Magistrate: 30 years of solitary confinement may be cruel

8/28/2007, 9:20 a.m. CT
The Associated Press

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - It may be constitutional to keep an inmate alone in a tiny cell for a short time, but decades of such "terrible deprivation" are cruel and unusual punishment, a federal magistrate says.

It was the second time U.S. Magistrate Docia Dalby has refused to recommend throwing out a lawsuit filed by Herman "Hooks" Wallace and Albert Woodfox, serving life for killing a prison guard, and Robert King Wilkerson, freed in 2001.

"Not only (have the courts) consistently noted the severity and terrible deprivation associated with such confinement, it has long been the subject of research, and even of television and movies," Dalby wrote. "It is also a matter of common sense that three decades of extreme isolation and enforced inactivity in a space smaller than a typical walk-in closet present the antithesis of what is necessary to meet basic human needs."

A similar ruling in 2005 has been adopted by a judge.

In a 50-page report earlier this month, Dalby found that prison authorities should have known that "being housed in isolation in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day for over three decades results in serious deprivations of basic human needs."

Chief U.S. District Judge Ralph Tyson will consider Dalby's findings in deciding whether the 7-year-old case will continue toward trial.

Wilkerson, Wallace and Woodfox all were Black Panther Party activists. They say they have been political prisoners at Angola because they have been continuously confined in the lockdown unit for decades.

Wilkerson was freed in 2001 after his 1973 conviction of murdering a fellow inmate was overturned and he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder. Woodfox and Wallace were convicted of killing guard Brent Miller during a riot in 1972.

All three were put in "lockdown" in 1972. Woodfox and Wallace remain there.

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