Herman Wallace and his legal team after his release
In so far as any good news can be attached to the case of a man who is dying of cancer after 40+ years in solitary, this is good news: Herman Wallace, of the Angola Three, who was framed decades ago, was cleared by a decent judge and allowed to go home. Amy Goodman had a piece on it yesterday.
I am no expert in this case, but I learned about it when a British magazine asked me to respond to a rather starry-eyed article by an English minister who liked the Christian approach of the warden of Angola Prison. Researching Angola became a critical piece of education for me as a white immigrant to this country who lived here for 30+ years without educating myself about the extent of racist injustice in the criminal legal system, the extent of torture (solitary is torture) and the fact that slavery continues legally (the 13th Amendment allowed it for convict labor) in American prisons. No excuses: just one big insight into how easy it is to be white and oblivious, which contributes in a big way to this society’s racism. If you are interested, I wrote a lot of what I learned in this article.