African-American Albert Woodfox, a former Black Panther activist who held the sad record of longevity in solitary confinement, died Thursday six years after being released from prison, his attorney said.
• Also read: Killed after discussing her divorce on TikTok
The fate of this inmate, who spent 43 years alone in a tiny cell for a murder he has always denied, had become a symbol of the failure of the American prison world.
He died of complications from Covid at the age of 75, his lawyer George Kendall wrote to AFP. “There’s a huge hole in the sky tonight,” he added on Twitter.
Convicted of armed robbery, Albert Woodfox was being held at Angola Penitentiary, a Louisiana prison with a sinister reputation, when a white guard was killed during a riot.
Charged with the murder despite his denial, he was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 along with two other prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert King.
The three men were then militants of the Black Panthers, a radical movement against racial discrimination in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nicknamed ‘the three from Angola’, they had remained in solitary confinement for decades, despite campaigns in their favor, carried out notably by Amnesty International.
Robert King was finally released in 2001. Herman Wallace in 2013, but fell ill with cancer and died three days later. Albert Woodfox was only published in 2016.
Solitary confinement, that is, spending 23 hours a day alone in a cramped cell, is the lot of about 80,000 prisoners in the United States, and many of them have served several years.
Activists for prison system reform consider this inhumane treatment, with research showing that depriving a person of visual stimulation, interaction, natural light or physical activity can alter the structure of their brain in a matter of days.