Comments on Current Events In Criminal Law from the Federal Criminal Courts in Texas

November 05, 2007

THE ANGOLA TWO

There are actually state punishments worse than death. The Angola Two have experienced such a punishment.

It was through the “Prisoner Grievance Committee” that I came to know an inmate named Irvin “Life” Breaux. A New Orleans native, Life was serving a life sentence for killing another inmate who made homosexual advances toward him. Life was one of the many “militants” who had been locked up in 1972 following the stabbing death of a prison guard named Brent Miller at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. I chronicled Life’s story and his tragic death in an article entitled “A Prison Tragedy” published in the prison’s newsmagazine, THE ANGOLITE (July-Aug. 1979). I won the prestigious American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award in 1980 for the article.

During the brief six-month period that I knew Life before his death in August 1973, we became close friends. We were “comrades in the struggle.” Together, we integrated the Big Yard at the state penitentiary without a single incident of violence in July of 1973 – no minor accomplishment inasmuch as Angola was then hailed as the “bloodiest prison in America.”

It was during this period that Life confessed to me that he had killed Brent Miller. He said Miller’s death was an inadvertent “casualty of war.” Life and a number of other “black militants” had a plan to simultaneously kill twelve well-known African-American “snitches” housed on the Big Yard. The purpose of the plan was to put Angola on the national media map; to make it a “cause” for the black militant political movement then prevalent in the nation’s prison system.. The group believed that the killing of twelve “Uncle Toms” in a Southern prison by “black militants” would launch their political cause with State Rep. Dorothy Mae Taylor in the forefront as its leader..

The militants had all the prison-made “shanks” that were to be used in the “assassinations” stashed in a locker in Pine One Dormitory. Life and two others were putting the shanks in a large, bulky prison-made jacket. The shanks were going to be delivered to assassins who would simultaneously carry out the “hit” on each assigned snitch. But Miller unexpectedly walked into the dorm. He saw the inmates, the shanks, and he tried to flee for help. He did not make it. Life caught him and led the knife assault that killed the young guard.

I don’t know if that is true. It is what Life told me. It was a confidence I kept to myself as he expected. When Life was killed, it was rumored in Angola that his death had been official payback for his role in Miller’s killing. I didn’t know how much credence to place in those rumors then – and I still don’t to this day.

In 2001 after the publication of my prison memoir, “A Life in the Balance,” I was contacted by a New York supporter of Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, two of the inmates convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the Miller killing. The supporter had a gut feeling that I had knowledge about Miller’s killing because of my many years in Angola and the role I played in the prison’s history during that early 1970s era.
I told the supporter what Life had told me in confidence. I would never have revealed the confidence had I not been asked by the supporter of the Angola Two, as Wallace and Woodfox have become known. The confidence Life shared with me was part of a past long buried in a mind that did not want to revisit the issue. But when asked to tell what I knew, I could not turn away from the request.

I didn’t want that request put upon me. I was embroiled in a bitter struggle with the Louisiana political system in 2001 to secure parole. The State had invested thirty years of effort in keeping two innocent men locked away from society forever in filthy isolation cells. I had nothing to gain, everything to lose by taking on the State of Louisiana in yet another battle.

But I gave Scott Fleming, an Oakland attorney representing the Angola Two, a “sworn affidavit” with permission to use it as he saw fit in court proceedings to get the Angola Two new trials. The affidavit chronicled my relationship with Life and exactly what he told me. In response, Fleming then sent me a copy of Hazekiah Brown’s testimony from the trial of Wallace and Woodfox. After reading Brown’s testimony I knew both men were innocent - or at the very least that the Miller killing did not happen as Brown said it did.

Beyond the innocence issue in the Wallace/Woodfox cases, there is the punishment that has been imposed upon the two men. They have been confined in a maximum security lockdown status for thirty-five years. In August 2007 a United States Magistrate ruled that such an extended confinement in solitary confinement amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Being housed in isolation in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day for over three decades results in serious deprivations of basic human needs,” the Magistrate said. “With each passing day its effects are exponentially increased, just as surely as a single drop of water repeated endlessly will eventually bore through the hardest of stones. By 1999, these plaintiffs had been in extended lockdown more than anyone in Angola’s history, and more than any other living prisoner in the United States, according to plaintiffs’ evidence. These men, now in their 60s, do not, and have not for some time, presented a threat to the ‘safety, security and good order of the facility.”

Wallace and Woodfox have suffered a fate worse than death in the electric chair. The 1972 Furman decision precluded them from receiving the death penalty, but the penalty by the State of Louisiana (35 years in solitary confinement) has already exacted from them eclipses any death the State could have possibly administered.

The injustice of the case continues. On October 9, 2007 Baton Rouge state district court Judge Michael Erwin rejected a recommendation by Commissioner Rachal Morgan that Herman Wallace’s conviction should be reversed based upon a finding of prosecutorial misconduct. Commissioner Morgan, following an exhaustive evidentiary hearing, found that Wallace had been denied due process of law because state prosecutors did not disclose to his trial attorney that former Angola Warden C. Murray Henderson had “promised” Hazekiah Brown an early pardon if he testified against Wallace. The evidentiary hearing disclosed that Henderson did in fact lobby for Brown’s early release and that the convicted rapist received a commutation of his life sentence in 1986.

“It could have seriously affected the jury’s determination of Brown’s credibility” had the jury known about the promise, Morgan wrote.

Morgan’s new trial recommendation was issued in November 2006. Judge Erwin took no action until protestors gathered outside the city’s Governmental Building on October 9 demanding a ruling by Erwin. The judge responded with the brief ruling rejecting Morgan’s recommendation and adopting the state’s position that the “promise” would not have altered the jury’s guilty verdict.

“I’ve been handling prosecutorial misconduct cases for 20 years and I’ve never seen a case more clear and solid,” said Nick Trenticosta, Wallace’s attorney. “It’s as clear as a bell.”
Trenticosta, and Wallace’s supporters, vowed to press the case forward through the state appeals process.

They started out as the “Angola Four.”
The year was 1972. The Spring. The Louisiana State Penitentiary, or “Angola” as it was more often referred to, was gripped by what was then called “black militancy.” The Attica Prison Riot, and its murderous suppression, had occurred just eight months before. Prisons across America had become cauldrons of political unrest. The term “political prisoner” was being attached to every stripe of inmate from rapists to cop-killers, and even petty thieves. This political awakening by inmates had brutal consequences – and its ultimate suppression by prison officials was extremely racist.

I was an inmate on Angola’s death row. There were 46 of us waiting to die. More to the point, we were waiting for the United States Supreme Court to hand down its landmark Furman v. Georgia decision – a decision in June of that year which effectively commuted the death sentences of more than 400 inmates housed on the nation’s death rows.

With the help of a young civil rights attorney named Richard Hand, I had just become the first prisoner in Louisiana to win a “prisoners rights lawsuit.” My reputation as an emerging “jailhouse lawyer” in the prison community surged like an electrical pulse across the prison plantation. I was the “man with the plan,” particularly to the black militants who wanted to wage war against the prison system any way they could.

Angola’s inmate population had exploded as a result of the Nixon “war on crime.” Its inmate population was overwhelmingly African-American, most from New Orleans. Some of these urban inmates called themselves “Black Panthers.” They had Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver aspirations. The prison was a sprawling 18,000-acre plantation ruled by a predominantly “redneck” staff. The rednecks were afraid of the black militants, pure and simple.

Dorothy Mae Taylor was the first African-American elected to the Louisiana Legislature since Reconstruction. She was from New Orleans, and quickly became a “radical” voice in the state’s political system. Louisiana had just elected its first truly “liberal” governor with Edwin Edwards who rode the African-American vote into the Governor’s Mansion. Edwards appointed long-time penal reform advocate Elyan Hunt as the first female director of the Louisiana prison system. The Edwards election, and the Hunt appointment, embolden both Angola inmates and Rep. Taylor.

The legislator set her political sights on “Angola.” She forgot the old political adage of Earl Long who once warned that “there are only two things you don’t mess with in Louisiana: LSU and Angola.” Taylor’s political interests in the prison ignited a budding but spirited “black militancy” at the prison. The prison regime reacted by locking up scores of African-American inmates in a brutal maximum security unit known as “CCR” [Close Custody Restriction]. The unit was located directly above Death Row.

In the Spring of 1972 Louisiana’s death row inmates were enjoying the benefit of outdoor exercise for the very first time. The privilege came about as a result of a lawsuit I had filed in 1970 challenging conditions on death row, including a lack of outdoor exercise. Being on the yard each day allowed me to communicate with inmates in CCR by hollering at their windows. A group of black militants housed on a CCR tier known as the “Black Panther” tier wanted me to help them file a similar lawsuit against the prison administration. They wanted to challenge CCR conditions.

I was more than willing to help. I had my own private war to wage with the “system.” Richard Hand had provided me with a 54-page legal memorandum he had filed in connection with the death row suit. It was a brilliant piece of legal work, containing all the “prisoners rights” cases of that era. I typed up a copy of the brief, and smuggled it to the militants. I had been warned by prison security that I could keep the “writ” so long as I did not share it with other inmates.

The militants used that brief to prepare a lawsuit for federal court challenging the living conditions in CCR. A copy of the lawsuit ended up in the hands of Deputy Warden Lloyd W. Hoyle before it could be filed. He reacted swiftly. He didn’t want another lawsuit in federal court on the heels of the “Sinclair lawsuit.” He felt that would play directly into the hands of Rep. Taylor who was pushing for a legislative investigation into conditions at the prison.

Hoyle ordered the release of all the black militants housed on the Black Panther tier back into general population. Those inmates hailed me as their “hero” – a white man who “bucked the system” to help them. I received a lot of “right on, comrade” messages from the “brothers.” Hoyle and prison security, however, saw me in a different light. I was a “troublemaker.” They hoped would be one of the first inmate executed when the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty in Furman as they believed it would do.

Then it happened.
A young prison guard named Brent Miller was stabbed to death on April 17, 1972 in Pine One, an all-black dormitory on the prison’s Big Yard.
The prison’s redneck regime went crazy. They imported dozens of local farmers (many with Ku Klux Klan sympathies) as deputies at the prison. Hundreds of African-American inmates, all designated with “black militant” labels, were locked up in various maximum security cellblocks with as many as five inmates to a cell. There were wholesale beatings and torture inflicted as these “militants” in an effort to find out who killed Brent Miller, and why.

Within weeks four African-American inmates were named the killers: Herman “Hooks” Wallace, Albert Woodfox, Gilbert Montegut, and Charles “Noxzema Black” Jackson. They quickly became known as “The Angola Four.” They had been part of that group of inmates released from CCR by Hoyle. One of Miller’s brothers, also a prison guard, threw Hoyle through a plate glass window in the prison’s administration building when it was revealed that Hoyle had released these “militants.” Permanently disfigured by shards of glass, Hoyle would later collect a large civil judgment against the State of Louisiana because of the attack The “Angola Four” quickly dwindled. Noxzema Black became a state witness against the others. Gilbert Montegut, mentally retarded and functionally illiterate, was found guilty of manslaughter. He looked so retarded that not even a West Feliciana Parish all-white jury could bring itself to find him guilty of murder. He was convicted simply because he happened to be in the same courtroom with Wallace and Woodfox. The latter two received life sentences for their alleged involvement in the Miller killing. They were placed in CCR where they remain to this day.

The Supreme Court did not uphold the death penalty in Furman. I was spared an appointment with the executioner. Prison officials were disappointed. Many believed I was equally responsible for Miller’s death because I had provided the “militants” with the Hand brief that got them released from CCR. They believed that if I had not provided the militants with the brief, Hoyle would not have released them and Brent Miller would not have been killed. No one will ever know.

What I do know for certain is this: the killing of Brent Miller did not occur as the State of Louisiana said it did through its star witness, Hazekiah Brown. I first met Hazekiah Brown on death row where he was housed with a death sentence for aggravated rape. He was a no-good, snitching Uncle Tom on death row, and he was no different on the Big Yard. His name was on Life’s hit-list.

I’ve carefully read Brown’s trial testimony against the Angola Two – and it convinced me that Miller had not killed the way Brown said he was. I know Angola, its inmates, and its history, especially during that era. I don’t know for sure if Life killed Miller, but I do know that what he told me is far more plausible than Brown’s testimony against Wallace/Woofox.

The following is my critique Brown’s testimony to demonstrate why Brent Miller was not killed the way the convicted rapist said he was.
John Sinquefield prosecuted Wallace/Woodfox for the State of Louisiana on behalf of West Feliciana Parish. He is now the chief prosecutor in the East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney’s Office. The following is Sinquefield’s “direct examination” of Brown:

Q. Hazekiah, I’m going to ask you to speak up just as loud as you can so that the people on the back row of this jury, the defense attorney and everybody in this court can hear you and I want you to speak up loud when you answer these questions.

A. Okay.
Q. State your full name for the record.

A. Hazekiah Brown.
Q. Are you an inmate at Louisiana –

A. That’s right, --
Q. – State Penitentiary?

A. – yes, sir.
Q. Now, Hazekiah, what are you presently serving time for at the Louisiana State Penitentiary?
A. Aggravated rape.

Q. Did you spend some time on death row?
A. That’s right.

Q. How long were you on death row?
A. About, say about six years, something like that. I don’t know exactly what – how many days.

Q. Were you subsequently removed from death row?
A. Beg your pardon?

Q. Were you subsequently – did you get off of death row after the six years?
A. That’s right. I got off on – on account of they excluded to the jury.

Q. All right. Now, let me ask you: All right, Hazekiah, is that the first time you’d been in the penitentiary?
A. No, sir, it’s not the first time I been in the penitentiary. It’s my fourth time.

Q. All right. Were you there before on another charge.
A. Yes. Six years for attempted aggravated rape.

Q. All right, so you’ve got a bad record; is that right, Hazekiah?
A. That’s right, I have.

Q. But you’re here today to tell the truth; is that correct?
A. From the bottom of my heart.

Hazekiah Brown was a chronic, habitual liar. He not only embellished his personal life accounts but distorted the truth, or manipulated it to fit his particular need, when speaking about other people or events.

Q. All right, Hazekiah, I’m going to direct your attention to the day of April 17th, 1972. It was a Monday. Where – what – were you at the penitentiary?
A. Yes, sir.

Q. Speak up.
A. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Q. What dormitory did you live in then?
A. I lived in Pine One.

Q. In Pine One. Where was your bed in Pine One, your bunk?
A. I slept in, sleep in number 68 bed. That was the first bed as you comes in from the walk, --

Q. Right.
A. – the first bed on the right as you’re coming in.

Q. All right. Now, Hazekiah, did you have a coffee pot that you kept at your bunk?
A. Yes, sir, I did.

Q. Did you make coffee occasionally in this coffee pot?
A. I shore did, every day.

Q. And did sometimes the correctional officers come in to get your coffee?
A. Yes, sir, in fact, all of them on that walk would drink coffee.

Q. Did you heat it up and prepare it for them?
A. Yes, sir, I heated it up.

That “coffee” admission signaled to the all-white, all-male jury that
Hazekiah was an Uncle Tom. It was also made it clear that he was what
inmates called a “dorm snitch.” He watched everything that went on in the
dorm: who was doing dope, who was strong-arming, who was fucking who,
and any other tid-bit of information the officers needed to understand the
various “players” in the dorm. Hazekiah was what Angola white guards
called a “Steppin’-Fetchin’ nigger.” He stepped and fetched for them –
coffee, information, shoe shines, jokes, and laughter. Hazekiah’s “Uncle
Tom” nature is an important point to remember in analyzing his trial
testimony. Its importance will be discussed later.

Q. What kind of coffee pot did you have?
A. I had a electric coffee pot, about a ten – about a ten-cup coffee pot, about a ten-cup coffee pot, something kind of like that.

Q. All right, now Hazekiah –
A. Yes, sir.

Q. – did you know a correctional officer by the name of Brent Miller?
A. Yes, sir, I did.
Q. How long had Brent Miller been at the penitentiary?
A. I think he’d been working there about four months, three or four months. I don’t know, I’d say it was something like that there.

Q. What kind of a fellow was Brent Miller?
A. As far as I know, he was all right with me.

Q. Did you ever see him mistreat any convict out there?
A. No, I never did.

Q. Did he have a habit of writing them up often?
A. I just know him to write up one man in my dormitory, and the dormitory where he was with me was Pine One, and that was a boy by the name of Knowles. I don’t know nobody else he wrote up.

Q. All right. Now, prior, that is, before this morning that we’re talking about here, had Brent Miller got coffee from you before?
A. Yes, sir, every day. All the time he was there he drank coffee from me.

Q. Did Brent – did Brent Miller – did you see Brent Miller on the morning of April 17th, ---
A. I shore did.

Q. – 1972?
A. I shore did.

Q. Did he come into your dormitory?
A. Yes, sir, he shore did.

Q. All right. Now, who was in that dormitory when Brent Miller came in?
A. I was.

Q. Who else?
A. I didn’t see now one else?

Hazekiah creates the impression that he was alone in Pine One when Miller came in. It was breakfast time. Most of the dorm inmates would have gone to breakfast, but not all of them. There were 68 inmates in that dorm. Hazekiah slept in bunk 68. His testimony indicates that all of the other 67 inmates went to “chow.” There’s no way that would have occurred. At most, two-thirds of any given dorm went to breakfast. The prison did not serve the kind of breakfast meals that made its inmates rush to the dining hall to get them. More importantly, the stronger inmates had their “punks” or “slaves” remain in the dorm to make their beds, clean their living area, and make sure no one went into their living area. The clique leaders always left a sentry or two in the dorm at all times to keep a watch not only over their living space but also over their “stash” (the secret places where they hid their drugs, money, and weapons). The clique leaders (the dorm power brokers and today’s equivalent of “gang leaders”) never, ever left a dorm un-attended. It simply did not happen.

Q. What purpose did Brent Miller come in there?
A. Come in there to get some coffee.

It was precisely because an Uncle Tom like Hazekiah could be in a
dorm that the clieque leaders left someone in the dorm to watch him. Just
as Hazekiah watched everything in the dorm to collect information, the
clique leaders watched him or had someone watching him to limit the
amount of information he could gather to pass on to the “free man.”

Q. All right. Did anything happen after that?
A. Yes, sir, it did.

Q. Now, Hazekiah, I want you to speak up as loud as you can and I want you to tell this jury what you – what happened out there.
A. Well, that’s what I want to do, but first I want to ask you, Judge, and all of y’all here: I want to have a few words, if I possibly can.

Q. Well, Hazekiah, I’d like for you, first of all, right now, of course, you’ve have an opportunity to explain any answer to anything you want in here in this court today.
A. I know, --

Q. All right. Now, --
A. – but I got to say this: --

Q. All right, say it.
MR. GARRETON: You Honor, I want to object. I don’t want Mr. Hazekiah Brown to make any opening statement to the jury; I want him to answer the statement or question and explain if an explanation is due.
THE COURT: The answer must be responsive to the question.
MR. SINQUEFIELD: All right.

Q. Hazekiah, let me ask you this: --
A. All right.

Q. – Did you see Brent Miller get killed that day?
A. I shore did; I saw him got killed. Do you want me to go on and tell it?

Q. I want you to tell it just exactly like you saw it.
A. Well, that morning, I don’t know when we got up that morning, but we got up to go to the lunchroom, you know, to go to breakfast that morning. Well, I don’t know what happened, but they went to the diningroom. I wasn’t – I never did hardly ever go to the diningroom for to eat; I always had something in my box there that I got from the commissary or places like that and I sat there and I had my coffee pot. Well, every morning around 6:00 o’clock I have the coffee on and have it hot, you know?

THE COURT: Talk into the microphone.
A. I have it hot and – that thing ain’t right (referring to microphone).
[Deputy Sheriff Rivet held up microphone for the witness to speak into.]
A. {To Deputy sheriff Rivet}. I’ll hold it. Turn it a-loose. Now. So that morning when we – when they went to breakfast that morning, I don’t know what happened at the diningroom. I’m the orderly there and so I got my broom and went on down around there and started to cleaning up. And after a pretty good while later they come in; all of them come back from the diningroom into the building. Well, I put the broom down and went on back to my bed, you know? So when I went back to my bed, I remember sit –I sat down on my bed there a while to drink me another cup of coffee and so I pulled the plug out, out of my pot, you know? Well, that made the coffee go, you know, get cool. So after awhile the whistle blowed again for them to go back to the diningroom. Well, they went back to the diningroom, and after they go back, that left Mr. Miller at the – on the dormitory. Well, you see, they have two mens on the dormitory, you know, one go to the diningroom with the men to feed them, and one stays on at the dormitory. So Mr. Miller was to stay – he stayed in the dormitory and Mr. Hunter, he went to the diningroom. So I don’t – didn’t know what happened then, but after awhile all of them – all of them – after all of them cleared out, you know, all the inmates and everything, well, Mr. Miller, he come to the door and he called me, he said, ‘Brown,’ he said, ‘look,’ he says, ‘you got any coffee? I say, ‘Yes, sir, I got some,’ I says, ‘but I don’t think it’s hot like you like it,’ you know? I said, ‘But you can come in and I’ll heat it up.’ So he came in and when he came in, he sat down on the side of my bunk, going to wait, just like this [illustrating].

Q. Which way was he facing, Hazekiah?
A. Well, just like it is right now, you know?

Q. Where was his back in relation –
A. Well, I’m going to –

Q. – to the door?
A. – I’m going to show you now. Well, he set cattycornered, just like I’m sitting here, and me and him was talking, but he was layng up on my bed just like this here, about on a forty-five angle, you know, like thisaway with his back half-way to the door and his face toward me, you know?

Q. The door would be in the direction I’m sitting now?
A. That’s right.

Q. All right. Go ahead.
A. So behind that, he – I was hooking up the coffee pot. By me a-hooking the coffee pot up, it was after a while, me and him was rapping, you know, talking about they had a wrop-out, it was that Saturday, you know. We – I had seen him out there on the rockkoppy and he was, you know, shaking and dancing with them, you know; so me and him was talking about it and I says, ‘You was out there having a good time,’ you know?
He says, ‘yeah,’ he said, ‘that was real nice, Brown.’ He said, ‘It shore was.” Then about that time, looked up – I heard some scuffling. I looked up there and Fox throwed his arm –

Q. Who’s Fox?
A. That’s Fox right there, man; that’s Fox right there.

Q. Had you known Fox before this?
A. Had I known him? I done been on the walk with him occasionally since I been over there, you know?

Q. So you’d know him when you’d see him?
A. Did I know him?

Q. Yes.
A. I’d know him if I was blinded; if I was blindfolded, I’d know Fox, shorely.

Q. Do you see him?
A. That’s him right there [indicating], that’s Woodfox. They call him Woodfox. I don’t know his name, but we been calling him Woodfox ever since I been in that dormitory.

Q. Go ahead with what happened.
A. And I looked up, there was Fox, Hooks, Montegut and Noxzema Black. His name was Jackson, is what it was, Jackson, but I forgit all the name and call him by nickname, which was Noxzema Black. They came in about, oh, it was at the end of the bed, and he caught Mr. Miller about thisaway [indicating] with his neck just like this and he jobbed him when he rared him back. He rared him back on the knife.

Q. Now, wait, let me – I didn’t understand, Hazekiah. Who grabbed – this was Mr. Miller that was grabbed?
A. Yes, sir. This thing here worries me [microphone]. Fox, Fox did it. He grabbed the man behind the neck, thissaway. Let me show you. It was just – I don’t know what hand, but just say right thataway, and he grabbed him and the man didn’t say a word, you know? And he hit him in the back with that knife [illustrating throughout].

Q. Did you see –
A. Did I see it! I was standing as close to it with this man here [indicating Deputy Sheriff Rivet] as I am right here.

Q. Woodfox stabbed him with a knife?
A. He stabbed him and then the rest of them grabbed him and they started stabbing him. They picked him up off’n my bed and carried him into the, you know, into the – lavatory there – not the lavatory: you know what it is, the playroom by the cooler and they was steady jooging on him then, you know?

Q. When you say “joking”, what do you mean?
A. That – that means a-stabbing him, hitting him, --

Hazekiah said Woodfox stabbed Miller first while he was sitting on
the inmate’s bunk before the rest joined in the stabbing assault. Yet no blood
was found on Hazekiah’s bunk, on him, or in the immediate vicinity of his
bunk. Stab wounds quickly produce enormous amounts of blood, and with
four inmates stabbing one officer, blood would have splattered everywhere
in the vicinity. I’ve seen dozens of prison stabbings and killings. They all
produced plenty of blood.

But even more unbelievable is Brown’s testimony that the inmates
attacked the Miller on his prison bunk. Brown was a known Uncle Tom
snitch. Had those four inmates attacked Miller that morning on his bed,
they would have killed him as well. They would not have killed a prison
guard in front of a notorious snitch and let the snitch live so he could “rat
them out.” Killing a prison guard is the worst crime an inmate can commit in
prison. It’s worst than killing a cop in the free world. No inmate would dare
kill a guard in the presence of any other inmate, much less a snitch. In fact,
there is no way four inmates would have actually participated in such an
alleged planned killing. Four inmates taking part in that kind of planned
killing meant that at least one would become a state witness.

The rest of Hazekiah’s testimony was nothing more than irrelevant
ramblings. The State had hitched their wagon to this Uncle Tom, and
Sinquefield took him through the killing description several more times to
make sure the jury got the picture.

Wallace/Woodfox are still serving life sentences in CCR.
As long as these two men are alive the Hazekiah Brown lie will live
through them.

While I may never know if Life did in fact kill Brent Miller, I do
know the prison guard was not killed by either Woodfox or Wallace in the
manner described by Hazekiah Brown.

And if they did take part in the Miller killing, Hazekiah Brown did not
see it. There is no way either of them or any other inmate would have killed
a prison guard in front of that notorious snitch and let him live.

The State of Louisiana’s case against Herman Wallace and Albert
Woodfox is a lie. It was a lie in 1972 and it remains a lie in 2007.

Written by Billy Wayne Sinclair