Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  “Look, if they had suggested, in that 1961 Lake Charles courtroom, that the white woman might not be telling the exact truth, they could’ve started looking for someplace else to practice law, for one thing. Then, too, given the time and place and the mob that had gathered outside the jail the night of my arrest, and the crowd in the courtroom, I suppose they were afraid those people would just take me and lynch me if it looked like they were fighting too hard for me. Defending me couldn’t have been a popular undertaking. In fact, I’ve wondered what the hell those two lawyers could have done to deserve the punishment of being appointed to represent me, especially since they weren’t even criminal lawyers.”

  “But you had other lawyers and two more trials,” she said.

  “True, but the white folks in Lake Charles had taken what I did and refashioned it into what they wanted it to be, and once everybody involved embraced the lies, exaggerations, and fabrications of the first trial, which they conveniently made no record of, they were married to it. It became the foundation for everything that transpired afterward. It’s the original prosecutor, Frank Salter, who has been keeping this thing alive long after he was forced out of office for racketeering. He’s the architect of this case, the biggest of his career, and I suspect that, with my attracting media attention and scrutiny, he doesn’t want it unraveling.”

  “Well,” said Linda, “let me tell you, if I had to use your trial transcripts as a play script, it would be virtually impossible for me to recreate that crime onstage the way the prosecutors and witnesses described it. I can see that much, and I’m not a lawyer. You’re guilty of robbing that bank, taking those people out into the country, and killing one, no doubt, but not the way they say you did it.”

  I gave her a serious look. “That’s bad enough,” I said.

  “Have you ever heard from any of the attorneys who defended you in any of your trials?” I shook my head. “Prosecutors, judges, anyone involved in any of the trials?” I shook my head again. “Any of the media from southwest Louisiana ever try to interview you?” No again.

  “Don’t you think it odd that as a prisoner who has achieved a lot and received plenty of national publicity for your accomplishments, not one of your former lawyers has attempted to reach out, send you a card, congratulate you, wish you luck—nothing? I think that’s telling, and I’ll bet it has to do with how your case was handled. Something was rotten in the state of Louisiana, and they were all party to it, willing participants or not. To me, it sounds like what you’ve been hearing all these years has been the silence of the guilty.” She also concluded that the justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court, with the cooperation of my lawyers, had judicially lynched me with their 1964 change-of-venue ruling, which allowed the state to retry me by setting aside the state law that forbade it. “It’s the only conclusion you can draw,” she said. “Your lawyers had won a judicial impasse ruling from the trial court, stating essentially that you were beyond the state’s ability to retry. So why in heaven’s name would they join the DA in appealing that ruling to the Louisiana Supreme Court and ask for another trial?”

  “They didn’t,” I corrected her. “I saw the brief they filed. They asked that the DA’s request be denied.”

  “Are you sure they filed the brief you saw? Because in its ruling the court specifically points out that you joined the DA in his request,” she said, “and I can assure you there’s nothing in the files to contradict that. Either the files have been laundered or your lawyers lied to you.”

  “No, then the court lied,” I said. “I have a stamped copy from the Louisiana Supreme Court of that brief. What they did to facilitate a second trial and get me another death sentence required the court to act contrary to law. So to give it the appearance of correctness they said they were doing it at my request.” I paused, trying to recall things I had not thought of in decades. “Look, what I did was bad enough, but my recollection of the trials was that there was a lot of lying and rearranging of the facts to make the crime even worse than it was.” I thought back.

  “Well, there’s only witness testimony,” Linda pointed out. “There’s no other evidence to speak of because the crime scene was washed away by torrential rain that night, leaving only the knife and scabbard the deputy found, and there were no fingerprints, blood, or anything to connect it to you. I find that especially strange since there should have been blood residue inside the scabbard if nowhere else.”

  “That was their knife, not mine,” I said. “Of that I’m certain. They said they recovered the knife but couldn’t find the gun. Well, I threw them both in the same place, and it wasn’t where the deputy said he found the knife. I know that much for sure.”

  “That’s why no lab tests were done on the knife. It also explains why the knife disappeared after your first trial.”

  “Prosecutors wanted to introduce a photo of the knife at my second trial, and the judge asked if lab tests had been conducted on the knife after my arrest,” I said. “They told the judge the knife had not been tested because it had rained all night, washing it clean. They lied. There was no rain.”

  “But, Wilbert, everyone testified about the rain—victims, cops, FBI, everybody,” Linda said. “Everyone said it was coming down so hard that it was difficult to drive through or even to see. How can you not recall it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I thought for a moment, then suddenly remembered: “Look at the newspaper photos of my being brought into the jail—you’ll see the clothes I’m wearing are dry; my hair is dry.”

  “What happened to the clothes you had on that night? If you cut Julia Ferguson’s throat, like the other teller, Dora McCain, testified, there should have been blood on your clothing.”

  “I don’t remember cutting the woman’s throat,” I said. “But I do know there wasn’t any blood on my clothes. Look at the picture in the newspaper. They took everything I wore, stripped me naked. Never saw my shoes and clothing again.”

  “Why would they all say there was torrential rain if there wasn’t?”

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know. Look, I didn’t testify, there were no witnesses for me, and my lawyers didn’t challenge the prosecution, so they pretty much presented the case the way they wanted to. Especially about what happened when we got out in the country. Most of what McCain said I did out there is not true, but I can’t disprove it.”

  “That’s the reason for the rain,” Linda said excitedly. “There was no evidence from the crime scene except for the knife that you believe was planted there. If they were going to spin this crime a different way, then they didn’t want anything that might contradict what they said. The rain accounts for the absence of crime-scene evidence.” She shook her head in disbelief. “But that would require everybody to lie. How did they pull that off?”

  “That would’ve been easy,” I said. “I was black, had just robbed a white bank, and killed a white woman. In 1961, every white person in the South was expected to do what was required of them. Lying and fabricating evidence to aid the prosecution would have been considered their civic duty. You know, I still marvel at the fact that they didn’t simply kill me on the spot.”

  I explained to Linda that however interesting her discoveries and analyses were, they were irrelevant. I was trying to regain my freedom through gubernatorial clemency, and there was that pardon board policy not to entertain clemency applications when an inmate disputed the facts of the crime. Since the board had recommended my release, I had most of the battle won; all I needed now was a governor to sign off on it. Phelps had promised that he would ask Governor Edwards after the fall elections, when he had nothing to lose, to commute my sentence as a personal favor.

  Linda went to the Institute of Human Relations, Loyola University’s social-action arm, whose director, Ted Quant, was very interested in aiding my release efforts. The Rideau Project, the institute’s first effort to aid a single individual rather than a group, was created with the blessing of Loyola’s president, Father James Car
ter. In one of her first roles as my “soldier,” Linda, along with Ted, coordinated the external effort of our Angola Special Civics Project, the first formally organized attempt by inmate leaders to get friends and relatives of the state’s eighteen thousand prisoners to vote as a bloc to influence the outcome of the gubernatorial election, which experts were predicting would be very tight.

  The Louisiana pardon-selling scandal gave rise to the campaign button ANYBODY BUT EDWARDS and put the governor in a runoff with reform candidate Buddy Roemer, a dark horse from Shreveport whose primary appeal may have been that few people knew who he was. He got 33 percent of the vote and Edwards 28 percent, mostly black. Edwards withdrew before the runoff.

  On his way out, Edwards granted a flood of sentence commutations for prisoners, including Tommy, who was freed during the Christmas holiday. Edwards granted thousands of clemencies in all during his three terms in office, including, news reports said, more than two hundred to murderers and more than twenty to inmates formerly sentenced to death. He had said publicly that I was a model prisoner who ought to be free, but he would not free me. “I gave it my best shot,” Phelps told me.

  During the election campaign, Roemer had promised to appoint criminal justice professionals to the pardon board and to award clemencies based on individual merit and fairness. It may have been political rhetoric, but it was at least a ray of hope for me.

  The scope of the pardon board’s corruption did not come to light until Edwards was about to leave office, when his executive counsel, C. W. “Bill” Roberts, reported that there were at least 464 clemency recommendations made by the pardon board that would never reach the governor’s desk for action because the governor had not asked to see them. Historically, pardon board recommendations were automatically forwarded to the governor to be granted or denied. Edwards had instructed the board to retain recommendations in their files until called for by his office. Roberts said that the only recommendations Edwards reviewed and acted upon were those brought to his attention by influential preachers, politicians, and officials.

  Edwards, popularly regarded as the champion of the black, the poor, and the oppressed, dealt a crushing blow to Louisiana’s long-term inmates. Prisoners who believed clemency might be likely, given historical precedents, did not pursue litigation that might have resulted in their freedom. They had no idea the deck was stacked, so they continued to cling to false hope.

  When it became clear that Roemer was not going to reappoint him, Phelps retired. On March 10, 1988, I went to his retirement party at corrections headquarters. I looked around for Dorothy “Dot” Henderson, the black chairwoman of the state board of parole, and found her sitting behind her desk in a spacious office. We were chatting when a Baton Rouge attorney, Nathan Fisher, entered to see Henderson about clemency for a client. She made a phone call, told him it was done, and he left. “Hell, I didn’t know you had that kind of power,” I said, surprised. “So what are you gonna do for me?”

  “I don’t have the power it takes for you, but for almost anyone else, yes,” she replied.

  “If you can’t get me out, at least take somebody else in my place—a gift,” I said, seizing what I saw as an opportunity.

  “Okay. Who do you want?”

  Ron Wikberg was unearthing the identities of the state’s thirty-one longest-confined prisoners (I ranked twenty-second on the list) for a story. We were certain they would die in prison anonymity unless we brought their stories to light. We had just finished interviewing fifty-three-year-old Louis “Pulpwood” Ducre, into his thirtieth year of imprisonment, and fifty-seven-year-old Jack Lathers, thirty-one years behind bars, two model prisoners who had pardon board recommendations that could free them. Their names sprang to mind, and I told Dot about them. Within a few minutes and after two phone calls, the life sentences of the two men had been commuted, and they would be freed within a day or so.

  To his credit, Roemer created Louisiana’s first professional, non-political pardon board. Then he ignored all of the clemency recommendations they sent him. Six months after becoming governor, he granted his first commutation to a murderer, freeing Juan Serato, the key figure in the state police’s sting operation that sent Howard Marsellus to prison. In explaining his decision, the governor said his criteria for clemency would include the nature of the crime, the amount of time served, prison behavior record, the inmate’s rehabilitation, and prospects of support upon release. His rhetoric generated high expectations among Angola’s poor and friendless long-termers whose only hope in life rested upon the system being fair. The governor then resumed ignoring all the clemency recommendations piling up in his office.

  Three months later, Roemer’s handpicked pardon board reviewed the recommendation of the previous board to commute my life term and forwarded it to the governor. It was done without public fanfare shortly after Thanksgiving. On December 7, 1988, Roemer plucked my recommendation from among all those awaiting his attention and denied it, despite my having served more than five times as many years in prison as Serato and having been called the most rehabilitated prisoner in America by Phelps and other Louisiana corrections officials. In announcing his decision to the media, he cited the nature of my crime and opposition from the victim and law enforcement officials in Lake Charles.

  Roemer’s action generated huge publicity. The Shreveport Sun, which served the black community in his hometown, ran two stories critical of his action. The Shreveport Journal, which served primarily white readers, said in an editorial that I had already served four times the national average for murderers and called Roemer’s denial of clemency “a mockery of the corrections system, because Rideau has done everything the judicial system asked of him and much more.”

  Negative articles, features, editorials, and letters to the editor followed, which clearly annoyed the governor. In a Times-Picayune feature story about me in December, former district attorney Frank Salter, now Dora McCain’s personal spokesman, tried to counteract the negative publicity by exaggerating the nature of my crime: “[He] lined them up military fashion and attempted to execute the three of them,” he told the Times-Picayune. “He attempted to commit a planned mass murder.”

  Times-Picayune columnist James Gill wrote in January, “Of the 13 men on death row when Rideau arrived at Angola in 1962, 11 have been released and one has died. Only Rideau remains to be victimized for his achievements.”

  Roemer allowed the holiday season to pass without granting clemency to a single prisoner in the state, the first governor since 1892 to do so. Indeed, during his first year in office, he had compiled the most dismal clemency record of any Louisiana governor—a fact not lost upon the 3,800 long-termers at Angola who lived for a sentence reduction to rescue them from prison terms they could not outlive.

  Traditionally in Louisiana, which had always pursued a criminal justice philosophy of giving a second chance to offenders, even lifers knew they would one day rejoin society, provided they survived the brutal conditions of their imprisonment. Now, Angola was fast becoming the prison where men served the longest sentences in the world. Paralleling the growing sense of despair among inmates were budget cuts, staff shortages, and growing employee dissatisfaction, all of which were adversely affecting the quality of life behind bars. Inconvenience and frustration increased in almost every aspect of everyday life for the inmates: Fewer dollars meant smaller portions of lower-quality food at mealtimes. Fewer employees meant a reduction in recreation, club activities, and church services. Because it took longer for fewer workers to process and transport visitors, visits were shorter. We highlighted the problem in “Getting Our Money’s Worth,” published in our first issue of 1989, reporting that Angola’s employee turnover rate had jumped from 26 percent to 60 percent under Roemer, while the national prison employee turnover rate had decreased to 15 percent.

  Hilton Butler was an old-line prison guard who had been “rehabilitated” by Phelps and Blackburn. As deputy warden, he had created the outdoor visiting program for dis
ciplinary-free inmates so they would be able to play with their kids. Upon becoming warden in 1987 after Blackburn retired, he overruled his security officials’ objection to congregating five thousand prisoners in the rodeo arena for a concert by the Neville Brothers. When guards were tearing down our flyers during our attempt to influence the 1987 governor’s race, he ordered employees not to interfere with our political activity. He approved annual religious Prison Fellowship seminars for death row inmates, conducted in a relaxed social atmosphere outside of death row, with guests. Inmate leaders wanted him to go public about the problem of hopelessness bred by the lack of clemency. But he was hesitant to buck his superiors in a high-profile way.

  Butler’s security chief, Mike Gunnells, who was not hesitant to speak his mind on the subject, told The Angolite, “If the governor would take a close look at what’s happening in the penal system, and if he’d help some of the people who deserve help, it would do a lot to improve the situation.”

  On March 8, Governor Roemer plucked out the board’s recommendation of clemency for Ron Wikberg, a model prisoner, to deny. No reason was given.

  Loren Ghiglione, president-elect of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), flew to Louisiana on March 15 to meet with the governor and plead for my release. He left with Roemer’s permission for me to fly to Washington, D.C., on April 13 to speak at the annual ASNE convention. Angolite supervisor Roger Thomas accompanied me. Years later, he would confess that he absolutely couldn’t understand why I returned to Louisiana rather than walk off into freedom in D.C.

  Although my outside travel had been approved routinely during the previous five years, I was now told that officials at corrections headquarters were concerned that I was going out too frequently. Speaking requests from Loyola, Dillard, and Xavier universities were denied.

  A front-page story about me, “Free Mind Trapped in Convict Body,” by Michael Kennedy in the Los Angeles Times in January 1989 had led Jonathan Talmadge, a producer for the ABC-TV newsmagazine 20/20, to investigate why I was still in prison. The night following my return to Angola from Washington, 20/20 aired “Why Not Wilbert Rideau?” Correspondent Stone Phillips characterized their report as “the story of how politics, a promise, and perhaps Wilbert Rideau’s very prominence have kept him behind bars.” He reviewed the crime, spoke with victim Julia Ferguson’s daughter, told of my three trials, and reviewed the U.S. Supreme Court’s Furman decision, which had led to my life sentence. “He was released from death row at a time of violence in the nation’s prisons,” Phillips said. “Angola had a reputation as the bloodiest. Rideau was credited with helping bring peace to Angola as an articulate voice of moderation who earned the trust of inmates and of the keepers.” Phillips talked to Peggi Gresham, Walter Pence, former warden C. Murray Henderson, and C. Paul Phelps. All testified that I was completely reformed. All agreed that my continued incarceration served no useful purpose.