When I met with Grassian I felt vulnerable. I wasn’t used to sharing my deepest feelings with anyone. But I knew the barbaric practice of solitary confinement had to stop. “The only way to survive the cell is to adjust to the painfulness of it,” I told him. I couldn’t answer all his questions, but I tried my best. “When you leave, you go back to your life,” I said. “I go back to my six-by-nine-foot cell and have just minutes to erect all these layers, put all these defenses back.” Every time I had a visit I had to break down the layers that I used to protect my sanity and my physical safety on the tier. When I went back to the cell, I had to put all those layers back. I had to shut my emotional system down. I buried my emotions, so that things that would normally touch me or move me didn’t touch me or move me. And I only had approximately five to ten minutes between the visiting room and the cell to do it. “It is the most painful, agonizing thing I could imagine,” I said. “But I have to do it in order to survive.”
Herman told Grassian he missed experiences like sitting under a willow tree after working in the field to catch a breeze in the shade. He struggled to describe what confinement in a six-by-nine-foot cell felt like. Tears came to his eyes. “Pain. How do you describe pain,” Herman said, hands trembling, Grassian wrote in his report. “When I start to feel the pain, it comes too much—like a flood. I have to stop it. . . . You suppress so much.” King, who was already out on the street, was also interviewed by Grassian. “Perhaps the most common theme expressed by the three men during the interviews,” Grassian wrote, “was that of sadness and loss, and the desperate need not to feel those feelings, for fear of being overwhelmed by them.”
Several years later a psychologist hired by the state was sent to interview me, Herman, and King. With this psychologist, I answered questions without digging into my personal feelings. By the end of the second interview, though, I was getting irritated at his line of questioning and his constant insinuation that because I could have books in my cell and I could exercise outside three times a week for an hour, year after year of being locked down 23 hours a day was tolerable for a human being and was somehow acceptable. At the end of my second interview with him he asked me if there was anything I wanted to ask him. “Do you think that watching TV and being able to buy candy in the canteen makes a difference to somebody held for almost 40 years in maximum-security isolation?” I asked. He didn’t respond. “Do you think being able to make phone calls alleviates the pain of sitting in a cell 23 hours a day, year after year? It doesn’t,” I told him. “If you can’t get out of the cell nothing they give you makes a difference. The pressure of being in the cell never goes away. The fight for sanity never goes away. You want me to believe that I’m OK when you know I’m not OK. I can’t give you specifics on how being in solitary has affected me but I can tell you without a doubt it has affected me.”
George Kendall asked me on his next visit what I had said to the state’s psychologist. He told me the state wanted to send a second psychologist to interview me. Maybe the first psychologist dropped out because he had an attack of conscience, I told him. Maybe he realized that being locked in a cell for 23 hours a day year after year was cruel and unusual punishment. We couldn’t know for sure. Herman and I didn’t want to meet with another psychologist from the state. The state’s lawyers fought us on that but George and his team prevailed.
George did need us to talk to another psychologist for our side, however, so they could prepare for our civil trial. He set up meetings for us with Craig Haney, a professor of psychology and researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was world renowned for studying the effects of solitary confinement on prisoners. Haney’s research shows that only 15 days in solitary confinement can create anxiety, withdrawal, irritability, hallucinations, aggression, paranoia, rage, loss of control, a sense of impending emotional breakdown, hypersensitivity, self-mutilation, and thoughts of suicide.
Herman and I met with Haney on separate contact visits at Angola, and he also talked to King. During one of my meetings with Haney I ordered food in the visiting room. When my meal came the guards wouldn’t loosen the chain on my handcuffs so I could eat. They would only remove the chain if I went behind the screen, so Haney and I ended up meeting with the screen between us. Haney was compassionate and knowledgeable about the impact of solitary confinement, and I liked him, but once again I felt as though I could only give enough to satisfy the purpose of the sessions, which was to establish that I’d been affected by being in solitary for so long. I had to hold on to everything else to stay sane. The fear that I might start screaming and never stop was always with me. I don’t say that lightly. I described my claustrophobic attacks and my problems with sleeping—the fact that I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours at a time. I told Haney I talked to myself all the time, that I had debates aloud with myself because there was nobody else to talk to. When I told him about not being able to go to the funerals of my mom and my sister, I cried. To get out of depression, I told Haney, “I refind my core and what I believe in,” describing how I held on to the principles, morals, dignity, and duty that I learned from the Black Panther Party. I told him I worried about becoming desensitized. “There is a part of me,” I said, “that is gone, that has been taken—my soul. I had to sacrifice that part in order to survive. It was the price of being able to make it with my principles intact.”
Herman expressed similar feelings about how difficult it was to deal with emotions, telling Haney, “I stay away from things, emotional things that I skillfully put aside. I feel like there is a dam of emotions, feelings, and tears that could burst forth. I must be able to hold back. It’s a reflex, the way we function in here, it is a survival mechanism. You have to repress and deny your feelings. You worry about what would happen if you release your feelings and your tears. . . . You can’t break down, you can’t moan out loud—if I don’t [keep control] I don’t know what will happen to me. I’ve seen too many guys let their emotions come loose and they’ve never returned from it. I fight every day against that.”
In his report Haney wrote, “All three men have relied on a belief system that has helped to keep them strong in the face of severe deprivations. They see themselves as representing something larger than themselves—as leaders who have stood up in the name of improving the prison system at Angola—and they do not want to succumb, or even give any indication that they might be weakening, out of concern for what this would mean to others who look to them for guidance, strength and example. Thus, it is especially difficult for them to admit their own vulnerability to the harsh conditions around them.”
Chapter 46
2008
On January 14, 2008, James “Buddy” Caldwell, an Elvis impersonator and the former district attorney for the Sixth Judicial District in Louisiana, was sworn in as the new attorney general for the state of Louisiana. One of his first moves was to hire the prosecutor at my 1973 trial, John Sinquefield—Caldwell’s childhood friend—to be “first assistant,” the number two position in the office. Unsurprisingly, we were on Caldwell’s radar right away. There was the Sinquefield connection, and the fact that my case was in the attorney general’s office; it had been transferred there before my 1998 trial. Also, George Kendall’s team was pressing ahead with our civil lawsuit, filing motions and deposing dozens of witnesses, including current and former Angola officials. Our support committee had done a tremendous job challenging what they considered to be the lies and misrepresentations of the state’s case against us. The pressure was on the state to respond, and Buddy Caldwell saw an opportunity to make a name for himself. It wasn’t long before he would launch a smear campaign against me.
But first, I got news that Brent Miller’s widow, Leontine “Teenie” Rogers, had written a letter supporting me and Herman, asking the state to admit its mistakes in the case, reopen the case, and find the real killers of her husband. Rogers had learned our side of the story a few years before, from an investigator, Billie Mizell, who was initially ask
ed by our attorneys to look into our case. When I first heard that Billie wanted to talk to Brent Miller’s widow I wasn’t optimistic. Teenie Rogers was 17 years old when her husband was killed. She grew up hearing the story that “racist” Black Panthers killed her husband because he was white. She would later say she didn’t know why she let Billie into her house on that first visit. But she thought of Brent, the “love of her life,” every day. Maybe his murder always felt unresolved for her. In the year after Miller’s death, Rogers sought damages from the state since her husband had lost his life at his workplace. The state responded by maligning Miller, saying it was his fault he got killed because he should have been in the guard booth, not in a prisoner dorm. Rogers’s case was dismissed and she received just $45 a week in workmen’s compensation for a limited period of time.
Teenie Rogers told Billie Mizell on that first visit that she didn’t go to my trial, because it was too painful, but she’d always believed what she had been told: that bloody fingerprints left at the scene of Brent’s murder and other evidence proved they had the murderers who killed Brent. Over a series of visits with Rogers, Billie laid out the evidence that pointed to Herman’s and my innocence—the bloody fingerprint that didn’t match us and was never tested against the prisoners who lived on the walk, the bloody tennis shoes that were never given to the crime lab or brought up at our trials, all the contradictory testimony that pointed to lying “witnesses.” In between Billie’s visits, Rogers would later say, she did her own investigation, including talking to former Angola guards. She came to believe that a terrible miscarriage of justice had taken place. She wrote to Governor Bobby Jindal, asking him to find out who killed her husband.
In January 2008, our stories were taken to Washington, DC. King, Tory Pegram, Chuck Blitz, Gordon Roddick, and several other members of our advisory board, including Barry Scheck, the cofounder of the Innocence Project; Denny LeBoeuf, a Louisiana death penalty defense attorney who was directing the ACLU’s efforts in Guantánamo at the time; Joan Claybrook, the founding executive director of Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen; Ira Glasser, the former executive director of the ACLU’s national office; Ira Arlook of Fenton Communications; Webb Hubbell, President Bill Clinton’s associate attorney general and former chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court; the actor and anti–death penalty activist Mike Farrell; and Gordon’s close friend and colleague Ben Cohen from Ben & Jerry’s, met with as many legislators and other potential national advocates as they could.
At one of these meetings Louisiana state representative Cedric Richmond (Orleans Parish), who was chair of the Louisiana House Judiciary Committee, Teenie Rogers, Billie Mizell, Tory, and King met with Rep. John Conyers, who was head of the federal House Judiciary Committee at the time and had assembled some of his colleagues. Our case was laid out. Then Billie introduced Teenie, who read aloud the letter she wrote to Governor Jindal.
Brent and I both grew up on what everyone calls “The B-Line,” which is a neighborhood behind the gate of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. As kids, we knew that Angola was a prison and a farm—but we just called it “home.” Angola is where we lived, it is where we went to church, it is where we went fishing and hiking and played ball with our friends, and it is where Brent and I said our wedding vows. Not a day has passed in the last 36 years that I have not thought of Brent and the love we shared and the life we could have had. April 17, 1972 still feels like yesterday to me. I dropped Brent off that morning where he clocked in for duty and then I drove to beauty school in Baton Rouge. A few hours later, my sister showed up to tell me that Brent was dead. My brother, who was also a guard at Angola and on duty that day, had to see Brent’s body—he never returned to work after that. My father also quit his job and we all left Angola. My husband, and my home, were taken from me by the men who stabbed Brent 32 times.
For over three decades, I believed those men were Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace. In 1972, I wanted both of them dead and would have killed them with my own hands if I could have. Even though I was too devastated to read the newspapers or attend the trials, I had no reason to doubt that the men who had been charged were the men who murdered my husband. Everyone on the B-Line had heard that a bloody fingerprint had been found at the crime scene, and when a fingerprint is discovered inside a prison, it does not take much effort to find out who left it there—the population is captive and each inmate has a set of fingerprints already on file with the state. I assumed that a fingerprint left in my husband’s blood provided the administration with an open and shut case against his killers. I had also heard that a bloody tennis shoe and a bloody knife had been found and that Woodfox and Wallace themselves had blood on their clothes so, for 33 years, I never doubted that the right men were behind bars. . . . What I found out was that there was a lot I did not know.
Since that day . . . I have learned that the bloody fingerprint found at the crime scene did not match Woodfox or Wallace. I was even more shocked to find out that no real attempt was made to find out who the fingerprint did belong to, which should have been a very simple thing to do. I have learned that the bloody tennis shoe never made it to the crime lab. I have learned that the knife could not be tied to Brent’s death at all. I have learned that the clothes that the state claimed belonged to Albert Woodfox were missing from the crime lab for a week and only had a few tiny specks of what might have been blood. Since my husband was stabbed 32 times, that seems a bit unbelievable to me. I have learned that the entire case against Wallace and Woodfox came down to inmate testimony—because NO physical evidence could tie them to the crime—and yet more inmates testified on their behalf than testified against them. I have learned that the state’s witnesses received rewards ranging from transfers to pardons to cigarettes and most of them have now admitted that they lied. I have learned that there was such a rush to judgement that a man named Robert King was also taken to solitary confinement and eventually told he was there under investigation for Brent’s murder. He was left in solitary for 29 years, even though he could not possibly have committed the killing since he did not even arrive to Angola until days after Brent was murdered. I have recently met Mr. King, who is a gentle and kind man and is somehow not bitter about what was done to him.
I do not know what it is like to spend three decades in solitary for something I did not do, but I do know what it is like to lose a loved one to a senseless murder. Every time another newspaper article or TV news story runs and every time a reporter calls me, I have to relive April 17, 1972 all over again. I do not know if you have ever lost someone you love to such a brutal crime, but I can tell you that it changes you—the grief overwhelms you, the “what ifs” haunt you. And now I have to live with another tragedy—the two innocent men, who have already spent 36 years in solitary confinement, who remain in prison for a crime that they did not commit. This is a tragedy that the state of Louisiana seems willing to live with. I am not. I hope you aren’t either. . . . After over 36 years, there can be no excuse to deny justice for one more day. It is time for the state of Louisiana to finally compare the bloody prints found at the crime scene to every inmate who was incarcerated at Angola on the date of Brent’s murder and find out who left his fingerprint on the wall of that prison dormitory before he walked out and left Brent there to die. I believe the recent promises to clean up the past corruption of Louisiana, so I am asking you to use the power of your office and your personal commitment to justice to put an end to this. Brent Miller was an employee of this state who was just doing his job. The state of Louisiana owes him justice.
After Rogers read her letter, nobody said anything. Some in the room were crying. While our group was still in his office, Congressman Conyers, who had described all black prisoners “political prisoners” at that New Orleans prison conference back in 1972, wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking the Department of Justice to open an investigation into our cases. He wrote to FBI director Robert Mueller asking for any files on our case. And he wrote to Warden
Burl Cain, asking to visit me and Herman at Angola, along with “other members of Congress and interested persons” he planned to bring with him.
That same month, January 2008, Herman, King, and I were deposed separately by the state’s lawyers in preparation for our civil trial. Louisiana’s attorneys asked me if I had sufficient clothing and I told them I did because I had family members and supporters who sent me money so I could buy clothes. Indigent prisoners, on the other hand, would put in a request for underwear and wait six months for a pair, I told them. They asked if we had fans in the summer. Yes, we did; but when it’s over 100 degrees in the cell, fans don’t help. They asked me if we were alleging anyone abused us in the lawsuit. “Not physical abuse,” I said. “We’re claiming the fact that we’ve been here in the cell so long constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.” Our suit wasn’t about the beatings, the dungeon, or the abuse by inmate guards or freemen that happened to us and all prisoners at Angola. It wasn’t about yard time or blankets or medical care. Still, while deposing us, the state’s lawyers repeatedly asked us questions trying to get us to say, one way or another, that being locked down 23 hours a day in CCR wasn’t that bad. We had color TVs, we had ventilation, we had mattresses. Repeatedly we told them our complaint was not about having TVs. It was about how being locked down for 23 hours a day was cruel and unusual punishment and a violation of our constitutional rights. Our complaint was also that we were not given true meaningful equal treatment compared with other prisoners because, while dozens of other prisoners came and went in CCR, we weren’t able to get out. We were denied our right to due process.
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