A 71-year-old man who was convicted in the slaying of a prison guard has died less than a week after a judge freed him from a Louisiana prison after he spent more than four decades in solitary confinement.
Herman Wallace's attorneys said he died Friday at a supporter's home in New Orleans. Wallace had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and stopped receiving treatment.
U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson ordered Wallace released Tuesday from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center at St. Gabriel, where he'd been held since 2009. Jackson also granted him a new trial, ruling that women were unconstitutionally excluded from the grand jury that indicted Wallace in the 1972 stabbing death of the 23-year-old guard, Brent Miller.
Wallace and two other inmates in solitary confinement came to be known as the "Angola 3."