Early on Oct. 1, Squire Sanders associate Carine Williams was driving south on Interstate 10 in Louisiana when her iPhone shook her out of a sad reverie. She was headed toward what would probably be her last visit to her client Herman Wallace, one of the so-called Angola Three inmates at Louisiana’s Angola prison who had been held in solitary confinement for decades. A magistrate judge had recommended that the U.S. district court in Baton Rouge deny Wallace’s habeas corpus petition. Squire Sanders had just filed a 30-page opposition brief, but the chances that the 71-year-old Wallace, who had liver cancer, would live to see release “were slim to none,” she said.
On the line was George Kendall, head of the firm’s pro bono practice. “He said, ‘Have you heard the good news? Wallace has been granted full relief,’” Williams recalls. “I almost drove off the road.”
