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Amanpour
Twists and Turns after Decades in Solitary; Counting the Cost of War; Imagine a World. Aired 2-2:30p ET
Aired June 11, 2015 - 14:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight: justice or miscarriage? After 43 years in solitary confinement, freedom for Albert
Woodfox could be just hours away -- or not, if the state has its way.
His friend and former inmate describes life inside.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROBERT KING, FILMMAKER: . when they brought your tray, they set it down on the floor and you would have to get down on the floor and pull your
tray through the bars to eat the food.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR (voice-over): Also ahead, the world-renowned Israeli artist, Michal Rovner, gives me a tour of her extraordinary London exhibit. Look
closely: it tells the story of our times.
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AMANPOUR: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.
The twists and turns of the American justice system never cease to amaze. In this story, we're at 43 years and counting, as the clock ticks
down on Louisiana state inmate Albert Woodfox, who's believed to be the longest-serving solitary prisoner ever.
Mind you: he has twice been tried and convicted and twice those convictions have been overturned. This week a judge finally ruled that he
had to be released immediately.
But the state won't budge. The Louisiana attorney general's office would only send us a statement saying, quote, "We look forward to
demonstrating to the court why this man should remain incarcerated and be held fully accountable for his crimes."
Woodfox was convicted of a 1972 prison guard murder at the Angola State Prison but always maintained his innocence, saying that he was
unfairly targeted because he was a Black Panther, part of a militant civil rights group.
Three men were caught up in this case; one has died and the other, Robert King, my guest tonight, had his conviction vacated after spending 29
years in solitary confinement. I spoke to him as he was preparing to drive to Louisiana to welcome his old friend to freedom -- or so he hopes.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Robert King, welcome to the program.
KING: Thank you.
AMANPOUR: This is a truly inexplicable story for our international audience. You are on the way to try to see whether your friend, your
cohort, Mr. Woodfox, will be released from where he is now in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Do you think it's going to happen or not?
KING: Wow.
Yes, I am thinking that it could happen and -- but will it happen at the time?
We don't know and we are trying to be cautiously optimistic because we have been here so many times before.
AMANPOUR: Is he in solitary?
KING: Well, he's in isolation, which is the same. I think it's the equivalent. In this area here, he is in a -- being held in a -- sort of
like a tank by himself. And he don't come into contact with a lot of people.
AMANPOUR: So it's --
KING: So for him, it's a little worse.
AMANPOUR: -- even worse since his convictions have been overturned.
KING: Yes, that is correct. Even though his convictions have been overturned and it's 43 years and counting since, you know, all of this
stuff happened, he still remains isolated, in prison and even though he's no longer convicted.
(LAUGHTER)
KING: You know, it's a -- it's a -- it's a contradiction. It's a major contradiction. It's kind of hard to conceive.
AMANPOUR: You yourself spent, I believe, 29 years in solitary confinement; finally your conviction was overturned.
Describe for me what it was like, being deprived of not just your liberty but any contact with anyone for 29 years.
KING: Being in a cell 23 hours a day, you don't come in physical contact with anybody unrestrained.
We learned how to communicate. We did communicate. We did some sacrificing and we continued to communicate with, despite the fact that we
were subjected to disciplinary action as a result of it --
(CROSSTALK)
AMANPOUR: How did you communicate if you were in solitary, how?
KING: Well, solitary confinement is, you're in a cell, Christiane, that is 6'x9'x'12. But there is a opening the front of the cell. And we
are able to communicate.
AMANPOUR: You describe, for instance, being served your meals; sometimes they would hand them to you. Sometimes they would fling them at
you. Sometimes they would fling them through the -- through the bars.
Tell me about that.
KING: Well, it was a practice, a common practice. When they brought your tray, they set it down on the floor and you would have to get down on
the floor and pull your tray through the bars to eat the food.
A lot of time the food would fall off or if you got something big on there, would get caught in the door or something like that. We saw that as
being sort of dehumanizing and we decided to sort of do something about it.
We entered a passive protest. We ceased to eat. And they called it a hunger strike.
AMANPOUR: What do you think Mr. Woodfox, Albert, is feeling right now, given that he's been in a dozen years longer than you, that despite
two overturned convictions, he's still in there and that the judge has said he cannot even be retried because there's no way he'd get a fair trial?
Just about everybody connected is dead. Even the DNA evidence that could exonerate him has been lost.
KING: He's -- when I spoke with Albert yesterday, I believe, he called me and we spoke. And I think he's -- it's -- he's -- it's one of a
euphoric. But he is cautiously, you know, optimistic because, you know, we've been here before. And we've been let down.
AMANPOUR: What about the murder of the prison guard?
Who did that?
What do you think you know about that?
KING: I have no idea. I don't know nothing about it. I was 150 miles away, never met the man in my life. But I was placed under
investigation.
Matter of fact, 500 inmates were, you know, initially placed under investigation and locked into cells.
And I was investigated for this crime that allegedly was committed by people whom I knew. I was investigated for 29 years for the -- for a crime
that I knew nothing about and I still know nothing about it.
AMANPOUR: Was it the politics of the time?
Was it because you were in the Black Panthers?
How do you account for why they came after you guys?
KING: It was the politics at the time and plus there was some things that were taking place in prison in which, when Herman and Albert went to
prison, they brought that ideology or ideology of a Black Panther Party into the prison equation because it was like -- in Angola, it was
considered the worst prison in the nation at that -- at that time. And they brought a human factor into it.
We did passive protests in order to upgrade some of the dehumanizing practices that were taking place during that time. So we were doing things
that we felt were just and righteous. And for that, you know, we didn't mind being persecuted or prosecuted for it, because we felt it was the
right thing to do.
AMANPOUR: Well, you've paid for all of that with so many years of your life and Albert is still paying with so many years of his life. We
thank you very much, Robert King, thank you for joining me.
KING: You're welcome. Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Now I want to turn to Woodfox's lawyer, Carine Williams. She's on the phone from Louisiana as she makes her way to visit Albert.
Carine Williams, thank you for joining us.
We've been here, you've been here so many times before, as Robert King just said.
Do you think this time it's going to happen?
CARINE WILLIAMS, WOODFOX'S ATTORNEY: Certainly I'm hopeful and I think this time, you know, it should happen. It's under the applicable law
and the facts that we have in this case. It's the right outcome.
So we're very hopeful.
AMANPOUR: Except that you have been here before; you've had two overturned convictions. He still hasn't been out and the attorney
general's office seems to be absolutely determined that he doesn't get out, that he continues to pay his debt to society, as they say.
What is it about the attorney general, do you think, that just doesn't want to let go of this particular case?
WILLIAMS: Yes, it's sort of inexplicable at this point, to try to understand the amount of resources that Louisiana has exhausted to keep
someone who is elderly, infirm and who has already given over 40 years of his life on a sentence that did not have a valid conviction to support.
It's pretty remarkable.
AMANPOUR: You --
(CROSSTALK)
WILLIAMS: -- have been here before and I have been hopeful before.
The attorney general's office would realize that, you know, enough is enough in this case. So at this stage we can only look to the courts and
hope that they're going to come through and see that.
AMANPOUR: Enough is enough, you say; but the attorney general's office adds that the perception of solitary confinement is not what
everybody thinks it is. But it is pretty brutal and we know that many people suffer depression and harm and all sorts of other issues.
How has Robert's health and mental state been affected?
WILLIAMS: You know, there's been -- it's hard to capture all the different effects that happen at -- when someone is put under solitary
confinement. This has been an interesting and trying week for a lot of reasons. But one of them is because it started out on Monday with a young
man in New York named Kalief Browder, who has gone to jail allegedly for stealing a backpack as a teenager and who served three years in solitary
confinement in a New York prison and then never had a trial, never had a conviction, eventually was released and struggling to deal with that
experience, unfortunately, Monday, he took his own life.
And that story, his story has haunted me since I first learned about it and has been top of mind all week. It's hard to explain what it does to
someone. And certainly I haven't experienced it personally. But the resilience of my clients, of Mr. King, of Mr. Woodfox is nothing short of
inspiring since I started working on this case seven years ago.
AMANPOUR: And Carine, you have been working on it a long time. And we know that for many, many years the widow of the prison guard in question
has herself said she does not believe that Albert or Robert or any of those convicted of his murder actually did it.
But you know also that the convictions were overturned and not declaring the inmates innocent. It was for racial bias or lack of
evidence, suppression of evidence, et cetera.
What do you say to people who still believe that it hasn't been proven that they didn't do it?
WILLIAMS: We just don't operate under a system where someone has to prove their innocence. It's really the state's burden to prove that
somebody is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And we have certain safeguards to make sure that they do so fairly, so that they can't railroad
someone and to mitigate against the risk of putting someone behind bars and taking time away from their lives as much as possible.
So the idea that these are just procedural issues or technicalities really misses the point. These procedural issues, these quote-unquote,
"technicalities" are actually constitutional rights that exist to safeguard against the potential of this happening. And so when those safeguards are
not in place, we can't have (INAUDIBLE) in the reliability of those convictions.
And that is why the conviction is vacated when you're able to prove that a safeguard was not provided at trial. And so Louisiana has now had
two chances to provide Mr. Woodfox with a fair trial that met the measures of our constitutional rights, that provided these safeguards. And they
failed on both accounts. And, boy, did they fail. But it's taken now 40 years to litigate these issues.
AMANPOUR: It really is incredible, Carine Williams, thank you for joining us. And we'll be waiting to see if indeed after 43 years in
solitary, a record amount of time in solitary confinement, Albert Woodfox is freed finally on Friday, now crammed with his other friends in little
boxes for all these decades.
And up next, a vision of endless motion, portraits of humanity on the move, the dynamic work of the artist, Michal Rovner, after this.
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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.
Centuries of violence have taught us the true cost of war. But do we know the price of peace?
A recent Rand report into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict found that both sides would be $170 billion richer if only they could agree to peace
and a two-state solution. But the chances of that seem farther away than ever, particularly under Israel's new far right government.
When we despair of the political process, who do we look to for answers, or at least for the right questions?
The Israeli artist Michal Rovner's insightful work and huge installations on such themes as war or peace, migration, even human
compassion, hang in the world's major museums. I met her and her extraordinary work at the Pace Gallery right here in London.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Michal Rovner, welcome to the program.
MICHAL ROVNER, ISRAELI VIDEO, PHOTO AND CINEMA ARTIST: Well, happy to be with you.
AMANPOUR: It takes a little while for the viewer to realize that there are moving people all over your art. You don't notice that when you
see it from far.
ROVNER: I call it "panorama," but they are just parts of a narrow landscape that you -- you know, with no beginning and no end. And there is
a lot of movement of the -- you know, anonymous people through the landscape.
AMANPOUR: How do you accomplish this?
How do you make all these people walk around?
What's the process?
ROVNER: I filmed 50 people in the age of 50. And I asked something very simple. I asked them to hold hands and to walk while holding hands.
And in that process, there was this moment of them trying to reorganize or when they just didn't want whatever.
AMANPOUR: But how is it live? I mean, is it a video screen?
ROVNER: It is a video. There is a video chip. It's information. It's like television.
AMANPOUR: Got it. Yes.
ROVNER: It's exactly like CNN but it looks different.
(LAUGHTER)
AMANPOUR: It's incredibly relevant right now. We have huge numbers of people crossing the Mediterranean. We just keep seeing these people
moving, moving, these migrations.
Israel, Palestine, where you come from, it's all about people moving or not being able to move.
Is there a political undercurrent to this particular work or in general your work?
ROVNER: In general, in my work there always is a political undercurrent. It's a dialogue that I have with reality because, you know,
the numbers of over 50 million people who are displaced, misplaced, without a home, these are unimaginable numbers. And the feeling is that I have,
that the past is somehow penetrating into the present, that, you know, there is this continuation.
AMANPOUR: When you look from far, it actually does look almost like the Holocaust, the big pictures, for instance. You look from far and you
have thin people. You have people arranged in what looks like train tracks.
ROVNER: It's definitely part of my past. It's our past and probably it's something that is imprinted on our retina, in the way that we cannot
see a row of people without having this -- or in this, you know, reference come up again.
So people in China see it very differently than us. It's really interesting. They talk about eternity and the hope.
You know, from a distance, it might look like brush strokes, like really brush strokes of a landscape. These are actually frozen fields in
Poland. You talked about the Holocaust. So these are like landscapes of death to me.
You know, I'm hoping that if somebody is moved, as people can be moved by art, by these nonspecific people or nonspecific crowds, then maybe there
is something good that is going on.
AMANPOUR: And we have these beautiful pictures of one piece that's called, "Cracks." And you show the evolution of color and the background
looks like it's a map and it looks like it's cracked.
And then you have these figures of women with their -- with their arms outstretched.
ROVNER: The war, the endless wars going on in the world, is a very substantial part of the fabric of society, of humanity, of our history.
And maybe these women, they are just looking at it. And maybe they're wondering how long is it going to go on.
AMANPOUR: Amazing, huge, massive pieces that you've sculpted by collecting tons and tons of stones.
Tell me about that, because that also involves Israeli and Palestinian artisans or just plain workers, who help you do it.
ROVNER: It started with collecting stones of ruined, dismantled, destroyed houses, of Israelis and Palestinians, from places like Jerusalem,
Haifa, Hebron, Nablus, Ramallah, a lot of places that physically I could not get to.
But trucks of stones of these ruined houses managed to arrive to my back yard. They're all particles of a life that was lived and ruined at
some point.
AMANPOUR: And having built this structure, you had to dismantle it, to move it.
What was the reaction of your builders when you dismantled it?
ROVNER: It's a very strong reaction, because you know it was almost a year to figure out how to put it all together, very heavy stones, all by
hand, all -- and when we took them apart, it was a very emotional moment. Everybody was hugging each other, touching each other.
And the Palestinians really cried, because you know, they are -- they're so emotional. They said, "Haram (ph), it's too bad we built it,
why do you ruin it?"
And one of them came to me and gave him -- me the chain that, you know, his chain when -- that he's holding when he's praying and said, "This
is for you," because you're, you know, it's for peace.
AMANPOUR: Well, you've just said it. It's for peace. And sadly there is no peace in your land and your prime minister has said there will
be no Palestinian state as long as I'm prime minister.
What are you trying to say about that, if anything, with this work?
ROVNER: I totally believe in peace. I totally believe that people, you know, really, if they are rational, if they are normal, if they are,
you know, they -- everyone wants peace.
AMANPOUR: What is your solution?
ROVNER: I talk about our responsibilities, Israelis. We should learn Arabic. We should learn the culture. We should learn the wonderful art,
the wonderful architecture, the literature, the Quran even, you know.
It's just to come to the other with some -- with respect. And if you look at the relationship of Israel and Germany, it's the most horrendous.
And you may think what was happening there, you know, to both sides. And this relationship healed.
And I the first thing is to acknowledge that, you know, these people are victims; something terrible happened. Yes, there is justifications,
but let's acknowledge. And I think that people should be compensated.
AMANPOUR: Sometimes I look at your pieces and they are quite dark as well.
ROVNER: You know, we have -- we are progressing in many fields. But that thing that I talked about, about the human compassion, I don't think
there is any progress on that at all.
AMANPOUR: We've discussed all sorts of huge questions that we are presented with and buffeted by every day.
Do artists have the answers?
ROVNER: I think art is all about the question.
This is the role of art, is to ask, to present a question, like who are this -- where is it?
Who are these people, you know, how can I see myself in that picture?
How close or how far is it from me?
How relevant is it for me?
So -- and what artists also can really do is -- I think they can give you another viewpoint, maybe a fresh viewpoint of a reality, maybe a softer
take on it by having these long, like brush strokes of cypress in the landscape, it creates this break of a landscape, this discontinuation.
And then there is here and there, which is a very important thing, aspect of living in Israel. It's the here and the there, you know, the
other, the Others, the other side.
AMANPOUR: Michal Rovner, thank you very much indeed.
ROVNER: Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
AMANPOUR: Beautiful work, important lessons; populations forever on the move.
And after a break, we follow the migration of one bird to the heights of popularity -- that's next.
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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, birds. India has the beauty and the pride of the peacock; Americans are awed by the power of their bald eagle
and the French are roused by the rooster. But imagine a world of more modest choices like here in Britain, with a much less extravagant national
bird
Now the results are in from a national poll, which saw 200,000 people vote for Britain's favorite bird and the overwhelming winner was the little
robin redbreast. Modest indeed.
And that is it for our program tonight. Remember you can always see the whole show online at amanpour.com, and follow me on Facebook and
Twitter. Thank you for watching and good night from London.
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