, political prisoners, solitary confinement, torture Tagged With: , , , ,

The End of Mississippi’s Notorious Supermax Unit

June 12, 2010 By 4 Comments

Even in a nation known for its draconian prison conditions and brutal lockdown units, the supermax portion of Mississippi’s state penitentiary stood out.  Critics and residents described it as a “horrific” and “wretched” place of “hopelessness and despair.” Or, as Chris Joyner described it last week in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger:  

Unit 32 was a nightmare, if sworn testimony and a string of violent deaths is a reliable measure.  

The supermax unit at the State Penitentiary at Parchman once held 1,000 men from gang leaders to petty thieves to seriously mentally ill inmates whose howls could be heard day and night. Prisoners were kept in isolation 23 hours a day, often behind full metal doors in stifling cells with broken lights, yet violence was common between inmates and guards and among the inmates themselves…  

[Unit 32] was home to hundreds of inmates with serious mental ailments including schizophrenia.   

MDOC [Mississippi Department of Corrections] officials often described it as place for the “worst of the worst.” But it also was home to property criminals or inmates convicted of drug crimes who had been sent to the unit for disciplinary infractions and given no way to earn their way back out.   

Parchman, a 20,000-acre penal plantation that epitomized Jim Crow justice, has a long history of abusing and degrading its prisoners. But now, at least, the hellhole that was Unit 32 will soon close its doors for good. As the Clarion Ledger reports:  

After instituting a host of reforms over the past 2 1/2 years, MDOC agreed Friday in U.S. District Court to remove the unit’s remaining prisoners as final settlement of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union seven years ago.   

“Unit 32, at a certain point, could not be reformed,” ACLU National Prison Project attorney Margaret Winter said. “It is truly a wretched place that cannot be made environmentally adequate.”…   

Under the agreement, MDOC will transfer seriously mentally ill prisoners from the unit to East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian, a private prison specially equipped to deal with inmates with psychiatric problems, and the remaining Unit 32 prisoners to “appropriate housing” within the prison system.   

The story of Unit 32′s demise is a credit to the advocates who led a decade-long fight to reform or abolish the place. It may also provide a model for other fights against the use of solitary confinement in state and federal prisons across the country.  

The story was told in detail by Margaret Winters of the ACLU and Stephen F. Hanlon of the law firm Holland & Knight, which provided pro bono assistance in a series of Unit 32 lawsuits. Their 2008 article “Parchman Farm Blues: Pushing for Prison Reforms at Mississippi State Penitentiary” appeared in the American Bar Association’s journal Litigation. Winters and Hanlon describe how they first became involved, in 1998, in a suit on behalf of HIV-positive prisoners at Parchman, who lived in dismal conditions in a segregated AIDS unit. They began representing prisoners on Parchman’s death row in 2002, after a group of inmates staged a hunger strike to protest conditions. In their article, Winters and Hanlon describe their first visit to death row, which was located inside Unit 32, as “14 unforgettable hours of bedlam and hellish heat.”  

The death row prisoners described profound isolation, unrelieved idleness and monotony, denial of exercise, intolerable stench and pervasive filth, grossly malfunctioning plumbing, and constant exposure to human excrement. Each cell had a “ping-pong” toilet, allowing waste from one cell to back up into the toilet in the adjoining cell. The temperatures in the cells during the long Delta summers were lethal, with heat indexes, we later proved, of over 130 degrees Fahrenheit.   

The cells were so infested with mosquitoes that inmates had to keep their windows closed and their bodies completely covered even in the hottest weather. Leaking rainwater and foul water from flooded toilets on upper floors soaked inmates’ beds and personal items; prisoners weren’t provided clean water, soap, and other basic cleaning supplies, even when they were moved into a cell smeared with excrement by the previous tenants.   

Lighting in the cells was so dim that the prisoners couldn’t see to read, write, groom themselves, or clean their cells. They were denied basic medical, dental, and mental health care. They were exposed day and night to the screams and ravings of severely mentally ill inmates in adjoining cells.   

Winters and Hanlon knew that “in Mississippi, it is widely considered fitting that these prisoners should suffer as much as possible before their execution.”  (This despite the fact that because of defective trials, just as many of the state’s prisoners “are eventually released from death row as are executed.”)  But in 2003, Federal District Court Judge Jerry Davis ”entered an opinion and far-reaching injunction granting most of the relief” the prisoners’ lawyers had asked for.

Their next step, Winters and Hanlon write, was “to extend the relief we had won for the death row prisoners to the other 1,000 men in Unit 32.” These men were in basic administrative segregation–solitary confinement–for reasons ranging from disciplinary infractions to mental illness to a need for protective custody. They lived in conditions that were in some ways “even worse” than those on death row.  

The men in Unit 32 in administrative segregation were all locked down 23 to 24 hours a day in even more profound isolation and unrelieved idleness than on death row. There was a pervasive culture of violence and sadistic use of excessive force. Corrections officers gratuitously beat prisoners already in full restraints. Take-down teams forcibly extracted shackled prisoners from their cells, sprayed them with a chemical agent that causes vomiting and shortness of breath, and then assaulted them again.   

The combination of all these conditions was causing serious mental illness to emerge in previously healthy prisoners, and causing psychosis and complete mental breakdown in less healthy prisoners. Suicides and attempted suicides occurred with alarming frequency.   

This case was more complicated, because the it challenged not only conditions in Unit 32, but the MDOC’s system for “classifying” prisoners.  “Although Unit 32 is supposedly used to incarcerate the most dangerous and incorrigible offenders in the state,” Winters and Hanlon write, ”in reality, the vast majority of the men housed in Unit 32—for years, sometimes for decades—did not have the kind of criminal or institutional history that would justify incarceration under ‘supermax’ conditions.” Some prisoners were locked up in the unit “because they had special medical needs, were severely mentally ill, or had requested protective custody. And once classified to Unit 32, there was no emerging from it. Hundreds of prisoners were doomed to stay there forever.”

As Winters and Hanlon point out, federal courts have held that “prison officials had essentially unfettered discretion to classify prisoners and to confine them to whatever degree of isolation they saw fit.” But in 2005, under Judge Davis, the ACLU team and the MDOC hammered out a settlement that “incorporated all the relief” from the death row case, and “added provisions on excessive force, procedural due process, and classification.”

It would take several years, further hearings, and another settlement before the changes were fully implemented. But under the new classification system, more than 80 percent of the prisoners in Unit 32 were moved out of administrative segregation–some to the general population, others to mental health units. Those remaining in solitary received written plans telling them what they needed to do to earn their way out, and reviews every 90 days.

The process of reclassification at Parchman is described in detail in a 2009 article called “Beyond Supermax Solitary Confinement: Mississippi’s Experience Rethinking Prison Classification and Creating Alternative Mental Health Programs,” published in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior. Its lead author, Dr. Terry Kupers of Berkeley’s Wright Institute, is a leading expert on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, and was a key participant in the reform of Unit 32.    

None of this means that all is well in the Mississippi prison system–far from it. The state’s prisoners–including, no doubt, many of those moved out of Unit 32–still suffer from inadequate health care, overcrowding, and a host of other problems. But it seems like a significant victory, especially when it comes to challenging the excessive, arbitrary, and inhumane use of solitary confinement. In a press release issued by the ACLU, Margaret Winter said, “This facility was truly a dangerous and degrading environment for prisoners and staff alike. The fact that this facility is now being closed is a great end to the long road that we have been on.”

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Filed Under: civil liberties/civil rights, Constitution, death row, Eighth Amendment, lawsuits/litigation, mental illness, Mississippi, physical effects, politics of punishment, prison health care, psychological effects, solitary confinement, suicide, supermax prisons Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Punishment for Possessing One Joint = Jail, Solitary Confinement, and Deportation

March 31, 2010 By 1 Comment

Continuing her incisive reporting on the travesty of immigrant detention in the United States, the New York Times‘s Nina Bernstein  yesterday documented the three-year nightmare of a legal immigrant from Haiti. Bernstein describes what happened to the young man after he was convicted of a non-criminal drug offense, considered so minor in the state of New York that it carries a fine smaller than some parking tickets. 

When a police officer in this Long Island suburb found a marijuana cigarette in Jerry Lemaine’s pocket one night in January 2007, a Legal Aid lawyer counseled him to plead guilty. Under state statutes, the penalty was only a $100 fine, and though Mr. Lemaine had been caught with a small amount of marijuana years earlier as a teenager, that case had been dismissed.

But Mr. Lemaine, a legal permanent resident, soon discovered that his quick guilty plea had dire consequences. Immigration authorities flew him in shackles to Texas, where he spent three years behind bars, including 10 months in solitary confinement, as he fought deportation to Haiti, the country he had left at age 3.

Under federal rulings that prevailed in Texas, Mr. Lemaine had lost the legal opportunity that rulings in New York would have allowed: to have an immigration judge weigh his offenses, including earlier misdemeanors resolved without jail time, against other aspects of his life, like his nursing studies at Hunter Business School; his care for his little sister, a United States citizen with a brain disorder; and the help he gave his divorced mother, who had worked double shifts to move the family out of a dangerous Brooklyn neighborhood.

Now Mr. Lemaine, 28, is among thousands of noncitizens whose fate may hinge on a case to be argued on Wednesday before the United States Supreme Court, in a challenge to the way the government interprets immigration laws about drug-related convictions. The government maintains that for deportation purposes, two convictions for drug possession add up to the equivalent of drug trafficking, an “aggravated felony” that requires expulsion and prohibits immigration courts from granting exceptions based on individual life circumstances.

Lemaine’s nightmare began when he was transferred–as tens of thousands of detainees are every year–to Texas, where the federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has upheld this interpretation of the law. In the criminal justice system, defendants have to be tried where their alleged offenses took place, immigration authorities “can send detainees anywhere in the country, without notice or legal counsel, and start deportation proceedings wherever they choose,” Bernstein writes. The fallout from this practice has only increased in the past year, since “the Obama administration has stepped up detention and deportation of so-called criminal aliens, including many legal immigrants with low-level drug convictions.”

Lemaine was fortunate enough to secure pro-bono legal counsel from a large New York law firm. (Some 86 percent of detainees who facing deportation in Texas, Berstein reports, have no lawyers at all.) His lawyer–who described the case as “surreal”–has had to contend with an absurd system “that requires immigration authorities to match the elements of a variety of state criminal statutes with federal criminal laws, and proceed as though the noncitizen had been convicted of the federal crime.”

In the meantime, Lemaine was transferred from a government-run detention center to private prisons run by the notorious GEO Group–where he eventually landed in the hole by no fault of his own. 

His lowest point, he said, came in the private Karnes County Correctional Center, which houses a mix of immigration detainees and federal prisoners. As he tells it, guards there let inmate gangs impose their own pecking order, and as the only black detainee in his dormitory, he seemed especially vulnerable. In the first days, the guards refused him utensils at mealtime, he said, leaving him alone eating stew and cereal with his hands. Later, half a dozen inmates beat him up in a racially motivated attack, he and his lawyers said.

Early on, after he wrote the medical staff that he was depressed, he was placed on a 10-day suicide watch in a filthy segregation unit where he did not see a psychiatrist for a week, he said. “They just break you down so much,” Mr. Lemaine said. “They just forget about you. Basically, you fend for yourself.”

He was returned to isolation for his own protection after being beaten up, and chose to stay there, he said, locked in a tiny cell 23 hours a day, rather than go back to the same dorm.

On January 11, officials abruptly decided to grant Lemaine supervised release, and “let him make his way back to New York on a Greyhound bus” where he rejoined his family. It was the same day that the earthquake devastated his country of birth. The White House has suspended deportations to Haiti–but if his case goes the wrong way, Lemoine could still be shipped back to Texas

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Filed Under: federal prisons, human rights, New York, private prisons, solitary confinement, Texas Tagged With: , , , , , ,