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Man dies days after being freed from 41 years in prison

LOUISIANA — A 71-year-old Louisiana prisoner who spent 41 years in solitary confinement and had just been released from prison has died, according to CNN.

Herman Wallace left a correctional center in St. Gabriel by ambulance Tuesday evening and was taken to LSU Interim Hospital in New Orleans for treatment of advanced terminal liver cancer.

Late Tuesday, U.S. District Chief Judge Brian Jackson in Baton Rouge denied the state's motion seeking to block his earlier order overturning Wallace's 1974 murder conviction in the death of Angola guard Brent Miller.

Jackson had also ordered a new trial because women were unconstitutionally excluded from the grand jury that indicted Wallace in the guard's death. And, he ordered him immediately released.

Earlier Tuesday, Jackson overturned Wallace's 1974 murder conviction in Miller's death.

"The record in this case makes clear that Mr. Wallace's grand jury was improperly chosen in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of 'the equal protection of the laws' ... and that the Louisiana courts, when presented with the opportunity to correct this error, failed to do so," Jackson wrote.

He added, "Our Constitution requires this result even where, as here, it means overturning Mr. Wallace's conviction nearly forty years after it was entered."

Wallace and two other inmates convicted in the 23-year-old guard's slaying came to be known as the "Angola 3."

Wallace, of New Orleans, was serving a 50-year armed robbery sentence when Miller was fatally stabbed in 1972. Wallace and the two others convicted in Miller's death were moved to isolation at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. In 2009, Wallace was moved to "closed-cell restriction" at Hunt Correctional in St. Gabriel and recently was taken to the prison's hospital unit.