Wilbert Rideau

Wilbert Rideau

Wilbert Rideau (born February 13, 1942) was described by Life magazine in March 1993 as "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America".

Imprisonment

Rideau was incarcerated in Louisiana State Penitentiary (better known as Angola Prison) from 1961 to 2000, convicted in three successive trials by all-white, all-male juries of murdering bank teller Julia Ferguson in the aftermath of a bank robbery. A fourth trial in 2005, before a mixed-race jury of ten women and two men, resulted in a conviction of manslaughter, for which he was sentenced to 21 years. Since he had already served nearly 44 years, he was freed immediately.

Legal history of the case

Rideau’s case, which dates from the pre-Civil Rights era, is widely studied in law schools for the landmark decision made by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning pretrial publicity (Rideau v. Louisiana, 373 U.S. 723 (1963). The Court overturned Rideau’s 1961 conviction because the local television station, together with local law enforcement officials, covertly filmed an “interview” with the teenager and repeatedly broadcast it, resulting in what the Court called “Kangaroo Court proceedings.” Rideau was retried in 1964 and 1970, each of those convictions was also overturned because of constitutional violations. He won a new trial after 40 years incarceration because black people were excluded from the 1961 grand jury that indicted him.

Rideau’s case split the Lake Charles, Louisiana, community along racial lines for four decades, even to the fourth and final trial in 2005, when white spectators sat behind the prosecutor’s table and those seated behind the defense were primarily black.

Although Rideau had always admitted robbing the Gulf National Bank, fleeing with three employees, and killing Julia Ferguson, the final trial pitted the prosecution’s 40-year-old sensational version of events—which held that Rideau lined up his victims before shooting them and that Ferguson begged for her life—against the defense’s contention that Rideau reacted impulsively first when a phone call interrupted the robbery and then when employee Dora McCain jumped from the car and ran and the other two employees followed suit, and that the killing was done in panic rather than premeditatively. The defense debunked the highly sensational elements in the prosecution’s version to the satisfaction of the jury.

Childhood

When he was six, his family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana (a city about 40 miles from the Texas border on Interstate 10). He attended the all-black Second Ward Elementary School. He was born into poverty, and when his parents later divorced, he became even poorer. He transferred to W.O. Boston Colored High School when he was in eighth grade and soon started playing hooky. At 13, he got a job at a grocery store and eventually stopped going to school. He had just turned 19 when he committed the crime that would take him to Angola penitentiary for more than four decades.

Rideau spent 12 years on death row until the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling abolished the death penalty as it was then applied. Rideau, like all other condemned in Louisiana, had his sentence judicially amended to life imprisonment by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Prison Journalism

In 1975, the federal court ordered the Angola prison to be reformed, and the outgoing warden C. Murray Henderson appointed Rideau editor of The Angolite. The incoming warden, C. Paul Phelps, ratified the choice and, with a handshake, gave Rideau freedom from censorship and thus created the nation’s only uncensored prison publication. The one requirement Phelps put on Rideau and the inmate staff was that they had to be able to prove the truth of whatever they published—in other words, they had to adhere to professional journalism standards. Rideau became known for his exposés of prison life and won some of journalism’s most prized awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the George Polk Award, and the Sidney Hillman Award. He was the first prisoner ever to win the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award. The Angolite was the first prison publication ever to be nominated for a National Magazine Award, for which it was nominated seven times. Rideau was credited with helping bring peace and reform to what had been called “the bloodiest prison in America” in the 1970s. He traveled the state as a lecturer accompanied only by an unarmed guard and was permitted to fly to Washington D.C., twice, to address the nation’s newspaper editors on the subject of prison journalism.

Rideau, with former associate-editor of The Angolite Ron Wikberg and University of Louisiana at Lafayette Professor Burk Foster, put together a criminal justice textbook now in its fourth edition and still in use today in Louisiana. Rideau and Wikberg also collaborated on Life Sentences, a 1992 anthology of articles from The Angolite, now out of print. Rideau and Wikberg, for their journalism, were named “Person of the Week” on Peter Jennings’ World News Tonight in August 1992.

In the 1990s, Rideau branched out into radio, television, and documentary film making, becoming a correspondent for National Public Radio, producing a segment for ABC-TV’s newsmagazine “Day One”; pairing up with radio documentarian Dave Isay for “Tossing Away the Keys,” and helping to create and produce two films, “Final Judgment: The Execution of Antonio James” and “The Farm,” which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Clemency efforts

Rideau was an exemplary prisoner, and because nearly all other surviving prisoners convicted of murder in the same time period in Louisiana had been released, his inability to get clemency became another controversy. Governor Edwin Edwards, it was revealed by ABC-TV “20/20”, made a secret promise to surviving bank teller Dora McCain that he would never release Rideau, although he believed him to be fully rehabilitated and although he had released hundreds of others convicted of murder and manslaughter.

Freedom

In December 2000, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans threw out Rideau’s 1970 murder conviction because of racial discrimination in the grand jury process in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. To the surprise of many outside of the area, the Calcasieu Parish prosecutor decided to try Rideau for a fourth time. He was re-indicted in July of 2001, and freed in 2005 by a jury verdict. Whereas he had been represented by local court-appointed attorneys in his first three trials, his defense team in 2005 included criminal defense icon Johnnie Cochran, nationally renowned civil rights attorney George Kendall, and famed New Orleans defense attorney Julian Murray, who all worked on the case for free.

As with every American trial, this one had to be prosecuted under the laws that were in effect at the time of the crime: 1961. The jury was free to convict Rideau of murder – the state elected to prosecute under the “specific intent” rather than the “felony murder” doctrine of the 1961 statute – or manslaughter, which in Louisiana is any homicide that would otherwise be murder if it is either committed without specific intent to harm an individual, or if it is committed in the heat of passion such as the panic the defense argued Rideau was in.

Shortly after Rideau’s release, Judge David Ritchie, who had declared Rideau indigent at trial, ordered him to pay over $127,000 to the court to cover the cost of the trial that freed him. This order was overturned by the Louisiana Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

External links

• [1], [2], [3] from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
• wilbertrideau.com, Wilbert Rideau site by Linda LaBranche, including links to articles written by Rideau
• The Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice, at Loyola University of New Orleans
• Wilbert Rideau at IMDb