His lead lawyer, George Kendall, said the cause was Covid-19. Mr Kendall added that Mr Woodfox also had a number of pre-existing organ conditions. Mr Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, involving two convictions, both overturned, and three charges spanning four decades. The case seemed problematic to most commentators. No forensic evidence linked Mr Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ case depended on witnesses, who over time discredited or proved unreliable. “The facts of the case were on his side,” the New York Times editorial board wrote in a 2014 opinion piece about Mr. Woodfox. But Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell saw things differently. “This is the most dangerous man on the planet,” he told NPR in 2008. Mr. Woodfox’s punishment defied the imagination, not only for its monotony — he was alone 23 hours a day in a six-by-nine-foot cell — but also for its agonies and humiliations. He was gassed and beaten, he wrote in a memoir, Solitary (2019), in which he described how he had maintained his sanity and dignity while locked up alone. He was searched with pointless, brutal frequency. His plight first received national attention when he became known as one of the “Angola Three,” men held in continuous solitary confinement for decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly called Angola, after a slave plantation it once occupied the location. In 2005, a federal judge wrote that the length of time the men had spent in solitary confinement was “so far beyond the pale” that there appeared to be “nothing even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence.” Mr Woodfox would spend more than a decade in solitary confinement before becoming, in 2016, the last of the three men to be released. His first stint in Angola came in 1965 after he was convicted of a series of petty crimes he committed as a teenager. The prison was notoriously harsh, even harkening back to the days of slavery. Black prisoners, like Mr. Woodfox, did field work by hand, supervised by white prison guards on horseback, shotguns at their feet. Young inmates were often put into a regime of sexual slavery encouraged by the guards. Released after eight months, he was soon charged with car theft, driving another eight months to Angola. After that, he began a darker criminal career, beating and robbing people. In 1969, Mr. Woodfox was again convicted, this time of armed robbery, and sentenced to 50 years. By then, a seasoned lawbreaker managed to sneak a gun into the courthouse where he was being sentenced and escape. He fled to New York and landed in Harlem. A few months later he was incarcerated again, this time at Tobbs, Manhattan Prison, where he spent about a year and a half. It turned out to be a turning point, he wrote in his memoirs. At the Tombs, he encountered members of the Black Panther Party, who ruled his cell rank not by force but by handing out food. They held conversations, treated people with respect and intelligence, he wrote. They argued that racism was an institutional phenomenon, infecting police departments, banks, universities and juries. In solitary confinement, Mr. Woodfox was alone for 23 hours a day in a six-by-nine-foot cell. “It was like a light went on in a room inside of me that I didn’t know existed,” Mr Woodfox wrote. “I had morals, principles and values that I never had before.” He added: “I would never be a criminal again.” He was sent back to Angola in 1971 thinking himself a reformed man. But his most serious criminal conviction – for the 1972 murder of an Angolan prison officer, which he denied – was still ahead of him, and with it four decades in solitary confinement, a stint that was interrupted for about a year and a half in the 1990s while he waited the retrial. The other two members of the Angola Three, Robert King and Herman Wallace, were also Panthers and began their isolation in Angola the same year as Mr. Woodfox. The three became friends by yelling at each other from their cells. They were “our inspirations for each other,” Mr Woodfox wrote. In his spare time, he added, “I turned my cell into a university, a debate room, a law school.” He taught a foodie how to read, he said, by instructing him how to sound out words in a dictionary. He told him to call him any time of the day or night if he couldn’t understand something. Albert Woodfox was born on February 19, 1947, in New Orleans to Ruby Edwards, who was 17 years old. He never had a relationship with his biological father, Leroy Woodfox, he wrote, but for much of his childhood he considered a man who later married his mother, a Navy chef named James B. Mable, to be his “dad.” When Albert was 11, Mr. Mable retired from the Navy and the family moved to La Grange, NC. Mr Mable, Mr Woodfox recalled, began drinking and hitting Ms Edwards. She left the family home with Albert and two of his brothers, taking them back to New Orleans. As a boy, Albert stole bread and tins when there was no food in the house. Dropped out of school in 10th grade. His mother tended bar and occasionally worked as a prostitute, and Albert grew to hate her. “I allowed myself to believe that the strongest, most beautiful and powerful woman in my life didn’t matter,” he wrote in his memoirs. His mother died in 1994 while he was in prison. He was not allowed to attend her funeral. The first of the Angola Three to be released was Mr. King, whose conviction was overturned in 2001. The second, Mr. Wallace, was released in 2013 because he had liver cancer. He died three days later. In a deal with prosecutors, Mr. Woodfox was released in 2016 in exchange for pleading no contest to manslaughter in the 1972 killing. By then he had been transferred out of Angola. His imprisonment over, the first thing he wanted to do was visit his mother’s grave. “I told her I was single now and I loved her,” he wrote. “It was more painful than anything I experienced in prison.” Mr. Woodfox is survived by his brothers, James, Haywood, Michael and Donald Mable. a daughter, Brenda Poole, from a teenage relationship. three grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and his life partner, Leslie George. Ms George was a journalist who began reporting on Mr Woodfox’s case in 1998 and met him in 1999. They became a couple when he was released from prison. Ms. George co-authored Mr. Woodfox’s book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. In a review for The Times, Dwight Garner called “Solitary” “unusually powerful”. in The Times Book Review, writer Thomas Chatterton Williams described it as “above mere advocacy or even memoir”, belonging more “in the realm of Stoic philosophy”. After release, Mr. Woodfox had to relearn how to go down stairs, how to walk without leg braces, how to sit without being bound. But in an interview with The Times soon after his release, he spoke of having already been released years earlier. “When I started to understand who I was, I considered myself free,” she said. “No matter how much concrete they use to keep me in a certain place, they couldn’t stop my mind.”
