Somewhere, Jean Valjean is laughing

NYT:

Herman Wallace’s world for much of the last 41 years had been a solitary prison cell, 6 feet by 9 feet, when he left a Louisiana prison on Tuesday, freed by a federal judge who ruled that his original indictment in the killing of a prison guard had been unconstitutional. 

On Friday morning, Mr. Wallace died of cancer in New Orleans. He was 71.He had been one of the “Angola 3,” convicts whose solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, an 18,000-acre prison farm on the site of a former plantation, became a rallying point for advocates fighting abusive prison conditions around the world. 

Mr. Wallace was serving a prison sentence for armed robbery when the correctional officer, Brent Miller, was stabbed to death in a riot at Angola in April 1972. Mr. Wallace and two other men were indicted in the killing. Two of the three — Albert Woodfox and Mr. Wallace — were convicted in January 1974.They were placed in solitary confinement, joining another prisoner there, Robert King, who had been convicted of a different crime, and for decades to follow they were locked up for as much as 23 hours a day. Amnesty International published a report on them in 2011, and they were the subject of a documentary film, “In the Land of the Free,” directed by Vadim Jean. 

...Mr. Wallace’s cancer was detected in June, his lawyers said. On Tuesday, Chief Judge Brian A. Jackson of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ordered that Mr. Wallace be released from prison and said he could be retried. 

The original indictment, he wrote, was fatally flawed because women had been excluded from the proceedings in which the grand jury was picked. Judge Jackson threatened to hold prison officials in contempt if they failed to release Mr. Wallace immediately. 

“He has spent more than 40 years in prison under a conviction and sentence based on an unconstitutional indictment,” the judge wrote. “By any measure, the time remaining on Mr. Wallace’s life sentence is far less than he has already spent in prison.” 

On Tuesday, Mr. Wallace was released from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, La. He was moved by ambulance to the home of a friend and supporter, Ashley Wennerstrom, a program director at the Tulane University School of Medicine. 

Though Mr. Wallace was weak, drifting in and out of consciousness, Ms. Sumell said, “He was very well aware of the fact that he was in Ashley’s home, and he was a free man.” 

On Thursday, Mr. Wallace was indicted again. Samuel C. D’Aquilla, the district attorney for East and West Feliciana Parish, said in an interview that he believed that the evidence originally used to convict Mr. Wallace remained sufficient to convict him again. 

“We just felt that he was a murderer,” Mr. D’Aquilla said, adding, “I know he was old, I know he had medical problems, but when he committed a murder, he didn’t have medical problems.” Brent Miller, the murdered prison guard, he said, “didn’t get another chance.” 

As Mr. Wallace lay dying, his friends at the Wennerstrom house did not speak of the indictment as they held a bedside vigil. 

“One of the final things that Herman said to us,” his lawyers said in a statement, “was, ‘I am free. I am free.’ ”