January 10, 1996: New York radio producer Dave Isay (left) and I await the midnight release of Moreese Bickham (right), star of our National Public Radio documentary “Tossing Away the Keys.” He was freed by the governor after serving thirty-eight years for murder.
After four decades, freedom once again seemed within reach in 2003. Some of my defense team in New Orleans, May 31, 2003. Left to right: Julian Murray, Laura Fernandez, Johnnie Cochran, Linda LaBranche, and George Kendall.
Staunch supporters Sister Benedict Shannon, Johnnie Cochran, Norris Henderson, Ted Quant, and Ronald Ware appear at a June 1, 2003, Lake Charles community rally for me.
Reverend J. L. Franklin, who visited me often to monitor my welfare, led a protest at the courthouse following the rally and galvanized black community support behind me.
Free at last! With my mother, who kept the faith for forty-four years.
I married my guardian angel, Linda, in 2008, twenty-two years after she resolved to free me. Her hard work, love, and devotion allow me to wake up in heaven every morning. Here, we’re at an awards dinner in the nation’s capital in 2005.
Willie B, my first pet, who succumbed to oral cancer in 2006. From him I learned that unconditional love is not limited to humans and that animals are life forces with needs, feelings, fears, pain, and joys—just like the rest of us.
The pardon board sent Roemer a unanimous recommendation to commute my sentence to fifty-five years, which would mean immediate freedom for me. Without even reviewing the board’s decision or its reasoning, Roemer told an impromptu news conference that he had no plans to accept the recommendation.
As much as I tried to tell myself that this was just another glitch in a life that on balance had been pretty good, and that there would be brighter days and new ventures ahead, every rejection required more energy and faith to bounce back from. I’ll never get out of this place alive! They’re going to bury me here, alone, a prisoner forever, I thought. The image of Angola’s cemetery, set on a remote patch of the prison grounds, rose in my mind: prisoners sealed up in a friendless, loveless place that no one ever visited. I pushed away the fearsome picture of my being buried there in a cardboard box. And I thought of Linda. She’s bought into this, thinking hard work and fairness would prevail. Nothing in her life prepared her for this. She must be crushed. The telephone in my office was ringing. I somehow found a reservoir of equanimity as reporters began phoning for my response. “I appreciate the board of pardons having once again expressed their belief in my worth and potential as a human being,” I said. “They have also expressed their continued belief in the American principle of equal justice, judging me the same way they judge every other person in this state who has been convicted of murder and then released.”
The following day Mary Foster called from the Associated Press. “Where do you go from here, Wilbert?” she asked.
“I’ll try again next year. What choice do I have? I’ve tried to make amends the best I could in the only ways available to me,” I told her. “I’ve tried to do things that counted over the last twenty-nine years.”
And then Francis “Corky” Clifton called. Corky and I had first met on death row, where he arrived in 1965 for killing a man during a robbery. His death sentence, like mine, was judicially amended to life imprisonment after the Furman ruling. Like me, Corky was a small, slight man who had entered the bloodiest prison in America. And like most of the formerly condemned, he was a model prisoner with an exemplary record of behavior. He received not a single visit from his siblings or his children, but, nevertheless, he had remade himself, teaching himself how to repair watches and to paint. Like others who thought they were serving 10–6 life sentences, he applied for clemency after a decade behind bars and was denied. A second denial followed. In 1983, he won a recommendation from the pardon board for a sentence reduction to fifty years, which was blocked by objections from law enforcement; this, in the new law-and-order climate of that time, had become routine practice for murder cases.
At the age of fifty-two, with no hope of legitimate release and after two heart attacks, feeling his time was running out, he had staged his failed “Moon Pies” escape. When he was taken back to Angola, he was placed in a small, solitary-confinement cell. Indefinite isolation was his punishment for succumbing to despair. “Having sit in this cell now for several weeks with nothing, even denied my cigarettes, I have thought a lot about suicide, and it seems to be the most humane way out of a prison I no longer care to struggle in,” he said shortly after his isolation began. He had posed a difficult question to me: “Suicide, or endless torment—which would you choose?” I couldn’t answer. Ron and I wrote a story about Corky. After it appeared, a woman named Betty Lung wrote to him from his hometown of Hamersville, Ohio. They corresponded, then talked on the phone. She visited him a number of times.
Now Corky was in the hospital and had sent for us. Despite the tubes delivering oxygen to his nostrils, he greeted us with a big smile. “For once in my life, something wonderful is happening,” he said. “I’m getting married in five days.” He handed us a photo of Betty, who had moved to Louisiana to be near him. Love had brought joy to Corky’s life. “Now I’ve got something to live for,” he said. He wanted us to know what a difference we had made in his life.
I know that among both prison authorities and the general public, the common view is that a prisoner is just waiting to find some woman to con and then leave after he is released from prison. That happens, just as it happens that scoundrels in free society take advantage of women. But in my experience, it happens far more often that a prisoner lucky enough to find a woman willing to take a chance on him, love him, and stick by him in the most challenging circumstances considers himself extraordinarily blessed and wants to keep her.
Just the day before, I had sat at a tree-shaded table on a beautiful sunny day in the spacious outdoor visiting park for trusties, watching Linda walk up the hill toward me, and I marveled at the happiness she had brought into my life. Love is a powerful, powerful force. I felt upbeat after our visit to Corky.
Two days later he was dead. Betty took his body back to Ohio, rescuing him from the Angola inmate’s nightmare of being buried in the prison cemetery, a prisoner forever.
10
Hope
1990–1994
“Have you ever run across anything to indicate that an execution was botched at Angola?” asked Sarah Ottinger, a young lawyer working with New Orleans attorney Nick Trenticosta on the case of Frederick Kirkpatrick, who was scheduled to be electrocuted on September 19, 1990.
Ron and I, each with a phone to our ear, looked quizzically at one another and answered that we had not.
“In fact, prison officials have consistently expressed satisfaction at how well the executions have gone,” I said, “particularly in light of news reports of bungled executions in other states.”
“Like the electrocution of Jessie Tafero last May, who literally caught fire in Florida’s electric chair,” Ron added. “But here, neither witnesses nor news media attending Angola executions have ever reported seeing a problem.”
Sarah’s question was not an idle one. After an unofficial twenty-two-year moratorium on executions, Louisiana had resumed the practice with a vengeance on December 14, 1983, beginning with the electrocution of Robert Wayne Williams. By August 1990, the state had executed nineteen men. To halt Kirkpatrick’s impending date with death, Ottinger and Trenticosta were mounting the first legal challenge to Louisiana’s use of the electric chair, charging that it burned, tortured, and mutilated the condemned. That was confirmed by photos of Williams taken by his family at the Baton Rouge mortuary that handled his funeral arrangements.
America was marking the one-hundredth anniversary of its first execution by electric chair, an event George Westinghouse, the nineteenth-century inventor of the alternating-current technology used in that killing apparatus, had described as “a brutal affair—they could have done a better job with an ax.”
> I phoned Rosetta Williams, Robert’s mother, and asked for copies of the photographs and permission to publish them. An Angolite fan and an opponent of capital punishment, she was happy to accommodate us. Because Florida law required postmortem autopsy photographs of executed inmates, Ron requested from authorities there the photos of Daniel Thomas, David Funchess, Ronald Straight, Buford White, Willie Darden, Jeffrey Daugherty, Ted Bundy, Dennis Adams, and Jesse Tafero—the last nine men to die in that state’s electric chair.
Florida sent us twenty-six photos; Rosetta Williams sent thirty-three of her son. Because all incoming mail was opened and inspected for possible contraband before reaching us, the arrival of so many grisly pictures, all in color, caused a stir in the warden’s office. John Whitley, who had recently replaced Larry Smith as Angola’s warden (Smith had been promoted to deputy secretary of corrections), came to see us one evening and asked to see the photos. We laid them out on a long cabinet countertop, a ghoulish display. The photographs, taken soon after the men were electrocuted, vividly showed the freshly burned, mutilated flesh. I was horrified anew, and disturbed again by the shaven heads of the dead men, which seemed to strip them of their humanness. “What am I supposed to be seeing in these pictures of dead people?” the warden asked.
We pointed to the photos of Williams that showed severe burns on his head and leg where the electrodes had been placed, the areas of mutilation larger than the size of the electrodes. He had suffered first-, second-, third-, and fourth-degree burns. “When you compare how he looks with the way the inmates in Florida who were executed look,” Ron said, “it’s obvious the execution of Robert Wayne Williams didn’t go right.”
“I was a witness,” the warden said, “and I didn’t see anything go wrong. There were no problems.”
“Chief, how do you account for these burns on him?” I asked.
“His head was covered and he had on clothes during the execution, so we couldn’t see his body. When the coroner said he was dead, we were escorted out. This is my first time seeing this.”
“There are no postmortem photographs of Wayne Felde, who was executed in 1988,” Ron said, “but two nurses who saw him afterward have signed affidavits, describing his physical condition as being even worse than Williams’s.”
“Do you have photos of Dalton Prejean?” Whitley asked. He had presided over Prejean’s execution on May 18, his only one.
“No, sir,” Ron replied, “but you were there. Did he look anything like Robert Wayne afterward?”
“I don’t know what he looked like,” said Whitley. “Again, he had a hood over his head and was fully clothed. When the execution was over, I signaled the coroner, who came in to check his heartbeat and officially declare him dead.”
“Chief, you didn’t look at him?” I asked.
“For what?” he asked in return, a little testy. “My job was done. The witnesses left, and I left. Paramedics went in afterward and removed the body.”
“Chances are your predecessors all did the same thing,” I said.
Whitley, forty-six, was a year younger than me, with a fondness for Stetsons and cowboy boots. He had begun his career at the violent Angola of 1970 as a classification officer. With guts and a mind of his own, he quickly established himself as an independent power to be reckoned with, someone you wanted with you, never against you. Maggio eventually made him director of classification, and in 1978, he became deputy warden. The following year, he transferred to Hunt Correctional Center and four years later became warden of the facility. Retiring in 1989, he moved to Texas, where he served as warden of a prison operated by Wackenhut, Inc., a privately owned, for-profit enterprise to which states outsourced their excess inmate populations. He had returned to Angola earlier in the year to replace interim warden Larry Smith. Phelps assured me that Whitley would make a good Angolite publisher because he could be relied upon to stand his ground and not let anyone dictate to him. Phelps was right. Whitley believed in a visible and accessible administration. While he regarded himself as a criminal justice conservative, he was very much a progressive in that he did not believe in censorship or in secrecy and vowed to continue the open-door media policy at the prison. “If there’s something that’s wrong in the prison,” he announced upon assuming the wardenship, “I want to know about it, and my staff had better correct it, because I intend to be proud of this prison and the way we operate it.” Our proposed publication of the postmortem photographs of Robert Wayne Williams was his first test as publisher of The Angolite.
“Tell me—what are you trying to accomplish with these pictures?” he asked. “Make a case against capital punishment?”
“This is not about the issue of capital punishment,” I said. I did not acknowledge that we thought publishing the sensational photos would probably result in a halt of the use of the chair. “A claim has been filed in court charging that the electric chair is defective and has been mutilating and perhaps torturing the inmates being executed. It’s a legitimate story.”
“The legislature just passed a law ending use of the chair,” he said. “We’ll switch over to lethal injection in a year.”
“But the thirty-two guys currently on death row and those who will be sentenced to death during the coming year are not affected by the law,” Ron said. “They have to die in that chair.”
“I doubt that any newspaper in Louisiana would publish those photos,” said Whitley.
“That’s all the more reason we need to do it,” I said. “And as publisher, you might want the distinction of having your magazine publish what even the professional outside press is too squeamish to print.” He asked how many photos we wanted to use. I said I intended to publish only two photos of Williams to make our point—one of his head and the other of his leg, in black-and-white.
“You’re saying you’re not good enough writers to make your point without the pictures?” he asked.
“No writer is ever as good as a photo,” said Ron. “These pictures grab your attention and make the point—without words.”
I reminded the warden of his own philosophy, that if he couldn’t stand having people see what he was doing, then maybe he shouldn’t be doing it.
He smiled and nodded in agreement. “I just wanted you to defend your position. I think the photos will make for a great story. But you do understand there are people who are not gonna want this published,” he said.
As word of the photos got around, those people did indeed arrive. Annette Viator, attorney for the Department of Corrections, came to the prison and implied I wouldn’t be allowed to publish the pictures. Her boss, corrections chief Bruce Lynn, strongly suggested to me that it was not in my best interest or that of the department.
Ottinger and Trenticosta filed their lengthy legal challenge in the 22nd Judicial District Court of Louisiana, in which they included the Williams photos. There was also a report by Theodore Bernstein, a national expert on electrical engineering who had traveled to Angola and spent hours studying the chair and its equipment and found significant problems: “The buckle on the wet straps is too close to the flesh and acts as an additional conducting path to cause burns at the buckle. The buckle and leather cause arcing of the electrical current to other areas of the flesh, resulting in additional burns. The sponge utilized is too thin and therefore does not spread the current uniformly over a sufficient area, which leads to greater burns. The rough underside of the electrode and the sharp edges of the metal, as constructed, burn right into the skin because of the close spacing permitted by the thin sponge.” Bernstein’s conclusions were supported by another expert, Fred Leuchter, Jr., the nation’s only provider of execution equipment, who stated that the Angola electrodes were “the most poorly designed… I have ever seen.”
Bernstein told Ron and me that he was surprised to learn Louisiana’s electric chair had been “put together by electricians” instead of electrical engineers. The biggest problem was the electrodes, which he said “contributed to excessive, completely unnecessa
ry burning of the person being executed.” The burns and mutilations suffered by Williams were not unique to him but were experienced by other prisoners electrocuted in Louisiana, he concluded; he predicted similar results in the future.
The court stayed the execution of Frederick Kirkpatrick. No news media in the state mentioned the photos. We decided to hold up publication of our next edition so that we could include the outcome of the pardon board’s October 8 clemency hearing for Robert Sawyer, a mentally retarded inmate scheduled to die in the electric chair two days later. He was now being represented by Ottinger and Trenticosta, who had become involved in his case only the month before.
When the Louisiana Supreme Court refused to stay the execution, Trenticosta had to remain in New Orleans to file legal motions for Sawyer in the federal courts, so Ottinger had to handle a challenging presentation to the pardon board alone. After presenting evidence of Sawyer’s mental retardation, which she contended had made it difficult for him to consider the prosecutor’s plea bargain offer prior to trial, Ottinger prepared to present evidence of design problems with the state’s electric chair. Bernstein was to be her first witness. “I don’t know where else to bring this,” she told the board, “but I bring it to you because you’re the conscience of the community.”
The board, forewarned by Annette Viator, declared itself an improper forum. “We are not technical people. That’s not our function,” pardon board chairwoman Yvonne Campbell said. She disallowed Ottinger’s argument and evidence of a design flaw in the chair, evidence that would have included the post-execution photos of Williams and made them part of the public record.
During a break in the session, board member Sally McKissack came over to where I was standing against the wall to say hello. Yvonne followed her. “Heard you’ve got copies of those photographs,” Yvonne whispered.
Wilbert Rideau Page 28