In the Land of the Free...

Later this month a new documentary film is released into UK cinemas, telling the story of the Angola 3 – a story that is still ongoing today. Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, In the Land of the Free... centres on three men, Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert King, who between them have spent more than 100 years in solitary confinement at Angola prison.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary derives its widely-used nickname from the nationality of the slaves who worked the plantation land on which the prison was built. It is the largest maximum security facility in the whole of the United States, with 5,000 inmates being held on an 18,000 acre site. And two of those inmates, Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, have been there longer than most. First arriving at Angola in the 1960s, they have spent the vast majority of the last 37 years there in the solitary hell of closed cell restriction (CCR). 

Originally convicted on separate robbery charges, April 1972 found Wallace and Woodfox (along with two other inmates) accused of the fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Angola guard Brent Miller. They were convicted of the killing and handed life sentences (their co-accused both were found guilty of lesser offences), with the prison authorities dictating they should serve their time in isolation. Also investigated in connection with the Miller murder was Robert King, despite not actually having been interned at Angola at the time the crime was committed. Following his subsequent transfer to the prison, he was implicated in another killing, this time of a fellow inmate, and he was convicted and saddled with the same punishment as Woodfox and Wallace. For the next 29 years, Wallace, Woodfox and King were confined to their six-foot by nine-foot cells for 23 hours a day.

In the Land of the Free... is written and directed by British film-maker Vadim Jean and he is very clear as to why he chose to make the documentary: “I had to. I believe Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox are innocent.” He does not mention Robert King's name and nor does he need to, as King was already a free man when Jean came to make his movie - his murder conviction having been overturned in 2001, when he was finally freed from Angola. And recently it has appeared as if Wallace and Woodfox too have been inching ever closer to joining their friend back on the outside.

Jean's film does not gloss over the appalling crime committed when Brent Miller was murdered, but the director lays out why he believes the continuing imprisonment of Wallace and Woodfox has compounded this tragedy, rather than offering genuine justice. With questions in particular raised about the legitimacy of the testimony provided by key prosecution witness Hezekiah Brown, as well as an untraced bloody fingerprint found at the murder scene, Jean's documentary suggests that the desire to convict the two men had a political, rather than evidential, foundation, with the pair's Black Panther activism and their relentless campaigning for improvements in the notoriously brutal conditions at Angola fostering animus towards them amongst the prison authorities. These long-standing doubts about the safety of the two men's convictions are reflected in In the Land of the Free...'s interview with Miller's widow Leontine Verrett, in which she admits that she now believes Wallace and Woodfox are innocent of her husband's killing.

Since his release from Angola in 2001, Robert King has campaigned for the freedom of his two friends, and In the Land of the Free... (to which King offers on-screen contribution) is a new and highly visible element in the effort to realise that objective. The last two years have brought significant developments in the saga too, with a visit from Congressman John Conyers to Woodfox and Wallace in March 2008 leading to their transfer from solitary to a high security dormitory. Six months on from that and a federal court overturned Woodfox's conviction, ordering that he either be released or retried. However both men have since been returned to the isolation of solitary, and a year on from the making of In the Land of the Free... Albert Woodfox is still waiting on a decision from Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell as to whether he will be set free or face another trial.

More details about In the Land of the Free..., including links to further information about the campaign to free Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, can be found at the film's website. The movie goes on UK theatrical release from 26 March, and it is also showing twice beforehand in London as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, with those screenings taking place at the Brixton Ritzy on 24 March and at the Curzon Soho the following evening.