Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  I nodded. “They’ll be in the next issue.”

  “The Department of Corrections isn’t gonna let y’all publish that,” Sally half declared, half asked.

  “Whitley’s the publisher. We’ll see.”

  “You heard what we’ve heard, Wilbert,” said Sally. “What would you do?”

  “Sarah and Nick have already filed this issue in court,” I said. “Having seen the pictures, I’d find a reason to dodge this execution, because if something goes wrong with it after you’ve refused to hear their complaint, you’re going to catch flak from everywhere. But you know that.”

  At the end of the hearing, Campbell announced that the governor, upon the board’s request, had granted Sawyer a reprieve to allow the board more time to acquire additional documents needed to make a decision.

  The September/October 1990 issue of The Angolite featured “The Horror Show,” with the postmortem Williams photographs. The magazine was being printed when we learned the closely guarded identity of the state’s executioner. We asked Whitley to convey an interview request to him and stopped the presses to postpone publication of Williams’s photos until after we interviewed the executioner.

  “He’d have to be crazy to talk to you,” Whitley said, “and once he sees those photographs in The Angolite, he definitely won’t talk to you.”

  “That’s why we want to interview him before the magazine is published,” I said. I asked Whitley to let the man know that we already knew who he was, but weren’t going to reveal his identity. “At least invite him to the prison; let us make our own appeal to him, and let him make his own decision.” Whitley agreed to extend an invitation to the man to meet with us.

  A couple of weeks later, Assistant Warden Dwayne McFatter, the new Angolite supervisor and Whitley’s right-hand man, met Ron and me at the door of the death house at Camp F and showed us into a room, where Whitley introduced us to a bearded, dark-haired man dressed in camouflage pants, snakeskin cowboy boots, and a black T-shirt. He was a Baton Rouge electrician who had volunteered for the job of executioner and was dubbed “Sam Jones,” after the governor who presided over the state’s first execution by electric chair. So far, he had killed nineteen men from Angola’s death row. His predecessor, Grady Jarrett, had died during the two-decade moratorium on executions, after dispatching sixty-seven men. I was intensely aware that had my death sentence stood, this man would have thrown the switch on me without batting an eyelid.

  Just as many people expect me to be somehow different from them because I killed someone, I found myself expecting a man who had coolly killed nineteen people to display something in his appearance or behavior that hinted at his chilling avocation. But he appeared to be the kind of nondescript, white, working-class guy you’d find sitting at a bar, on a bus, at the supermarket—a carpenter, a locksmith, a repairman, even a cop, all of which he had been during his life.

  Jones said he agreed to come and hear us out because of the reputation of The Angolite. Had he wanted anonymity, he would not have come to meet with us. So we appealed to his ego, telling him that we wanted to put his picture on our cover. He agreed to an interview and to being photographed. Whitley turned away in disgust as he and McFatter stepped outside the room, leaving us to our interview. We first took Jones into the execution chamber to get photos of him standing next to his instrument of death, the oaken chair that had done duty since the year before I was born. I gave him an Angolite to hold in his hand as I snapped his photograph.

  Jones was a divorced father who didn’t socialize much. He called himself “a loner” but assured us that he was just a typical citizen who lived a normal life—except for his occasional trip to Angola to push a button to kill someone. He was paid $400 each time. He insisted the money had little to do with his being an executioner. He said he did it for the victims of crime. “They don’t have anyone else speaking for ’em,” he said. He didn’t sound convincing. He said that neither he nor his family nor anyone close to him had ever been victimized by crime. Yet it seemed clear that he liked being an executioner.

  Jones said he knew nothing about executions, had never seen one performed, much less conducted one, when he executed Williams in 1983. “I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. We asked him about the ongoing legal challenge, the claim that the electric chair was poorly designed and caused excessive pain and mutilation to the inmate. He said there had been no problems with the chair Angola used. “I see ’em when they remove them from the chair. I haven’t seen any of them burned or mutilated in the eighteen or nineteen that I’ve done.”

  “But you just admitted that you had never seen an execution before,” I said, “so how would you know what the inmate was supposed to look like physically after being electrocuted?”

  “I had seen people electrocuted accidentally,” he said.

  Ron showed him the postmortem Williams photos. “Is that the way he looked after you executed him?” Ron asked.

  Jones looked through the color photographs, then shook his head. “No, I’ve never seen that,” he said. “That’s the first time I’ve seen that. I didn’t see that on him when they had him in the chair. It may have come up later. I don’t know what happens to ’em, what procedure the body goes through after they’re electrocuted.”

  “Did any of the other inmates have burns like this on them?” Ron asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I don’t remember seeing it on ’em. As soon as they take ’em out of the chair, they put ’em in a body bag and they’re gone.”

  Jones admitted he had never examined the electric chair. He relied upon prison electricians—whose execution expertise was acquired, like his own, through on-the-job training—to have it in perfect working order when he arrived to perform his deed. The only test of chair readiness occurred a couple of days prior to each execution, when prison authorities put the electrodes into a tub of water to see if the electricity was flowing through them.

  Jones believed the inmates he executed were human garbage, guilty and beyond redemption. Although he was highly critical of the justice system, he felt it had so many safeguards built into it that it was virtually impossible for anyone on death row to be innocent. He believed that electrocution was too quick and easy a death. “They don’t feel no pain,” he said, basing his statement on his own experience of having once been shocked. “It knocks them out.” Yet he confessed that if he had to be executed, he would choose lethal injection over the electric chair.

  “Does killing these guys bother you, just a little?” I asked.

  “Nope—not at all,” he replied nonchalantly. “It’s never bothered me. There’s nuthin’ to it. It’s no different to me executing somebody and goin’ to the refrigerator and getting a beer out of it.”

  “What if it was your son?” Ron asked.

  “If he did something, they sit him in the chair, he was convicted of it, I’d execute him,” he said.

  We left the death house convinced that Sam Jones was as remorseless a killer as any of the men he executed. And he was a free man.

  “That fucker is crazier than I thought he was,” said Whitley, having overheard much of the interview.

  “And he’s about to learn the power of the press,” I said.

  “No matter how this ends,” said Whitley, “whether we have the needle or the chair, we won’t be needing his services anymore. He talked himself out of a job.”

  Our September/October 1990 magazine was finally published around Thanksgiving. The photos of Williams, the medical diagnosis of his burns, and the conclusions of expert electrical engineers that Louisiana’s electric chair was defective made news throughout the state. It was our hottest, fastest-selling magazine ever. Everyone wanted to see what an electrocuted person looked like, it seemed.

  The corrections department, without acknowledging anything was wrong with the electric chair, announced it would ask the legislature to mandate that the present death row population be executed by lethal injection.

  Our interview
with the executioner was published two issues later, after which he was relieved of his duties.

  A couple of weeks later I was summoned to a meeting with Governor Roemer at the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge. Whitley and McFatter accompanied me and, as usual, I wore no restraints.

  Whitley said he didn’t know what the governor wanted. I was concerned that it might have something to do with the post-execution photos, that the governor might want to shut down The Angolite. I would contest that in the most high-profile way I could, and I knew, win or lose, that would bury me in prison forever.

  When I was shown into the governor’s office, Whitley and McFatter waited outside with a state trooper. An attractive blonde and an old man in a suit sat on a couch to the left. Roemer stood behind a desk, a small, wiry man, dressed casually in jeans and shirt.

  I recalled how he had phoned Dalton Prejean moments before his execution—causing hope for a reprieve to surge through the condemned man—only to tell Prejean he was going to let him die. I wondered now if he had been deliberately callous. He invited me to a chair in front of the desk and we both sat. He said he was honoring his promise not to make a decision on my application for clemency without meeting with me and listening to my side. “If there’s anything in particular that you want to say on your own behalf, now’s the time to say it,” he said dispassionately.

  I thanked him for meeting with me. “I don’t know what to tell you that you don’t already know,” I said. “I’ve traveled throughout this state for years and could have physically taken my freedom at any point. The fact that I didn’t should tell you something.” I shrugged. “But perhaps you have questions for me.”

  “My understanding is that you took three people all the way out of the city, out into the woods, lined them up on the side of the road, and shot them execution-style.” He stopped, studying me.

  “No, sir,” I said, shaking my head, “it didn’t happen like that. I never intended to hurt anybody. If I had wanted to kill those people, I would have done it right there inside the bank, instead of running all over the place with them. In fact, they even testified that I told the bank manager to get his coat because he’d be cold walking back to town. I did not line them up and shoot them execution-style, like the DA claims. Mrs. McCain leaped out of the car and I sprang out of the other side, slipping and losing my balance. Everybody took off running and I panicked, firing impulsively as they fled.”

  “Why did you slash Mrs. McCain’s throat?”

  “I did not slash Mrs. McCain’s throat.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t,” he said, an edge to his voice. “She told me you did. She sat right there where you’re at and showed me the scar on her neck.”

  I realized from his tone that he had granted me this audience only because of pressure from the media. This was the face-to-face version of his call to Prejean. My gut clenched.

  “I don’t know why she said that, Governor. In four decades, I have never heard that before. I can only tell you that it’s not true.”

  “Wasn’t there a confession?” the old man on the couch asked.

  “There were two confessions,” I replied. “What I’m telling you today is exactly what I told the sheriff that night at the jail. The FBI got me to sign a second one several days later that gives a different version of the crime. One of the agents wrote it himself, and had me sign it, on the promise that they would protect my mother from the lynch mob.”

  “You’re saying the FBI statement isn’t accurate?” Roemer asked.

  My mind searched frantically for something he might relate to. “That statement has me eating lunch in Youngblood’s Café in the shopping center next door to where I worked. It was an all-white area of town, before the civil rights movement and racial integration. It was against the law for a black person to eat in a white café. Had I tried to do so, the crime I’m in prison for would’ve never happened, because the whites in that place would either have killed me on the spot or the police would have locked me up.” I paused, trying to gauge whether or not my words were having any impact. “There are other falsehoods in that statement.”

  “Why haven’t you refuted any of this before now?”

  “I never testified in any of the trials. My lawyers wouldn’t let me. Since I had already served the required ten years, six months on a life sentence when I got off death row, I tried to get out through the clemency process, which is how all lifers get out.” I told him about why I didn’t challenge the facts of my case before the pardon board. “While the policy no longer exists,” I said, “it’s too late now for me to start refuting things. My opponents’ version of the crime has been repeated in hearings and in the media for so long that it’s taken on a life of its own. But that aside, what would I look like arguing that, no, I didn’t cut Mrs. McCain’s throat, I only shot her? What difference does that make? It certainly doesn’t make me less guilty. But it would change the question from whether I merit clemency, given the amount of time I’ve served and my efforts to redeem myself, to a controversy over details of the crime and who’s telling the truth and who’s not.”

  Roemer switched the subject. “I guess you’ve seen a lot of changes at Angola during the years you’ve been there,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah—like going from night to day,” I said. I started telling him about the prison and some of my experiences in it. The conversation between us relaxed, and he seemed to warm to me, asking questions about my trip to Washington and my plans if he granted me clemency. He asked about my traveling and remarked at one point, “Maybe I should make you the goodwill ambassador for the Department of Corrections.” I could not tell if he was serious or joking. I remembered reading that he was a poker player and reputed to be a good one. I understood why: He was elusive and difficult to read.

  Since I was doing most of the talking, in response to his questions, I lost track of time, but when he ended the meeting, he told me he was glad that we had had our talk, that it had given him a different perspective, and that he needed to reevaluate his position. He encouraged me to continue my good works and generally left me with the impression that he would do something for me. He walked me back to the door and shook my hand in a friendly fashion.

  “Is he gonna do something for you?” Whitley asked as we returned to our vehicle.

  “He said he was glad we met because he learned a lot that he hadn’t known,” I said, not wanting to divulge anything that might get back to the governor. I convinced myself that the meeting had gone surprisingly well.

  In the following days, Whitley told me that the word from corrections headquarters was that the governor was going to free me. Then Department of Corrections secretary Bruce Lynn told me the same thing. Yvonne Campbell and Sally McKissack told me the pardon board had been advised that Roemer would sign their recommendation, but not until after the next year’s gubernatorial campaign, because he was going to run for reelection. I was ecstatic. The wait didn’t bother me a bit. The knowledge that I was going to be free made all the difference in my life. I was free to focus on making a life after prison. I felt free. I had hope and a future. I was on top of the world, and it was a beautiful sight.

  Angola authorities dread summer. The oppressive Southern heat brings the prospect of irritated inmates who might flare up and express smoldering discontent in violence or rebellion. When a Baton Rouge judge scheduled Andrew Lee “Flash” Jones to be electrocuted on July 22, 1991, for the 1984 rape and murder of the eleven-year-old daughter of his estranged girlfriend, the pardon board recommended that Governor Roemer delay the execution until September 15, when the legislature’s mandated switch to lethal injection would take effect. The governor, who was facing a tough reelection bid, refused.

  Rigor mortis had not yet stiffened Jones’s body when, hours later, the supervisor of the metal fabrication plant in the Main Prison industrial compound approached two inmate welders, Dan Goodson and William Stone, and instructed them to build a “restraint table” purportedly to be used o
n patients at the state mental hospital. He neglected, however, to remove the logo of the Colorado State Penitentiary from the photos and blueprints he provided to guide them in their work. The inmates realized they had been given the task of constructing the lethal-injection gurney that would replace Angola’s electric chair. They told the supervisor they would not do anything to help the state kill an inmate. They were both locked up for disobeying a direct order.

  The following morning, Tuesday, plant supervisors tried again, instructing each of the other thirty-seven inmate welders in turn—among them Eddie Sonnier, whose brother had been electrocuted in 1984—to build the gurney. But they had all decided to follow Goodson and Stone to the Dungeon. As word of what happened spread to the farm workers emerging from the dining hall and preparing to go out in the sizzling midday heat—it was over 90 degrees in the shade—there was spontaneous combustion as large numbers of them opted to join in protest, turning a collective deaf ear to the orders yelled at them to go to work.

  Ron and I rushed to the scene. Ron talked to the rebelling inmates while I hurriedly photographed what was happening. It was only a matter of time before security reinforcements would rush from other parts of the prison to help deal with the uprising. We worked fast because we did not want to get caught in the middle of the potential physical clash, which could be dangerous. As we entered the Main Prison Office building, several guards stopped us and demanded my camera.

  “Rideau, we got shit kicking off, and we can’t have y’all running around in there with that camera,” a supervisor said. “It ain’t safe.”

  “That’s our problem, not yours.”

  He shook his head, reaching for the camera. “Naw, y’all go on to your office. You can get your camera back when this is over.”

  I gave him the camera. Then I phoned the warden’s secretary to report its seizure, and asked that it be returned to us.