Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  Some of the night deputies were Louisiana State University students. They began to let me read their textbooks while they were working. One book, The Fabric of Society by Ralph Ross and Ernest van den Haag, was especially compelling because it gave me a basic understanding of society and human behavior, including my own. I became so attached to the book that the deputy ultimately gave it to me. Other books that shaped my thinking and my life were Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Anthem, from which I took the message of self-reliance and the understanding that the world owed me nothing; from Machiavelli’s The Prince I gained insight into the nature of power and politics, the forces that ruled my life; from Morris West’s Shoes of the Fisherman I learned that pain is the price of living.

  My education was advanced by the books I read, but even more by the actions of these Southern white men—“good old boys,” many of them—smuggling those books in to me. It marked a turning point. From the moment I was arrested, no one from the Negro community except my family tried to help me or even visited me, not even a minister. I had been brought up in a world sharply divided by race and, for the most part, had seen white people as the oppressors. In the Hole, I saw “the enemy” trying to help me, at risk to themselves. That forced me to reexamine my racial stereotypes.

  In November 1966, my attorneys appealed my conviction, specifying thirty trial errors. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled unanimously on December 12, 1966, that all of my legal complaints lacked merit. I was returned to Angola’s death row, becoming C-48. The face of death row had changed dramatically. Nine of the twelve inmates who’d been there when I’d first arrived were gone.

  The governor had found Delbert Eyer, the young, white, born-again Christian, to have been rehabilitated, and commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment in July 1966, allowing him to parole out in September 1966, a free man.

  Seven of the Negroes—Alton Poret, Edgar Labat, Thomas Goins, Andrew Scott, Edward “Bo Diddley” Davis, Freddie Eubanks, and Woodman Collins—had their death sentences reversed either by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals or by the U.S. Supreme Court because of the systematic exclusion of Negroes from the grand juries that had indicted them (the same complaint my lawyers made in my case and which the state courts had denied). Their respective prosecutors did not pursue new death sentences. They instead struck plea bargains that gave Poret, Labat, and Goins immediate release and meant freedom for Scott, Davis, and Eubanks within less than a decade. Collins remained in prison with a life sentence, leaving death row.

  The death sentence of Emile Weston was thrown out by the federal court because the state had not provided him with a complete verbatim transcript of his trial so that he could appeal his conviction (another ironic echo of my experience). He was a free man.

  Roy Fulghum, Brodie Davis, and Ora Lee Rogers remained. They had been joined by many newly condemned men, and death row had been enlarged to encompass three tiers of cells instead of one. The men enjoyed many more privileges, including personal TVs, hot plates, and pots and pans for cooking in the cells. The atmosphere was more relaxed and boisterous. With the state slipping into an unofficial moratorium on executions, the death sentence was not taken as seriously.

  My lawyers appealed this conviction, too, to the U.S. Supreme Court. On October 9, 1967, the court declined to hear the case, and Frank Salter clamored on the front page of the Lake Charles newspaper for an execution date to be set. A gubernatorial election was less than a month away. Arch-segregationist and white supremacist congressman John Rarick was challenging the incumbent, John J. McKeithen. Since I had met McKeithen when he visited death row shortly after taking office in 1964, I wrote to him. I asked for neither reprieve nor clemency, only that I not be sacrificed to the politics of the moment.

  Elven Ponder, one of my Baton Rouge attorneys, who had the offensive habit of calling Negroes “nigras,” told me the governor, after reading my letter, said he was not going to sign my death warrant because he had serious legal reservations about my case. Ponder assured me that no matter what Salter said in the media, McKeithen would not execute me. William “Hawk” Daniels, the investigator for the Baton Rouge district attorney’s office, had already told me, “They’ve done things in your case, like bringing you here, that’ve never been done before; things you probably can get a new trial on. I fully expect Calcasieu is going to have to try you again before it’s over because there are so many issues in your case. I’m fairly certain you’ll get another trial on appeal.” Ponder agreed. I was heartened.

  On December 8, 1967, my lawyers filed for a writ of habeas corpus in the federal district court in Baton Rouge, raising the issues of racial discrimination in the selection of my grand jury and the unprecedented change of venue to East Baton Rouge Parish. Case law on the grand jury issue was clear-cut and stretched back a hundred years. My lawyers’ brief, however, landed on the desk of E. Gordon West, one of the most conservative law-and-order judges in the federal court system, a segregationist who customarily refused to see racial discrimination.

  While I awaited his decision, I settled in. My first stint on death row had been submerged in reading and learning. By now I had acquired a different kind of passion. I had been defined as criminal, but I knew I wasn’t an evil or monstrous person, despite my crime. I wanted the same things that everyone else wanted in life. But those things had eluded me, propelling me toward more desperate behavior that isolated me even more. I only wanted to change the way I was living. Who was criminal? I asked myself. Everyone who broke the law? Was there a criminal personality? I became intrigued by the idea of answering this question, seeing it as a way of making amends with a contribution that could help society. And I had my own personal laboratory.

  I began working on an analysis of criminals. I wrote in longhand in the dead of night, when it was relatively quiet. I thought I could educate society about who turns to crime and why. That gave me a purpose and gave my mind something to fasten on.

  Judge West took no action on my case for almost a year and a half. He set no date for a hearing, asked for no clarification of issues, made no ruling. I asked Ponder to do something to speed things up. He said that as long as my case was sitting there, I never had to worry about being scheduled for execution. But I didn’t like being in limbo. On March 27, 1969, Ponder filed a motion with West asking to have the case transferred to another court. West denied the motion the day it was filed; he also issued an order requiring the state to show cause by May 12, 1969, why the habeas corpus should not be granted. Ponder had found a way to jump-start my case.

  Less than a month later, during a hearing West called for the purpose, Ponder filed a motion to amend my habeas pleading: The U.S. Supreme Court had just made a ruling in another case, Witherspoon v. State of Illinois, overturning a death sentence because persons with conscientious scruples against capital punishment had been excluded from sitting on the trial jury. Ponder pointed to the verbatim transcripts of my Baton Rouge trial to show that eighteen such individuals had likewise been barred from my jury. One of Salter’s assistants conceded the violations had occurred and fell under Witherspoon. Listening to my lawyer, the judge, and the prosecutor, I could tell that the amended habeas corpus had been filed at West’s suggestion and the entire proceeding had been prearranged; they were bad actors following a script. West reversed my conviction that day in a manner that allowed him—and Salter—to sidestep the issue of racial discrimination at a time when race was a political hot button in Louisiana. By tying his ruling to the Witherspoon case, Judge West made the U.S. Supreme Court responsible, for the second time, for overturning my conviction. Instead of resentencing me to life imprisonment, as a number of Louisiana condemned men had been because of that case, West gave Salter the right to retry me, and a third chance to put me in the electric chair.

  By this time my case had developed notoriety on the sheer strength of the state’s inability to make a conviction stick. It reemerged on the front pages of the Lake Charles and Baton Rouge newspapers.
I was moved back to the parish jail in Baton Rouge to await a new trial. I was well received there by the inmates, respected as a veteran sage—so much so that I was placed in my own cell to reduce my influence.

  Although blacks had begun to enter some of the official corridors of power and privilege—in 1968 the capitol seated its first black state legislator since Reconstruction—the racial climate in Louisiana was as bad as ever, if not worse. As the doors to equal education and equal job opportunities were forcibly opened to blacks by a series of federal court decisions, resentment against such change festered in the hearts and minds of a large segment of white Southern society. Baton Rouge, because it housed the capitol, had become a magnet for the forces visibly, vociferously, and sometimes violently opposed to racial desegregation. As membership in the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan swelled in the mid- and late 1960s, the organization staged massive rallies in the white suburban neighborhoods south of Louisiana State University. Kleagles, Grand Dragons, and Imperial Wizards, their hooded robes glowing in the night against the blaze of forty- and fifty-foot kerosene-soaked, fire-torched crosses, revved up the passions of people resistant to the dismantling of America’s caste system. The Klan members burned in effigy congressmen whose seats they had targeted, among them Jimmy Morrison, who lost the seat he had held for twenty-four years when what he intended as a negative characterization of his opponent, Indiana native John Rarick, “The Klan’s Man from Indiana,” backfired and swept the white supremacist to victory. The Klan met blacks head-on in the town of Satsuma, as civil rights activist A. Z. Young led a march from Bogalusa to Baton Rouge in 1967. Klansmen staged well-attended rallies—there were six hundred people at one, in 1967, just before Judge West first considered my case. Racial tension ruled in the capital city.

  In 1970, at the time of my third trial, the Klan was using the kind of intimidation for which it was famous. It invaded North Baton Rouge—the black part of town—and plastered the utility poles and other upright surfaces with signs showing a rearing white-hooded horse carrying a hooded white rider, his left hand holding aloft a fiery cross. Beneath the horse’s feet was the Klan’s motto: FOR GOD AND COUNTRY. The poster was dominated by the horse and rider and by big, bold print in the upper left corner that read SAVE OUR LAND, and beneath the picture it read JOIN THE KLAN.

  In the Baton Rouge courthouse, where my trial began on January 5, the only strand of continuity in my defense was Lake Charles civil attorney James Leithead. All of the other court-appointed attorneys had asked for and received permission to withdraw from the case. Leithead had asked to withdraw, too, on the grounds that his law partner was a special assistant attorney general, which, he argued, presented a conflict of interest; the court refused his request.

  The new judge was John S. Covington, who appointed two new Baton Rouge attorneys to assist Leithead with my defense: James Wood, two years out of law school, and maritime lawyer James George. The prosecution was represented by four attorneys: Frank Salter and three prosecutors from the East Baton Rouge Parish district attorney’s office. The jury for the third trial, like the other two, was composed entirely of white men. The trial, which took three days, was largely a repeat of the two earlier trials. The prosecution’s case was not challenged, nor was a proper defense mounted on my behalf. The third jury returned their death verdict in a record eight minutes.

  My lawyers once again began the long process of filing a mandatory appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court, while I waited in the East Baton Rouge Parish jail. I expected this appeal, as all my others to the state’s highest court, to fall on deaf ears. Here, the reading materials I had come to rely on at Angola—a wide variety of books, magazines, and newspapers—were restricted. I filed a lawsuit demanding them, contending I had a constitutional right to educate myself. I was in court for a hearing on the issue when the judge, before the start of the formal proceedings, told attorneys representing the East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff that they had better have something to counter the merit of the suit. The parish attorneys asked for a short recess, during which I was whisked from the Baton Rouge courtroom to the airport, where a waiting airplane took me not to Angola but to Lake Charles. The East Baton Rouge Parish district attorney, with agreement from the Calcasieu Parish district attorney, but contrary to law and without telling my lawyers, had made a successful motion during the recess to have me sent back to the Calcasieu Parish jail.

  To thwart any potential influence I might have among black prisoners in the Calcasieu Parish facility, Sheriff Reid shut me in a solitary-confinement cell on the jail’s second floor, which housed only white inmates. I was back in enemy territory, and utterly alone.

  3

  Solitary

  JANUARY 1972

  It’s late, and raining. The buildings before me have been abandoned. Life has drained from the traffic arteries below. The wet pavement of empty Lake Charles streets and parking lots doubles the glare of street lamps and neon signs, intensifying the darkness.

  It’s quiet. Profoundly so. Rain whispers against the open window a few feet away. The only other thing you can hear is your own heart, thumping. I’ve known men who could not stand this silence, but I’ve grown accustomed to it. I scratch a fingernail on one of the bars, to reassure myself I haven’t gone deaf. I’ve stood here many nights staring out my second-floor window at the same scene below, week after week, month after month, year after year…after year. Except for the rain, it never changes.

  I came from that world, was once a part of it. But it’s strange to me now, like a foreign country I’ve only read about. I feel no love, no hate. What lies outside that window represents all of my soul’s yearnings: freedom, joy, home, love, friendship, satisfaction, peace, happiness. But I feel nothing as I look. To me it is inanimate, like a picture on a wall. I’m barred from that world and old memories no longer bridge the gap. I can’t relate to that world, any more than I can imagine what it would feel like to walk down one of those streets, the rain in my face. It’s been too long.

  I turn my attention to squashing my cigarette butt in the ashtray, then look around my cell. This is my reality. Solitude. Four walls, gray-green, drab, and foreboding. Three of steel and one of bars, held together by 358 rivets. Seven feet wide, nine feet long. About the size of an average bathroom or—and my mind leaps at this—the size of four tombs, only taller. I, the living dead, have need of a few essentials that the physically dead no longer require—commode, shower, face bowl, bunk. A sleazy old mattress, worn to thinness. On the floor in a corner, a cardboard box that contains all my worldly possessions—a writing tablet, a pen, and two changes of underwear. The mattress, the box, and I are the only things not bolted down, except the cockroaches that come and go from the drain in the floor and scurry around in the shower. This is my life, every minute of the year. I’m buried alive. But I’m the only person for whom that fact has meaning, who feels it, so it’s immaterial.

  My eyes return to the open window across the catwalk outside the bars. A block away, twin lights appear as a car cautiously finds its way down the rain-slicked street. A gust of wind whips at me, ice on its lash. I look at my gray, jail-issued coveralls hanging on the wall hook. I should put them on to be warmer, but I don’t. After what I’ve been through, why should I cringe before a simple thing like cold? Strength and the spirit of contest surge through me. This is a challenge, and knowing that the cold cannot defeat me gives me pride. I remain in my T-shirt and shorts, unyielding, feeling strong and powerful. That’s what I’ve been reduced to.

  It’s hard to believe that I once experienced a life in that world outside my window. Would I even be able to recognize the neighborhood I grew up in? Are kids playing hooky still shooting craps on those old tombs? Is Old Man Martello still peddling cigarettes three for a nickel to underage smokers? I wonder, but there’s no one to ask. Everyone but my mother has abandoned me.

  I turn from the window and walk slowly toward the heavy steel door. I’m restless again. One … two … three … four … f
ive … turn. Walk back. One … two … three … four … five … stop. I reach for the pack of cigarettes. Light one. Puff deeply. Fan out the match, flip it out into the catwalk. I exhale the smoke, looking idly out the window, thinking of nothing, then turn lazily toward the center of my cell.

  Suddenly, adrenaline is coursing through me. I freeze, like a feral cat who spots a stray dog. It’s the walls! They’re closer! They’re moving in on me, closing up the tomb. Panic is suffocating me. This is what they want; they want to kill me. Somehow, I will my muscles to relax, and my mind follows. The tension dissipates. It’s just my imagination. Steel walls don’t move. Shit, no. I should know that better than anyone. Ridiculous. I just need something to do, that’s all. But what? I look around the cell, wondering what to do. I can read, walk, shower again, or think. And I’m tired of reading, so …

  One … two … three … four … five … turn. One … two … three … It’s not right to make a man live like this, alone. But I can take it. I can whip this motherfucker. I am stronger than anything they can do to me. The more they do, the stronger they make me. I actually smile. Haven’t I endured and risen above an experience that would crush most men?

  One … two … three … four … five … turn. Yeah, I’ve seen men broken, destroyed by solitary. Some have come to fear every shadow. Others have committed suicide. Some men would do anything to escape this cell. Some feigned insanity so they could go to a mental institution. Even more cut themselves, over and over, until the Man, fearing a suicide on his watch, moved them out of solitary. Others stayed doped up, whenever they could get the dope. Engaging in such tricks, though, is beneath my dignity; it’s unmanly. I am stronger than the punishment. The only way to beat it, to rise above it, is to regard the punishment as a challenge and see my ability to endure it while others cannot as a victory. Whenever another man falls under the pressure, it’s a triumph for me. Callous, some would call me. A man falls, broken, insane, or dead, and I feel nothing except triumph. But this is no place for pity—not for the next man, nor for myself. It would break me. The hard truth about solitary is that each man must struggle and suffer alone.