Herman Wallace died today, less than a week after his conviction was overturned. He spent the last four decades in solitary confinement at Louisiana’s Angola prison, fighting to prove his innocence, fighting against a barbaric criminal justice system, fighting to end the torture that is prolonged solitary confinement. Words can’t describe the injustice of this case, the horror of decades of isolation, the courage that kept Herman Wallace fighting till the end… Wherever you are, get involved, be the generation that ends solitary confinement in America. – Center For Constitutional Rights Reports
Washington Post– No physical evidence linked Wallace or Woodfox to the crime. Fingerprints at the scene did not match those of the defendants, but the prison did not attempt to test the prints against any but a handful of other inmates. Wallace and Woodfox maintained that they were framed because they had started a Black Panther Party chapter at Angola and had objected to the prison’s brutal conditions. Angola’s own museum Web site acknowledges that it was known in the late 1960s as “the Bloodiest Prison in the South.” From 1972 through 1975, more than 270 inmates were stabbed by other inmates . Corruption and sexual exploitation were rampant, and armed inmates patrolled the halls. One guard boasted in a published interview that “I’ve got just about every finger broke on both hands from punching” prisoners. Wallace and Woodfox led the protests of these conditions, and when a prison guard was found dead, they were charged with the crime. continue…
