Newspapers are never better than when they dig into a case of past injustice:

Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, Black Panthers from New Orleans who were serving time for armed robberies, were convicted of Miller’s murder. The widow did her best to go on, moving to Jeanerette, an industrial town in the heart of Cajun country about two hours south of the prison. Two years later, she married Dean Verrett, who loved her despite her feelings for Miller, and they had three children. She began working at a beauty parlor, where she still works today.

Then 2 1/2 years ago, Billie Mizell, a legal investigator and fledgling author, showed up at Verrett’s home near the banks of the Bayou Teche. She said she wanted to talk about Miller’s murder.

What Mizell told Verrett stunned her. A bloody fingerprint found at the scene did not match Woodfox or Wallace. There was never any physical evidence linking them to the crime.

They’d been held in separate 6-by-9-foot cells for nearly every hour of every day. Supporters called their conditions solitary confinement; prison officials strongly disagreed. (The men were moved to a prison dormitory in March after nearly 36 years.)

Mizell said the star witness against Woodfox and Wallace, a repeat sex offender serving a life sentence, was promised freedom for his testimony — a deal that the prosecution never disclosed to the defense. He was later transferred to another building where guards plied him with cigarettes, a prized jailhouse currency.

Verrett was skeptical. But she and Dean, who had also worked as an Angola guard, corroborated everything Mizell said by digging up court files and talking to friends and former co-workers.

After years of struggling with questions about the cold way prison authorities treated her when she sought compensation for her husband’s death, issues she ignored as a teenager but that gnawed at her as an adult, she came to a troubling realization.

Maybe the militants, who had become an international cause celebre among liberal activists and human rights groups, were innocent.

[...] When Miller began working there two decades later, the guards were all white and the prisoners segregated. Wardens looked the other way when stronger inmates sold weaker ones as sex servants.

Wallace and Woodfox were part of a crew of socially conscious Black Panthers who challenged the Darwinian order by organizing opposition and telling victims they did not have to be “turned out,” according to the two inmates and others who served in Angola at that time. That riled the prison strongmen as well as the guards, who let the sex trade flourish because it kept prisoners busy, inmates recalled.

“I had to fight corruption and the things being tolerated by the prison administration to control the population,” Woodfox, 61, said in an interview. “When you saw the look on these kids’ faces — to see the spirit of another human being broken — it affected the way you looked at life.”

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