Angola 3’s Albert Woodfox released

Prior to his release Friday, Albert Woodfox retroactively pleaded no contest to charges of manslaughter and aggravated burglary in connection with the death of a prison guard at the Louisiana State Penitentiary – also known as Angola – in 1972.

“I don’t feel the Miller family had any choice in it”, Wanda Callender, the guard’s younger sister, told the newspaper.

Woodfox was to be released shortly from the West Feliciana Parish jail, the Advocate newspaper reported.

Over the course of the past four decades, Albert’s conviction was overturned three separate times for a host of constitutional violations including prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense, racial discrimination in the selection of the grand jury foreperson, and suppression of exculpatory evidence.

Miller’s wife has long called for Woodfox to be released, stating that she does not believe that he was her husband’s killer.

U.S. District Court Judge James Brady, one of those judges, went even further last summer, ordering the state to release the 69-year-old Woodfox and banning the Attorney General from retrying him for the crime. “Mr. Woodfox continues, as he always has, to maintain his innocence”, Kendall said, according to The Times-Picayune.

Yet numerous 80,000 people estimated to be in solitary confinement in USA prisons have been there for years on end.

Woodfox was awaiting a third trial in the guard’s killing when he was released on Friday.

Among his first actions as a free man will be to visit the gravesites of loved ones, Woodfox said Friday as he addressed a crowd that included Robert King, the third member of the Angola 3, who also said he was targeted for his activism with the Black Panthers.

And as the AP reports, when asked “whether he would have done anything differently back in 1972, Woodfox responded: ‘When forces are beyond your control, there’s not a lot you can do”.

A “no contest” plea is not an admission of guilt, and Woodfox has long maintained his innocence. No other inmate in the U.S.is believed to have served more time in solitary confinement than Woodfox.

But it was not clear when exactly Woodfox would be sprung from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.

Another inmate convicted for Miller’s death was released in 2013 and died three days later.

Woodfox thanked his brother, Michel, and the other two members of the “Angola 3”. King was freed in 2001 after a court reversed his conviction of allegedly killing a fellow inmate in 1973. He was supposed to be released last June, but a federal judge blocked his release order at the last minute.

Prior to today’s settlement, Woodfox’s conviction had been overturned three times.

“After four decades of isolation, Albert Woodfox’s release is long overdue and undeniably just”, Amnesty International, which had gone to bat for the Angola 3, said in a statement. He received a 42-year sentence for the crimes, but has already served 45 years.