Inside Report for August 1, 2008

• By BILL LODGE
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Aug 1, 2008 - Page: 7B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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In 1972, corrections officer Brent Miller was stabbed to death at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

For the next 36 years, inmate Albert Woodfox was held in solitary confinement, a period during which he twice was convicted for the murder of the 23-year-old officer.

Woodfox, sent to Angola on an armed robbery conviction, was released from solitary earlier this year and sent to the prison’s maximum security unit, where he remains.

In July, U.S. District Judge James J. Brady overturned his conviction. The state Attorney General’s Office said it will appeal the decision.

Surely, Woodfox loyalists celebrated Brady’s decision, which was based on a recommendation from U.S. Magistrate Christine Noland.

Surely, people convinced of Woodfox’s guilt in the slaying grumbled and griped because Brady agreed with Noland’s conclusion that the inmate’s defense attorneys provided ineffective assistance in his second murder trial.

Paul R. Baier, a professor at LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center, was in neither camp.

Baier sees the judges’ actions as a means to force the legal system to work in accordance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in Brady v. Maryland. In that case, another guy named Brady was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

But the Brady in that murder case had asked prosecutors prior to trial for copies of any statements made by his co-defendant in the case. And the prosecutors withheld the statement in which the co-defendant admitted he had actually committed the murder.

The high court threw out Brady’s death sentence. Justices said “The suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused upon request violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment.” They added: “Society wins not only when the guilty are convicted but when criminal trials are fair; our system of the administration of justice suffers when any accused is treated unfairly.”

In the Woodfox case, Noland said Woodfox’s defense attorneys should have objected to the testimony of several prosecution witnesses in 1998, during his second trial. That included the transcribed testimony of an inmate eyewitness from the original trial in 1973. Hezekiah Brown, serving a life sentence for aggravated rape, first told prison officials he was not at the scene of Miller’s slaying. But that initial statement was withheld from Woodfox, Noland said, as was the fact that officials promised to help Brown win release from his life term.

Brown, who was pardoned in 1986, testified at Woodfox’s first trial and said Woodfox took part in Miller’s slaying. Brown died before Woodfox’s second trial in 1998. But Brown’s 1973 testimony was read to the second jury.

After Judge Brady overturned Woodfox’s conviction, one of the inmate’s current attorneys, Nicholas J. Trenticosta, of New Orleans, said Noland had concluded in her recommendation: “This guy is probably innocent.”