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Wallace was thrown into lock down the day of Brent Miller's murder. Within a few days, officials had obtained the evidence they needed to charge Wallace and three other so-called "militants"--Woodfox, Chester Jackson, and Gilbert Montegut--with the crime. They were indicted by an all-white, all-male grand jury in nearby St. Francisville, Louisiana, which was home to many prison staff, their families, and friends.
A river town near the Mississippi border, St. Francisville proudly advertises itself as plantation country. It was also Klan country, and until the civil rights movement and the FBI arrived in the early 1960s, no African American had registered to vote in the parish in more than 60 years. The defendants in the Miller case contested the indictment on the grounds that women and blacks had been systematically excluded from the jury pool. They were subsequently re-indicted by another grand jury, chosen through "the same or substantially the same grand jury selection procedures," according to Wallace's current brief.
Albert Woodfox was convicted of Miller's murder in a separate trial in 1973.
After being granted a change of venue, the three remaining defendants--Wallace,
Jackson, and Montegut--stood trial in East Baton Rouge in January 1974--before
yet another all-white, all-male jury.
The prosecutors in the case presented no physical evidence to tie the three men
to the crime. Although bloody fingerprints had been found near the guard's
body, they matched none of the defendants'. According to evidence presented in
Wallace's petition, no effort was made to match them to any of the 5,000 other
inmate prints on file. A bloody knife, likewise, could not be connected to any
of the men on trial. The evidence against them consisted entirely of testimony
by other Angola
prisoners obtained under highly dubious circumstances.
The prosecution's star witness was Hezekiah Brown, whose eyewitness testimony was indispensible to its case. An aging prisoner serving a life sentence for aggravated rape, Brown said that he had been in the dormitory on the morning of Brent Miller's death, and had seen the defendants stab the guard repeatedly. Former Angola prisoners have said in interviews that Brown was a notorious snitch. But it would be nearly 25 years before proof emerged [4] showing just what happened behind the scenes to secure his testimony.
In 1998, lawyers for Wallace's co-defendant, Albert Woodfox, succeeded in obtaining previously suppressed witness statements, taped interviews, and other documents from the murder investigation carried out by prison officials, the county sheriff's office, and local prosecutors. These materials, supplemented by testimony by Warden Henderson and others, show that Hezekiah Brown was encouraged, if not coerced, to identify the prisoners already chosen as suspects. Henderson admitted he promised to seek a pardon for the lifer if Brown helped them "crack the case." A series of letters to judges, pardon board members, and the secretary of corrections shows that Warden Henderson kept his word, though it would be more than 10 years before Brown's pardon came through. In the meantime, Brown benefitted from an array of special favors, including reassignment to a private room at the low-security "dog pen" where the prison's bloodhounds were trained and a carton of cigarettes, the crucial prison currency, every week.
Another inmate witness, Joseph Richey, placed Wallace and the others at the scene of the crime; he was later found to be a schizophrenic who was heavily medicated with Thorazine. After the trial, Richey was transferred to a plum job at the governor's mansion and given weekend furloughs (during which he robbed several banks). Previously suppressed documents, obtained through the discovery process by Albert Woodfox's lawyers in 1998, show that Angola officials didn't believe Richey had seen anything. The state possessed these documents at the time of Wallace's trial, and presented his possibly perjured testimony nonetheless.
Howard Baker, yet another prisoner who testified at Wallace's trial, has since sworn an affidavit completely recanting his testimony. Baker had initially been a suspect in Miller's murder, and may have been seeking to protect himself. In the affidavit, Baker states:
So I looked at the situation like this, I got 60 something years, and I got a chance to help myself so I was going to do something to help me get out of this cesspool".So, I gave a statement on 10/16/72, to Warden Dees, which was a lie. And my testimony based on that statement was a lie. I really thought this would help me because Dees told me my statement would get my sentence commuted".It was all over the penitentiary that they [Wallace and Woodfox] were the ones that administration thought was involved. So I gave a statement.
The state played its ace-in-the-hole in the middle of the trial, when one of the four co-defendants walked in after a recess and sat down at the prosecution's table. Chester Jackson had turned state's witness, and would now testify against the others. The defense attorney, Charles Garretson, later testified that he "was in a complete state of shock"it took everything I could glean together to maintain professionalism and sanity and intelligence to go forward after this lunch break." The court gave him less than 30 minutes to prepare to cross-examine his own former client. Although he denied it on the stand, Jackson had clearly cut a deal; shortly after the trial, he would plead guilty to manslaughter. Garretson later said that he felt he was "the only one in the courthouse that didn't know this. I felt that--I know all the deputies knew it. I felt the judge knew it."
These allegations of widespread and deliberate suppression of evidence form the core of Herman Wallace's current appeal. His habeas petition states, "Mr. Wallace's defense strategy was to show that the State's inmate witnesses must be either mistaken or lying. Although the State possessed precisely the information Mr. Wallace's defense counsel sought--material which would show that the State's witnesses lacked credibility and the State's prosecution lacked integrity--the State disclosed none of it." This withholding of evidence, Wallace says, violated his constitutional right to due process.
Wallace's remaining co-defendant, Gilbert Montegut, had a prison guard to confirm his alibi, and was acquitted. Herman Wallace was convicted of the murder. His conviction happened to fall during a brief period when the Supreme Court had effectively struck down capital punishment--had it come at any other time, Wallace would likely have received a death sentence. Instead, he got life without parole and was placed in lockdown, along with Woodfox. The reason given for their confinement in solitary was the nature of the crime--the murder of a guard, which rendered them a threat to others in the prison community. Both Wallace and Woodfox remain there, ostensibly on the same grounds, 35 years later.
If the story of Herman Wallace's trial reads like a study in Southern
justice, its sequel shows what has changed in Louisiana in the intervening
decades--and what has remained the same. Wallace and Woodfox now have a small
legion of active supporters and an impressive team of lawyers renowned for
their death penalty appeals, including Nick Trenticosta, director of the Center
for Equal Justice, in New Orleans, and George
Kendall at the pro bono unit of Squire Sanders & Dempsey in New York. But even good
lawyers can't vitiate the Louisiana
justice system's apparent determination to keep Wallace and Woodfox locked up
and locked down, for reasons that appear to go far beyond the facts of the 1972
murder of Brent Miller.
The two men believe that they were originally targeted for the murder because
their political beliefs and activism represented a threat to the absolute power
of prison authorities. Statements from Angola's current warden, Burl Cain,
suggest they are being kept permanently in solitary for much the same reason.
Cain has been widely celebrated [5] for
"transforming" Angola,
largely through the institution of Christian "moral rehabilitation,"
which he sees as the only path to redemption for the sinners in his charge.
There is no room, either in Cain's worldview or on his prison plantation, for
people who question authority like Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have.
In a 2008 deposition, Cain declared, "The prison operates with one
authentic authoritarian figure, the warden and the rule book." He also
said that Woodfox's lack of deference made him a dangerous man: "The thing
about him is that he wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be
defiant. He wants to show to others that he is powerful and strong."
Woodfox's lawyers have pointed out that he had no record of violence and few
disciplinary infractions in the past 20 years. They documented a similar record
for Wallace in a 2006
deposition [6] [PDF]: "Mr. Wallace's
most recent disciplinary report for institutional violence occurred some 22
years ago," it said, and in recent years, Wallace's handful of infractions
included "possessing handmade earrings and a poem, 'A Defying
Voice'"; "wearing a handmade necklace with a black fist"; and
"possessing the publication, It's About Time, a Black Panther publication
16 containing articles/photos on the Angola three, characterized as, quote,
'racist literature' by security personnel." His most recent disciplinary
report "was December 2005, when he was found in the possession of excess
number of postage stamps, for which he received thirty days cell
confinement."
But Cain believes "It's not a matter of write-ups. It's a matter of
attitude and what you are." And to Cain, what Woodfox and Wallace are and
will always be is Black Panthers. Associate Warden Hayden Dees previously said
that "a certain type of militant or revolutionary inmate, maybe even a
communist type" was dangerous enough to be kept in permanent lockdown. In
2008, Cain said that Woodfox belongs in solitary because "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 kind of problems, more than I could stand, and I
would have the blacks chasing after them."
