Solitary

Woodfox opens Chapter 33 describing watching the televised moment where Nelson Mandela walked out of prison in 1990, after 27 years behind bars. Mandela, who’d been arrested for resisting apartheid in South Africa, was a source of inspiration throughout Woodfox’s time in solitary confinement. Woodfox began a renewed attempt to end his own unjust confinement; because a court had never ruled on Woodfox’s motion to quash the grand jury indictment of him for killing Angola prison guard Brent Miller (on the grounds that the jury contained no minorities or women and was therefore unconstitutional), Woodfox was successful in obtaining a new trial, although it would take six years for that trial to actually occur.

In the meantime, Woodfox was devastated by the loss of his mother, in 1994. His mother, Ruby Edwards, had persevered through great hardship, Woodfox writes, including growing up in the Jim Crow south, where black people were subject to constant oppression and disrespect, and having to fight Woodfox’s biological family for custody of her son. When she died, Woodfox only found out through a letter of condolence from Herman Wallace: “one of the cruelties of being in prison is that you are always the last to know what’s going on in your own family” (222). Woodfox was further hurt when the warden of the prison denied his request to attend his mother’s funeral, even though it was custom at the prison for inmates to be allowed to do so.

In Chapter 35, Woodfox returns to the preparations for his retrial for the murder of Brent Miller. Among other discoveries, Woodfox and his lawyers found that prison officials had paid one of the witnesses, Hezekiah Brown, who’d testified for the prosecution, with cigarettes. They also discovered letters from the warden asking a judge to support a pardon for that inmate.

In August 1996, Woodfox was released from Angola, having served half of his 50-year original sentence—for armed robbery—and taken to another jail, where he’d be held while awaiting his retrial for the murder of Brent Miller, but not before having to walk past members of Brent Miller’s family, who were waiting at the gate of Angola, threatening to kill him.

At the new institution, Amite City Jail, Woodfox was once again in solitary confinement and held in a cell 23 hours a day. Eventually he was moved into a part of a jail in which he was housed for other inmates, mostly Cubans, whom he assisted with their letters and immigration paperwork. In this section, the doors of cells were open all day. After 24 years, Woodfox writes that being able to move around freely outside of a cell, and to have people moving around him, was “unnerving at first” (232). Though he came to adjust to the increased mobility, he didn’t let down his guard around other inmates, many of whom only stayed in the wing a short time before being moved elsewhere.

Years passed, and finally Woodfox’s trial was set to take place in November 1998. In the lead up to the trial, his case had drawn the attention of Scott Fleming, a law student, and Malik Rahim, a former Panther Woodfox had met while they were incarcerated together at Orleans Parish Prison. Together, they drew attention to Woodfox’s upcoming trial, raising awareness in a way Woodfox had hoped on previous occasions would happen, but had been disappointed. This time, a network of former Panther’s mobilized to follow Woodfox’s trial closely, and Woodfox went into the proceedings feeling hopeful.

But once the trial began, Woodfox writes that he quickly realized his lawyers were outmatched by the prosecution, who told jurors that Woodfox had killed Brent Miller out of hatred for white people, and that his connection to the Black Panthers was proof of that hatred, and tried to confuse the jurors’ about a bloody fingerprint left at the scene on the day of the murder, which didn’t match Woodfox, by calling it a partial palm print and failing to notify Woodfox’s lawyers about the palm print theory before the trial. In turn, Woodfox was frustrated that his lawyers had not found all three potential alibi witnesses to testify in Woodfox’s defense and had not consulted forensic experts who could have helped with the case. But despite that frustration—and the guilty verdict the jury ultimately delivered—Woodfox ends the chapter remembering what he’d said in an interview after the verdict: he had no regrets.

In the final chapter of this section, Woodfox returned to Angola as prisoners in the solitary confinement unit, CCR, were preparing to begin a hunger strike over increasingly strict conditions. For their involvement in the strike, Woodfox, Wallace, and King were sent to Camp J, the prison’s punishment unit, where they were held in their cells 23 hours and 45 minutes a day, and released only for showers, were denied reading material, and had little access to exercise. Though prisoners were supposed to be released after six months, guards had discretion to hold prisoners in the unit almost indefinitely, which amounted to “severe psychological torture” (254).

Woodfox closes the section by describing a new legal strategy, an appeal of his conviction on the grounds that the state had withheld evidence that the witness, Hezekiah Brown, had been paid, and on the grounds that the grand jury had been improperly selected—a case, Woodfox ends by noting, could go all the way to federal court.