Check out this 3 part NPR series:
http://www.npr.org/...
http://www.npr.org/...
http://www.npr.org/...
This is a trailer for the new DVD: https://secure.pmpress.org/...
Ira Glasser, the former Executive Director of the ACLU, wrote at HuffingtonPost.com:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
By now, anyone who has looked fairly and independently at the evidence in this case has concluded that the convictions were unsupportable. Even Brent Miller's widow now believes Wallace and Woodfox were wrongly convicted, and she would like the state to find out who killed her husband that April day in 1972.
But the habits of the old South die hard, and the courts move slowly. A black man will be inaugurated on January 20. But Albert Woodfox is 61 and Herman Wallace 67. They will not see that inauguration, nor benefit from it. It is Christmas Day, and they are about to begin their 37th year in the dungeon of the old slave plantation. A crucifixion.
Where is the public outrage that will resurrect them?
Also check out this new book by Robert Hillary King:
https://secure.pmpress.org/...
In 1970, a jury convicted Robert Hillary King of a crime he did not commit and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. He became a member of the Black Panther Party while in Angola State Penitentiary, successfully organizing prisoners to improve conditions. In return, prison authorities beat him, starved him, and gave him life without parole after framing him for a second crime. He was thrown into solitary confinement, where he remained in a six by nine foot cell for 29 years as one of the Angola 3. In 2001, the state grudgingly acknowledged his innocence and set him free. This is his story.
It begins at the beginning: born black, born poor, born in Louisiana in1942, King journeyed to Chicago as a hobo at the age of 15. He married and had a child, and briefly pursued a semi-pro boxing career to help provide for his family. Just a teenager when he entered the Louisiana penal system for the first time, King tells of his attempts to break out of this system, and his persistent pursuit of justice where there is none.
Yet this remains a story of inspiration and courage, and the triumph of the human spirit. The conditions in Angola almost defy description, yet King never gave up his humanity, or the work towards justice for all prisoners that he continues to do today. From the Bottom of the Heap, so simply and humbly told, strips bare the economic and social injustices inherent in our society, while continuing to be a powerful literary testimony to our own strength and capacity to overcome.