The Taste of Freedom

By Kari Lydersen, AlterNet. Posted December 18, 2003.

The laundry room in Robert King's New Orleans home has been overtaken by pralines. Trays of them sit on every surface, and the sweet sticky smell of the pecan, sugar and cream concoctions pervades the small room and wafts throughout the rest of the house.

Pralines are a tradition in New Orleans, but King's have an extra spin on them. He calls them "Freelines," a reference to the freedom he gained on February 8, 2001. King had spent the previous three decades in the infamous Louisiana state penitentiary in Angola, an 18,000-acre prison built on the site of a former slave plantation that still functions as a farm with convicts, the majority of them serving life sentences, as the farmhands. There King would make pralines on a tiny stove made from a tin can and toilet paper.

King was not only incarcerated for 29 years at Angola, but he spent all of that time in solitary confinement. The state claims that was because when he arrived at Angola from the Orleans Parish Prison in 1972, where he had been sent for armed robbery, he was "under investigation" for the murder of guard Brent Miller that had recently occurred at Angola. Then in 1973 an inmate was killed in a fight at Angola, and witness testimony sans any physical evidence implicated King (who at the time was known as Robert King Wilkerson).

King always maintained his innocence in the inmate murder, and his codefendant, Grady Brewer, testified all along that he alone had committed the murder in self-defense. King's conviction hinged on the testimony of two inmates who later changed their stories, and revealed that they had been forced to implicate King.

Following that testimony King was released on a plea bargain. He and his international network of supporters maintain that it was not the murder of the inmate or the guard -- which occurred when King was over 100 miles away in New Orleans -- that led to his confinement in solitary, but rather his membership in the Black Panther Party and the fact that he was among the inmates carrying out literacy, self-esteem, anti-rape and other programs at the prison.

King is now free, but two of his close friends -- Albert Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace -- are still in solitary confinement, having been there over 30 years for Miller's murder. If it weren't for that charge, both would have already been released after serving the sentences for armed robbery that brought them to Angola in the first place. Like King, Woodfox and Wallace were vocal members of the Black Panther Party, active at a time when the party was gaining popularity in the prison and officials were trying their best to suppress it, placing party members in solitary confinement and forcing prisoners to shave their Afros.

There is no physical evidence linking Woodfox and Wallace to Miller's killing, and there are plenty of examples of prosecutorial and judicial misconduct in their convictions, including the exclusion of women and African-Americans from the juries. It was later revealed that the only supposed eye-witness in the cases, inmate Hezekiah Brown, received regular payments of cigarettes for his testimony, and later he was even pardoned and released thanks to the warden's intervention. In 1992 Woodfox was granted a new trial since women and African-Americans were excluded from his jury.

Again, the system seemed almost laughably stacked against him. Among other things, one of the grand jurors convened for an investigation preceding his retrial was Anne Butler, the wife of warden Murray Henderson, who had presided over the original Miller murder investigation. The two had co-written a sensational book about the murder, and admitted they had distributed the book to other grand jurors. When the trial was finally started in 1998, Woodfox was granted a change of venue, presumably to a more neutral location. But the new venue turned out to be Amite, the small town where Miller's family lives. Not surprisingly, Woodfox was again convicted. (And bizarrely enough, the warden Henderson is now incarcerated himself for shooting Butler five times.)

Along with the men's ongoing appeals of their criminal convictions, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a civil lawsuit on behalf of the three men, charging that their three decades in solitary confinement violate the 8th and 14th Amendments, constituting cruel and unusual punishment and the denial of due process. The suit, which names warden Burl Cain as the defendant, was filed in 2001.

In October 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the state that would have prevented the suit, clearing the way for it to go forward. There have been other lawsuits about the conditions of solitary confinement around the country, including suits regarding the Supermax solitary units at the Tamms Supermax Correctional Center in Illinois and Pelican Bay State Prison in California. The MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Chicago filed suit on behalf of mentally ill inmates at Tamms, including many who became mentally ill or had pre-existing conditions horribly exacerbated by the conditions at Tamms.

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