Phillips pressed former governor Edwards about the role opposition from law enforcement and victims’ friends and families played in the clemency process. He asked about Donald Wayne Owens, a murderer and armed robber Edwards had freed after only thirteen years. He asked about former death row inmate Adam Mack, the brutality of whose crime surpassed even the most sensationalized version of mine. Edwards said he couldn’t remember the cases but was sure local law enforcement had not objected. Wrong, said Phillips, flashing the local district attorney’s letter of objection onto the screen.
But the real bombshell that 20/20 dropped was a secret promise that Edwards had made to bank teller Dora McCain that he would never free me, no matter what. Edwards admitted to it.
Julian Murray, one of Louisiana’s top criminal defense lawyers, who had represented me pro bono before the pardon board, explained to 20/20: “No system of justice worthy of the name allows the victim or the victim’s family to determine the punishment. We don’t set up our system that way…. We set up a system of laws, not of men. We set up a clemency system, a pardon board system. And he went through all the steps. We ask for rehabilitation; we demand a certain amount of time. He’s done all of those things. Then if he’s going to be treated equally, he should be let out.”
Stone Phillips gave the final word to Governor Roemer: “Can I ever [release him]? I don’t know. Am I willing to listen? You bet! Am I willing to learn? You got it! Can he do some things to talk about the damage he did, and what he can do to restore confidence? Certainly. Got more work to do, though.” Phillips ticked through a number of my public service and public education efforts, showed video of me working with New Orleans judge Miriam Waltzer and her probationers, and asked, incredulously, “What more can he do?” “His only chance to overcome what he did,” Roemer said, “is what he might propose he could do so that those kinds of crimes would happen less in the future, not more. Only he can address that.”
I had no idea what Roemer was saying; I wasn’t sure he did, either.
The Monday after the 20/20 report, Roger Thomas called to tell me that headquarters had just rescinded approval for an April 19 trip to Baton Rouge to cover a special prison ministry luncheon featuring Chuck Colson. I was given no explanation.
Roemer had appointed Bruce Lynn, a cotton farmer and banker with no experience in corrections, to replace Phelps as head of the state’s penal system. Lynn called me on April 20 in response to my request. I asked if my recent trip denials represented a change in policy. “I had gotten several letters from people in Lake Charles, complaining about you going to Washington,” he said, “and I just wasn’t gonna let you go to that Colson thing in Baton Rouge while I’m catching flak about your other trip.” He assured me that he had just approved an April 27 trip to New Orleans as part of the crime/dropout prevention program because that was “an educational kind of thing, something I can defend,” he said, “but y’all going out to cover things like the Colson event is a different matter, and you might not always be able to do things like that.”
I soon learned that Lynn had denied a request for me to attend a national death penalty seminar in New Orleans in May. The following morning, a week after the 20/20 report, Ron and I went to a parole board meeting to cover a hearing for the state’s longest-confined prisoner, who had spent forty-one years in Angola. We were not permitted to sit in on the hearing.
The American Society of Magazine Editors congregated at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City on April 26 to pay tribute to the best magazines of the past year. The Angolite had been a finalist. Unlike in the past, no official went to represent us. It was now clear to all that The Angolite and its editor were out of favor.
Hopelessness is contagious. Governor Roemer’s policies fed despair at Angola.
Francis “Corky” Clifton was a fifty-two-year-old lifer whose job it was to tend the prison’s bloodhounds. He was a highly trusted inmate and a model prisoner, a rare trusty who lived and worked under comfortable circumstances without any supervision at all. The night after he watched the 20/20 report, he put five Moon Pies in his pocket and escaped into the Tunica wilderness. He had served twenty-seven years and had invested a lot of effort in the traditional means of earning his way out. Warden Butler, who had been working at Angola forty years, couldn’t recall the last time a trusty like Corky tried to escape. After almost a week on the run, with no food or money and not wanting to steal, he surrendered. He explained that he ran off because he had given up hope of ever getting out of prison.
A rash of escapes, acts of desperation, suicides, and murders followed in the ensuing weeks. Steve “Poodle” Howard, a thirty-four-year-old trusty, took off, only to be captured several days later. Poodle, an exemplary prisoner, had served ten years of his life sentence and was active in Angola’s civic and social organizations. Donald Fink, a fieldworker who had served twenty-one years on a life sentence, walked out of the farm line one noon. An armed guard on horseback yelled, “Where you going?” Fink hollered back, “I’m going home,” and started running. A hail of gunfire brought him down. Fink’s friends told us he had come to believe he had nothing to live for. Soon afterward, an inmate was stabbed and killed, the second murder of the month.
“In all my research and prison experience, I haven’t run across any other point in time where we’ve experienced a similar rash of desperate acts by the kind of prisoners who don’t normally do these kinds of things,” Roger Thomas told us.
Federal judge Frank Polozola, whose court enforced, via inspections and reports, the 1975 court order to stem the violence at Angola, expressed concern about the state of the prison; he wanted action.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Corrections Larry Smith led a surprise shakedown of Angola on the morning of June 9 with a hundred guards borrowed from other prisons. They searched Camp C, where yet another murder had occurred the day before, but found only a two-and-a-half-inch handmade knife. A subsequent shakedown of the huge two-thousand-bed Main Prison complex produced six knives. Two hours after the outsiders withdrew, a Main Prison inmate was slashed across the face in a fight.
Ten days later, Terrance Metoyer, sentenced to eighty-seven years at Angola for armed robbery, was transported to Jefferson Parish to face more robbery charges. As he awaited his turn in court, he asked to use the restroom, where he overpowered the guard, took his gun, and fled in leg irons. Commandeering a truck, he eventually rammed into a police car. Instead of fleeing, Metoyer walked toward the police car, firing. He was shot three times; after surgery, he was returned to Angola.
On June 22, Judge Polozola declared a state of emergency at Angola, citing the four suicides, four murders, eleven escapes, and sixty-four stabbings there since Roemer had become governor. The judge ordered a full investigation of Angola to determine “whether the warden and others in charge of that prison are operating it in accordance with the Constitution and laws of the United States and the state of Louisiana and the consent decrees approved by the court.” Polozola appointed Ross Maggio, a longtime political adversary of Warden Butler, as the court’s expert to oversee the investigation. Local U.S. Attorney Ray Lamonica and the U.S. Justice Department were also ordered “to conduct such investigations—civil and criminal—which may be warranted.”
Polozola did not mention hopelessness, despair, or clemency as factors in the “crisis” at Angola, but because we had kept our media friends abreast of the growing problems, they had a frame of reference for what was actually happening. We urged them not to be distracted, to stay focused on the increased number of suicides and mindless escapes, acts of desperation. “Model prisoners do not commit suicide because of drugs, mismanagement, low employee morale, corruption, or any of the things Polozola is complaining of,” I told the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate. “They do so because of hopelessness, the same reason law-abiding citizens take their own lives. To suggest otherwise means there’s some kind of political agenda.”
The press interpreted my comments as criticizing the federa
l judge. One headline read: “Inmate Editor Declares Order ‘Political.’” At a news conference, reporters alluding to my comments asked Governor Roemer if his not granting clemency might have contributed to the problem of inmate hopelessness at the prison. “I do not believe that is the problem,” he said. “I think that is an excuse.” He had no plans of changing his position on clemency. That night, a forty-one-year-old thief hanged himself at Angola.
We on the Angolite staff tried to keep the media focused on the governor’s role in generating the hopelessness at the prison. We reached out to every media contact we had in Louisiana.
In a brief visit to the Angolite office soon after his recent appointment, Maggio stepped through the door, smiled, and said, “Don’t you know to duck when a lumberjack swings an ax at a tree?”
“Roemer and Polozola are trying to lead the public to believe these guys are killing themselves because of drugs and mismanagement,” I said. “They’re playing politics. Somebody’s got to keep things in perspective.”
“Judge Polozola doesn’t play politics,” he said. “You have to admit there are problems here.”
“There are always problems in this place,” I said, preaching to the converted. “Are we talking about the ones Polozola wants to recognize and do something about, or the ones he wants to ignore or sweep under the rug?”
“You want to be careful,” Maggio said, his tone serious. “You could end up dying in here—from old age.”
“From all indications, I can expect that anyway, so I really don’t have much to lose, do I?” I said. But I knew he meant well and was trying to warn me.
“There might be an opportunity to help yourself,” he said.
I knew that he was offering me the chance to join forces against Butler and earn favor with the powers that be. “Chief, did I ever tell you that when you were warden in 1976,” I said, “I went on a speaking trip to Baton Rouge, only to discover that some of your enemies had arranged the trip to ask me to roll over on you? I refused then, just like I have to do now. I can’t do what you want me to do if I want The Angolite to survive.”
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but I hoped he understood.
Finally, on July i, Roemer commuted the sentences of nine prisoners. On July 6, he acknowledged on local television that perhaps he should have been less rigid with regard to clemency. On July 10, James “Black Mattie” Robertson, whose quest for freedom after forty-one years in Angola had been front-page news, was paroled. The highly publicized event was a morale booster for the inmate population. “I thought I was going to die here,” an emotional Mattie told us at the front gate, where Butler saw him off before a crowd of media. “And I sure would’ve if y’all hadn’t helped me and made the people on the outside know what was happening with me. I appreciate the parole board and officials giving me my freedom, but y’all the ones who really got me out of Angola—The Angolite and the other newspaper people who was working with y’all to help me.”
Ten days later, Jack Turner, sixty-eight, the inmate with the second-longest time spent at Angola, was paroled to a nursing home. He had been featured with Black Mattie and twenty-nine other inmates the year before in Ron Wikberg’s article “The Long-Termers,” which won honors from the American Bar Association and ultimately resulted in the release of fifteen elderly long-termers.
An angry Polozola, in a July 14 hearing in his court, expressed displeasure not only with how officials had handled the issue of Angola but also with the larger corrections problem in Louisiana. He blasted the governor and the legislature for not resolving the prison overcrowding that necessitated placing more than four thousand state prisoners in local jails. He promised to address the problem. The idea that deserving men might be released to relieve overcrowding lifted spirits throughout the prison.
Angola inmates received another powerful dose of hope from a July 23 front-page Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate story reporting that Roemer had rethought his clemency policy and recognized that there had to be hope and room for rehabilitation in it. In a companion story, the pardon board announced that it was undertaking a review of all seriously ill and elderly prisoners who might be candidates for nursing home or family care and was considering a similar project aimed at long-termers.
We were all smiles in the Angolite office. Who would have believed it? But I reminded my colleagues that you don’t cross swords with a governor or federal judge and walk away buddies. It was reasonable to assume that somewhere down the line, it would cost us.
On July 24, Roemer announced a shake-up in the corrections hierarchy. Larry Smith, the only ranking black at headquarters, was put in charge of all adult prisons. By month’s end, Roemer ordered the state police to conduct a criminal investigation into wrongdoing at Angola.
In August, Maggio filed a report with the federal court highly critical of management at Angola, charging the Butler administration with lax security practices that made it “relatively easy” for drugs and contraband to be smuggled into the prison. That was true, but it was true of every administration I’d known. Butler’s administration was also accused of racial discrimination: only 3 of 77 security promotions at Angola above the rank of lieutenant between June 1984 and June 1989 had gone to minorities. That was also true, but racial discrimination had existed under all previous administrations as well. Maggio attributed the manpower shortage to sexual discrimination: only 3 of the 692 females who applied for a job from May 1988 to February 1989 had been hired. (The irony was that Maggio had no more wanted female guards in Angola when he was warden than did Butler.) Maggio also reported that the security deficiencies under Butler “may have been a contributing factor” in the rash of escapes, suicides, and murders.
The governor embraced Maggio’s report as being “right on target” and told the media, “We expect to enact the steps brought out in that report.” Butler announced his retirement the following day.
Typically, promotions in corrections were contingent upon whom you knew. Larry Smith got his the hard way. He started at Angola and worked his way up. Whenever there was a difficult task to be done, it was given to him. He earned a “troubleshooter” reputation when he was sent to assume management of the problem-plagued DeQuincy prison in 1987, making him the first black ever to run that facility. Now he was being appointed interim warden of Angola, the first black to preside over the historically white-ruled prison.
One of his first stops was the Angolite office for what he called a “heads-up talk” with me. “I don’t think I have to tell you that you’ve got some officials in Baton Rouge pretty upset with you,” he said. “In fact, I’m supposed to take you out of the equation. I told them I didn’t think that kind of action was necessary, that I’ve known you as long as I’ve been in this business, and that I’ve always known you to be about the right thing, and that you could be reasoned with. And that’s why we’re having this talk.”
“Chief, The Angolite is pretty much the only voice prisoners have in this state,” I said. “If I don’t speak for them, who will?”
“Well, you got your message across loud and clear. I’d say that you accomplished your objective. My question is: Are you done?”
I nodded. “I’ve done what I had to do.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “I have no intention of interfering with the operation of The Angolite. In fact, I’d appreciate you and Ron helping me. You guys know this place probably better than anyone else.”
Black inmates were ecstatic about having Smith in charge, which made his job easier. For them, Smith embodied hope because he represented the impossible in their lives—a black man running Angola. If that could happen, maybe the impossible could happen for them, too. His wardenship gave rise to great expectations, from less onerous work to better treatment by the guards, from fairness in the disciplinary process to help in getting out of prison. Inmates felt Smith could ease their suffering. He met with inmate leaders and asked for their patience and cooperation; then he ordered prison-wide elections for inmat
e representatives who would participate in regular meetings with administrative officials and other inmate leaders to discuss and resolve issues and problems relating to prison operations and the inmate population.
Roemer authorized deficit spending to bring the prison into compliance with the law, the federal consent decree, and Maggio’s report. That meant substantial improvements in security procedures, more equipment, additional staff, training programs, an employee pay hike, and a restoration of cuts that had been made in the prison’s operating budgets. The court spurred the state to improve ferry service across the Mississippi River for employees who commuted and to complete improvements to the Angola Road, which had been under construction for a decade. That was an immense benefit to prison employees and visitors who had to navigate the muddy, rutted road that connected the prison to the outside world. Jobs and promotions were opened to women and blacks. The Angola prisoner population benefited from all of this: Club meetings and recreational activities were back in full swing; church services were full again; friends and family got full visits; and the stress level among inmates dropped measurably.
Wilbert Rideau Page 26