Herman Wallace - Telegraph Wallace was already serving a 50-year sentence for armed robbery when he met Albert Woodfox, a fellow prisoner at Orleans Parish Prison. While there both became enthusiastic followers of the Black Panther Party, a revolutionary socialist wing of the civil rights movement. Following their transfer to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed "Angola" after the 18,000-acre slave plantation that once stood on the site, the pair began rallying fellow inmates to their cause . On April 17 1972, a 23-year-old prison guard, Brent Miller, was stabbed to death during a riot, and Angola's Black Panthers were placed under lockdown. The following September a grand jury indicted Wallace for the killing. A separate trial convicted Woodfox of the same offence, and the following year Robert Hilary King was placed under sentence for the murder of a fellow inmate. The "Angola Three," as they became known in the press, were each confined to a cell 6ft by 9ft across for 23 hours of every day . Though King was released in 2001, after more than 30 years in prison (29 of those in solitary confinement), Wallace and Woodfox remained incarcerated. Wallace's case had come before prison review boards more than 160 times, but he had emerged from lockdown only once - for seven months on a high-security dormitory in 2008. He kept active by reading, lifting weights made of old newspapers, and, latterly, by penning replies to the stream of correspondence that had opened up in the wake of King's campaign efforts from the outside. King and his supporters pointed to various inconsistencies from the murder trial. Several eyewitnesses later recanted, and one was legally blind, while there were various disinterested parties prepared to testify that Wallace had been in a separate part of the building at the time . A report by Amnesty International in 2011, entitled "100 years in solitary," gave further weight to the protesters" cause. When success finally came, however, it was for quite different reasons. On October 1 a judge in Baton Rouge ruled that since there had been no women on the jury, the original trial had been unconstitutional. Wallace was free to go. Since June he had been held in a hospital wing, where he had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He was moved to a friend's house, by then semi-conscious. Two days later a West Feliciana Parish grand jury made one last attempt to reindict him, but without success. The fourth of eight children, Herman Wallace was born in New Orleans on October 13 1941. His mother, Edna, worked in the Orleans Parish Prison. In 2009 he was moved to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in Louisiana, where he was again placed in isolation. For the past 11 years he had kept up contact with Jackie Sumell, a New York artist, who turned their telephone conversations and letters into an installation, The House That Herman Built, including a reconstruction of his cell and a design for Wallace's "dream home." Their plans covered everything from the carpets and colour of the kitchen walls to the dimensions of Wallace's fantasy hot tub. A documentary about the project, Herman's House, aired on PBS last July. At present Albert Woodfox remains at the David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, where he has been held since his transfer in 2010. Herman Wallace, born October 13 1941, died October 4 2013