Louisiana has 120 days to dismiss charges or retry a former Black Panther whose conviction was overturned in a prison guard's 1972 death, a federal judge said Friday.
U.S. District Judge James Brady's three-sentence order made final his decision to strike down the murder conviction of Albert Woodfox because of mistakes made by one of his former trial lawyers.
Woodfox was held in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for 36 years and is one of the former Panthers known as the Angola Three. He and another inmate were convicted of stabbing guard Brent Miller on April 17, 1972.
State Attorney General James Caldwell said he will ask the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal to uphold Woodfox's conviction, and appeal again if they refuse.
We respectfully but vehemently disagree with the judge's ruling ... If this ruling is upheld, we will with no question retry Albert Woodfox. We will take it as high as we need to go, he said in release.
Woodfox's attorneys said they will ask Caldwell to drop charges immediately against him and the other inmate convicted of the stabbing.
If there is to be a retrial, Woodfox's attorneys said, he should be released on bail.
The state has already stolen nearly four decades of Albert Woodfox's life, attorney Nick Trenticosta said. The injustice in this case is unfathomable. How can Louisiana continue to imprison a 61 year old man after a federal judge has ruled that he shouldn't have been convicted in the first place?
Woodfox, 61, Herman Wallace, 66, and Robert King all spent decades in solitary at Angola. Wallace was also convicted of stabbing Miller, while King was convicted of killing a fellow inmate in 1973 and released in 2001.
Brady's ruling in July overturned the conviction from Woodfox's second trial, in 1988.
He approved the recommendation of a magistrate who found Woodfox's lawyer should have objected when a prosecutor testified that a key witness was believable. The attorney also should have objected to the inclusion of testimony from witnesses who had died after his original trial, the judge and magistrate found.
Woodfox was in solitary confinement at the Angola prison from 1972 until this year, when he was moved into a maximum-security dormitory with other inmates.
He and Miller, who will be 67 in October, said they were targeted because they helped establish a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party.
Woodfox's attorneys say no physical evidence tied either man to the killing, and the convictions were based largely on statements from a rapist who was promised help getting a pardon if he testified against Woodfox and Miller.
