Earlier Tuesday, Jackson overturned Wallace's 1974 murder conviction in Miller's death.
"The record in this case makes clear that Mr. Wallace's grand jury was improperly chosen in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of 'the equal protection of the laws' ... and that the Louisiana courts, when presented with the opportunity to correct this error, failed to do so," Jackson wrote.
He added, "Our Constitution requires this result even where, as here, it means overturning Mr. Wallace's conviction nearly forty years after it was entered."
Wallace's attorneys said the freed prisoner left a
correctional center in St. Gabriel by ambulance Tuesday evening and was
expected to go to LSU Interim Hospital in New Orleans for treatment of advanced
terminal liver cancer.
"Tonight, Herman Wallace has left the walls of
Louisiana prisons and will be able to receive the medical care that his advanced
liver cancer requires," his legal team said in a statement.
"It is Mr. Wallace's hope that this litigation will help ensure that others, including his lifelong friend and fellow 'Angola 3' member, Albert Woodfox, do not continue to suffer such cruel and unusual confinement even after Mr. Wallace is gone," his legal team said in a written statement.
Kendall said Woodfox won full habeas relief last year but
the state has appealed that as well. The case is pending before the 5th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals.
In 2010, Woodfox was moved to the David Wade Correctional Center
in Homer, where he remains in custody.
Woodfox and Wallace have continued to deny involvement in
Miller's killing and say they were targeted because they helped establish a
prison chapter of the Black Panther Party at the Angola prison in 1971, set up
demonstrations and organized strikes for better conditions in the prison.
The third man, Robert King, was released after 29 years in
solitary confinement. King, convicted of killing a fellow inmate in 1973, was
released in 2001 after his conviction was reversed and he pleaded guilty to the
lesser charge of conspiracy to commit murder.
Amnesty International USA last year delivered a petition to
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's office, containing 65,000 signatures from people
around the world who called the men's solitary confinement inhuman and
degrading.
The group's executive director, Steven W. Hawkins, welcomed
the court's ruling involving Wallace. "Tragically, this step toward
justice has come as Herman is dying from cancer with only days or hours left to
live," he said in a statement. "No ruling can erase the cruel,
inhuman and degrading prison conditions he endured for more than 41
years. George Kendall, one of Wallace's attorneys, told The
Associated Press in an earlier telephone interview the decision gives his
client "some measure of justice after a lifetime of injustice," but
his response was tempered by the grim outlook for Wallace's health.
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