Solitary

Chapter 48 opens with Woodfox grieving more losses: a childhood friend who had been the same age as Woodfox; a former Panther who’d helped with Woodfox’s case, and Althea Francois, a founding member of the Angola 3’s support committee. Despite his decades of isolation from the people he loved, Woodfox writes that the separation brought about by death was different, and hard to bear. Meanwhile, the kind of separation he’d endured for nearly forty years–solitary confinement—was coming to be seen by many people in the international community as a form of cruel and unusual punishment, and in 2011, the United Nations released a statement calling solitary confinement a form of torture.

In Chapter 49, Woodfox notes that this torture was not felt equally: in Louisiana, 1 in 86 adults was incarcerated. For black men in New Orleans, that figure was 1 in 14, a state of affairs, Woodfox writes, that can be attributed to the fact that many Louisiana prisons are for-profit institutions that depend on a constant influx of new prisoners to stay profitable. Meanwhile, in 2012, Woodfox was awaiting the results of a ruling on a different question of discrimination: whether the selection of the jury foreperson at his 1993 indictment had been discriminatory. In early 2013, the judge ruled that it had been and overturned Woodfox’s conviction, also granting Woodfox bail. Once again, Attorney General Buddy Caldwell resisted, citing the same false rape accusations he’d made years before.

While waiting for the trial to move forward, Woodfox received news that Wallace, who had been feeling ill, had advanced liver cancer and only had a few months to live. Lawyers began fighting to get Wallace out of isolation and into a hospital and worked to allow the Angola 3 to meet to discuss their civil suit against solitary confinement. When Woodfox first saw Wallace, he writes that he felt optimistic that his friend would beat the cancer; by the next meeting, at which Wallace was frail and disoriented, it was clear that would not happen. In the course of Woodfox’s final visit with Wallace, the team received news that a judge had overturned Wallace’s conviction for the murder of Brent Miller and granted him immediate release. Wallace was brought out of prison on a stretcher and taken to the hospital. The next day, he was taken to the home of a supporter for hospice care where he died two days later but not before the state of Louisiana had reindicted him for murder. Woodfox writes that “the vengeance by the state of Louisiana against us had long been incomprehensible to me, but this moved pushed at the boundary of sanity,” (366).

In the weeks after Wallace’s death, Amnesty International delivered a petition to Governor Bobby Jindal. This time, Woodfox was the only person they were campaigning for, a fact that made Woodfox feel more isolated than ever. Yet through the organization, Woodfox was also receiving signs of the extent of the public support for his cause, including thousands of letters from supporters. That support buoyed Woodfox’s spirits as he waited for the court’s determination on whether he could get a new trial—a wait that was tinged with dread, as the panel of judges were known to be some of the most conservative on the Fifth Circuit. Nonetheless, in 2014, the judges ruled in Woodfox’s favor, ruling that, “for well over a century, the Supreme Court has held that a criminal conviction of an African-American cannot stand under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if it is based on an indictment of a grand jury from which African-Americans were excluded on the basis of race” (375). This meant Woodfox would get a new trial. While waiting for that trial to move forward, Woodfox watched the news—which included coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement—and felt frustration that the same fights that had existed in his youth were ongoing.

In June 2015, a judge issued a ruling ordering Woodfox be release from prison and barring a new trial, citing Woodfox’s age and health problems, the lack of available witnesses (which would make it hard to present a defense at trial), and the prejudice Woodfox had experienced in spending forty years in solitary confinement. The state appealed and asked for a stay of Woodfox’s release. While Woodfox waited for the ruling, he made a list of things he wanted to do once released, including visit his mother’s grave and his daughter. However, the Fifth Circuit granted the stay, which meant Woodfox would have to stay in prison while awaiting the results of the appeal. Woodfox writes that in this moment he felt not only sadness for himself, but those around him. “some of the most difficult times for me in prison were moments like these, when it wasn’t only a loss for me, but for everybody who worked so hard on my behalf and who cared about me” (383).

Woodfox’s lawyers turned to preparing for a trial, including seeking to have some testimony excluded—because it was discredited and also because the witnesses were deceased—and investigating new leads for the murder, including accounts that other inmates had claimed responsibility or had seen the perpetrators. While Woodfox writes that he wasn’t sure about the value of these accounts, one element that remained consistent was the fact that he had Wallace were not involved.

Leading up to the criminal trial, Woodfox’s team experienced a number of setbacks, including a ruling that the trial could take place in West Feliciana Parish—where the defense though it unlikely they could get a fair trial, given past experience there—and that they could have a nonunanimous jury, meaning a conviction with only 10 out of 12 jurors, a system that had been originally instituted to marginalize the votes of black jurors.

Meanwhile Louisiana had elected a new attorney general, Republican Jeff Landry. Given the setbacks and uncertainties, Woodfox’s lawyers asked him if he would consider taking a deal for time served, instead of the retrial. The suggested a plea of nolo contendere, in which Woodfox would not admit guilt but his conviction would stand. This could secure his immediate release. Woodfox decided to take the plea, a decision, he writes, that he continues to think about every day: “I was being forced to choose freedom over the integrity of my word, which was everything to me” (401).

At the close of chapter 54, Woodfox describes walking out of prison with his brother, who had first started visiting him in prison at the age of eight. That evening, they went to the same theatre Woodfox had snuck into as a child, where an event was held to celebrate Woodfox’s return, with community members and longtime friends such as Robert King and Malik Rahim. The next day, Woodfox finally got to fulfill his longtime desire to see his mother’s grave and then those of his sister, his childhood friend, and Herman Wallace.

In the epilogue, Woodfox describes how, in the year after his release, he had to relearn basic actions that he hadn’t done for decades: buckling a seatbelt, pushing an elevator button, closing a door. In time, he also began to lose the fear that all that he loved would be taken away from him.

In closing the chapter, Woodfox writes that Wallace continues to be with him and King as they advocate for changes to practices that result in wrongful convictions, have a disproportionate impact on the poor, and lead to the overuse of solitary confinement, with devastating consequences for people’s physical and mental well-being. Addressing these issues, Woodfox says, means challenging systemic racism in the American justice system, as well as the prison-industrial complex that uses prisoners as a source of profit. In closing, Woodfox points to his own experience, and says despite everything he endured in his struggle for justice, he did not lose his humanity, inviting those who care about the humanity of others to join the fight.