Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  Whitley warned me, “If someone named Norris Henderson is one of the people you’re working with, you’d be wise to be very careful with him. Security has him pegged as a militant and the major instigator in this strike business.” I told him that Norris had been working hard to stop the strike, at no small risk to himself, and that he now had a couple of bodyguards after a small group of black nationalists tried to put him in a dangerous predicament. “Chances are, that’s who fed the false information about Norris to security.”

  Norris, Gerald, and allies among the inmate leadership spent the weekend cashing in their credibility, leaning on their relationships, and appealing, reasoning, and even negotiating with various individuals to back off the strike. Most inmates wanted the unrest to be over. By Sunday afternoon, the strike was called off.

  There were no more disturbances during Whitley’s tenure. He made it a point henceforth to cultivate a rapport and working relationship with all the inmate leaders. He would go to their offices, sit up in the middle of the night with them, discussing issues or just shooting the breeze. He wanted to solve problems and was open to new ideas, as long as they made sense. He made the inmate power structure a resource and its leaders allies in his management of the prison, enabling him to manage the prisoner population independent of his security force, which he needed only for its guard service and to operate the facility.

  On September 12, 1991, Ron and I and a handful of reporters watched the prison maintenance crew remove the electric chair from the death chamber. A few hours later, we recorded the installation of the lethal-injection gurney in the middle of the chamber, which promised a less painful death for the condemned. Unlike electrocution, which required the head and portion of his lower leg shaved to accommodate electrodes, this method permitted the inmate to keep his hair and the dignity it represented. The gurney was built for $5,000 by a Baton Rouge contractor who preferred to remain anonymous.

  If “Flash” Jones had been electrocuted to further Buddy Roemer’s political ambitions, it was for naught. Roemer failed to make the runoff, placing third behind David Duke, a notorious white supremacist who got 32 percent of the vote, and Edwin Edwards, generally regarded as corrupt, who got 34 percent in the primary.

  The runoff between Edwards and Duke was popularly dubbed “the race from hell.” It was a campaign marked by the infamous bumper sticker VOTE FOR THE CROOK. IT’S IMPORTANT. The crook won the governorship with 61.2 percent of the vote. Duke won 55 percent of the white vote. That vote was a telling measure of racist sentiment in Louisiana in 1991.

  Since I expected to be freed by Roemer before he left office, I wasn’t concerned that Edwards, who had promised never to free me, was returning to the mansion. But as Roemer’s term was running out, he commuted the sentences of forty-seven men convicted of murder, among them repeat felony offenders and some formerly sentenced to death, and denied clemency to me.

  Linda, who had eagerly anticipated my release, was devastated, as was I.

  In the after-hours solitude of my office and Guitar Slim’s blues, I reflected deeply on my situation, and Linda’s. I could not escape the conclusion that whether it was fair or unfair that I was denied clemency, I was in prison because of my own actions. Linda’s only crime was compassion. We had a Sunday picnic visit scheduled; I knew it would be a dramatic one.

  She had never looked more beautiful to me than when she stepped off the old cast-off school bus that delivered visitors to Butler Park. Her smile folded me into its warmth. We found a table and made out a store order for the pork chops and potatoes we would grill. Then we settled into our visit. She asked how I was holding up and wanted to figure out our next strategy.

  “That’s a long desert to walk through, Junior,” I said. “You’ve blessed my life with love. You’ve struggled alongside me and lived for a dream. But the bubble has burst. You need to turn me loose, walk away, and go on with your life.”

  She gazed into the distance, fatigue and sadness in her eyes, then turned her smile on me. “Wilbert, had someone told me five years ago that so much of my life would revolve around a prison and a relentless struggle to get you out of it, I would have seriously recommended they seek professional help. But I made a promise to you back then that I would not walk away and leave you in here. Now, once you’re free you can tell me to take a hike and I’ll go. Until then, you’ve just got to put up with me trying to kick down the doors that are keeping you in. It’s the only unselfish thing I’ve ever done, and although it’s hard and sometimes painful, I’m not going to quit. I can’t.”

  With Edwards back in office, my friends and supporters knew we would have to look elsewhere if I were ever to win my release. Hope came in the form of Gerald Bosworth, the real-world lawyer now serving time, who conceived a way to challenge the no-parole status of lifers in court. The trick lay in a basic truism about law, first told to me by Ginger Roberts-now-Berrigan: “The law is whatever a court says it is, so long as no one appeals.” Many penal administrators regarded the hope generated by parole eligibility as the most effective inducement for encouraging good behavior in prisoners. We therefore wanted to test the limits of that view.

  Lifer and Angolite staffer Gilbert Guzman won a favorable judicial ruling on the legal argument that when he was sentenced to life, his sentence did not expressly prohibit parole, as life sentences now did. He was paroled soon afterward. Then Kenneth “Biggy” Johnston, another lifer and a stringer for The Angolite, followed, using the same legal argument. Next, a local judge ruled in Ron Wikberg’s favor on the same issue. Dorothy Henderson, who had returned to the parole board, won agreement from the family of Ron’s victim, and he was quickly paroled. Three precedents for paroling lifers had been established without a single appeal from any agency. I was to be next. But instead of sending my case into the court alone, which Bosworth thought might attract opposition because of my high profile, he decided to join together all twenty-eight remaining inmates who would be eligible under this strategy. It was a grave mistake. New Orleans district attorney Harry Connick, alerted to the strategy by a parole board secretary, was adamant that one of the inmates from his city not be released. When we, as a group, won a favorable ruling in the district court, he appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which reversed our victory. Another door slammed shut in my face.

  The following spring, C. Paul Phelps died suddenly of a heart attack. Only weeks before, he had given Life magazine an interview for an eight-page feature about me, “The Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America.” He had so impressed writer George Colt with the openness and innovation he brought to prison administration that Colt wanted to follow up with a feature on Phelps.

  Warden Whitley had tracked me down so he could personally tell me of the death before I heard it elsewhere. It was a knockdown blow. At sixty, Phelps was still a young man, and he was one of the fixtures in my world. Not only was he the best friend I’d ever had, he had also been the big brother and even the father figure I never really had.

  The family requested I serve as one of the pallbearers at the funeral. I wanted badly to go, to help carry the man who’d had the most impact upon my life to his final resting place and to say my last good-bye. Corrections officials would not let me attend; it was felt that the many dignitaries who were expected to be there, including former governors who had denied me clemency, would find my presence discomfiting. Linda attended the event in my stead. At the funeral hour, I took a walk around the yard, remembering C. Paul, nursing my loss and my sadness. I felt his presence, as if he were walking beside me. I could hear his great words of advice: “I don’t care how other people play. I play fair, and if I can’t, then I won’t play at all.” “Sometimes life shapes roles for us not of our own making.” “You have a responsibility to act for others when you’re the only person in a position to do so. It’s how you handle it that separates the great from the mediocre.” “Always aspire to greatness.” “Always take the high road; never let your enemies drag you down to their level.�
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  God, I would miss him.

  One day I was talking with Sydney Deloch, an inmate counsel substitute—one of those prisoners trained in law whose job it was to assist inmates in legal matters—when he mentioned that a prisoner had won a reversal of his conviction from the federal district court in Baton Rouge because there had never been a black grand jury foreman in the parish where he was indicted and tried in the 1980s. That triggered thoughts of my own experience in 1961, when blacks didn’t have any role in the justice system, except as defendants to be tried and punished. Linda went to Lake Charles to research their records on juries and jury foremen.

  Old court documents revealed without exception the method used to select grand juries in Calcasieu Parish in 1961. Five white jury commissioners sat around a table with specially confected cards that were coded W for white and C for colored. According to the undisputed testimony of clerk of court Acton Hillebrandt, himself an ex-officio commissioner who joined in the selection, the commissioners would “thumb through the cards and select whoever they saw fit” to put in the jury pool. Linda researched a dozen grand jury pools up to and including the one created for me. There was an average of one black in each pool of twenty; roughly proportionate representation would have called for between three and four. The grand juries actually impaneled were even worse: six had no blacks at all, and the other six had a single black juror.

  Ed Flood, the only black man selected for the 1961 grand jury pool and grand jury that indicted me, did yard work for Hillebrandt. Linda’s research showed that was typical: The token blacks selected by the white jury commissioners were janitors and laborers known to them; these simple men were in theory supposed to stand up against the wealthiest and most powerful white men in the parish to ensure fairness.

  Calvin Duncan, the most brilliant legal mind in Angola, did the legal research necessary for my case, which Linda took along with her findings to Julian Murray, the lawyer who had been representing me pro bono for years. Julian filed a writ of habeas corpus for me in 1994 alleging racial discrimination in the composition of the grand jury that had indicted me. The Calcasieu Parish district attorney did not challenge any of the facts. He argued that the white jury commissioners didn’t intend to discriminate during the Jim Crow era; in fact, he said, by deliberately including a black in each jury pool, those officials had acted quite nobly to institute an early version of affirmative action. He also argued that I waited too long to file my claim and that I should have known better than to believe my lawyers in 1973 when they told me everything that could be done for me had been done, dropped my case, and wished me well.

  My petition was allotted to magistrate Christine Noland, who handled prisoners’ suits for Federal Middle District Court judge John Parker in Baton Rouge. Noland was generally considered by Angola’s jailhouse lawyers to be the most conservative jurist in the district. Still, I was convinced my legal case was sound. So all I could do now was be patient and wait for the ruling that would set me free.

  11

  Censorship

  1995—2001

  In prison, days inch along like snails, and years zoom past like rockets. Photos, new or old, remind you of your disappearing youth as the hours spent yearning and waiting for freedom drag by. Events make you feel your mortality and churn up your desire to “seize the day” before all your days have passed.

  Such was the case when my phone rang on September 18, 1994, and my friend Ron Wikberg, after two years of freedom, told me he was dying of cancer. The doctors did not expect him to live another month. Despite that, we had a good conversation. I reminded him of the legacy he was leaving with the excellent investigative articles he wrote for The Angolite, some of which were collected in the anthology Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars, which we coedited for Times Books, then a division of Random House, and some of which were collected in the textbook The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana, which we coedited with Professor Burk Foster. Dying hadn’t changed Ron’s sunny nature or affected his love for his wife, Kay, and his friends or dampened his sense of humor. But he was years younger than me, and his dying hit me hard, as had Phelps’s a year earlier. Ron’s news came only months after Whitley told me privately that he would be leaving Angola in 1995. I felt surrounded by loss.

  Whitley had been our best publisher since Phelps. There were few limits to what we could do, so long as we told the truth and held to professional standards. When corrections authorities in other states wouldn’t honor our requests for information about their operations, we could rely upon Whitley or our supervisor, Dwayne McFatter, to get the data for us themselves. During Whitley’s wardenship, The Angolite enjoyed its heyday.

  Paul Slavin, an ABC-TV producer, read Life Sentences and wanted me to do a show for his network. With Whitley’s approval, ABC brought in equipment and people to teach us how to use it. Angolite staffer Michael Glover was trained as my cameraman, and we followed the prison’s eleven terminal inmates around for months to get their perspectives on living and dying behind bars. “In for Life,” a twenty-minute report that aired March 14, 1994, on the network’s Day One newsmagazine, was introduced as the first report ever produced by prisoners to be broadcast nationally. It won a CINE Golden Eagle, awarded for excellence in television production.

  I was invited to do commentaries on prison issues as a correspondent for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air. Whitley introduced me on the first show and said he felt the radio reports represented a good opportunity to educate the public about what prison is really like. As with the ABC project, I interviewed and recorded whoever I wanted for my reports, then shipped the tapes, unreviewed and uninspected, to Naomi Person, my producer, in Philadelphia.

  The prospect of producing filmed news reports and documentaries especially appealed to me. I realized from the response to the Day One piece that I could have a bigger impact on educating the public and promoting prison reform through film than I ever could through print or audio. ABC-TV left their camera equipment behind for us, and I wanted to create a film production operation in Angola. The time I would have to devote to doing that, and acquiring broadcast outlets, meant I had to step down from my post at The Angolite, which I’d held for nearly two decades. The magazine was my baby, and it was no small thing to me to turn it loose. But I had to do so quickly, before Whitley left, because a new warden might be reluctant to allow me to relinquish my high-profile editorship for fear the act would reflect poorly on him.

  Whitley allowed me to name Michael editor (he would continue to be my cameraman) provided I stayed on as editor emeritus and pursued my film projects from my desk in the Angolite office. “Most of the inmates and the employees respect you, and nobody’s gonna challenge the magazine’s operations as long as they know you’re still there,” said Whitley, “whereas they might try Mike.”

  I dove into my new job, writing to TBS, CNN, A&E, Discovery, HBO, and a host of other television companies, citing our award-winning work for ABC-TV. Aside from ABC, only CNN and TBS were interested. Thom Beer of TBS flew to Angola to meet with me and Michael, and with assistant wardens Richard Peabody and Dwayne McFatter, to hammer out working arrangements between us and his company.

  Whitley had suggested we do a documentary on the prison’s rodeo, but I wanted to do one first about the next execution, which, given our special access, would make it a unique report and firmly establish our new venture.

  In mid-January, Whitley formally announced he would be leaving in a couple of weeks and would be replaced by Burl Cain, warden of a small satellite prison. Cain arrived at Angola just as the prison’s inmate leadership of more than a hundred men threw a surprise farewell party for Whitley, who was visibly moved by the tribute. “I cannot believe that the prisoners of a maximum-security institution, with their own finances, have done a dinner to say good-bye to the warden,” he told the gathering. “I’ve never heard of that being done before. And I can tell you, I really appreciate it.” Cain, who didn’t attend, ominously tol
d a gathering of inmate leaders later that they had thrown a party for the wrong man: “If you’d been smart, you would’ve given a party for the new warden coming in instead of the old one going out. He can’t do anything for you.”

  One of Cain’s first acts as warden was to be the execution of Antonio James. I explained my new job to Cain and briefed him on my proposed television project, which I called “First Blood.” I told him that Paul Slavin thought ABC-TV would be interested in it. Cain wanted to see a “treatment” or “script” of what I wanted to do. After reading treatments on “First Blood” and on a rodeo project, which I was going to film next in October, he enthusiastically approved both projects.

  Michael and I followed Cain around with a videocam during the weeks preceding the scheduled execution as he went about familiarizing himself with the prison, selecting new uniforms for his administrative officials, learning his execution duties, moving into the warden’s house, and fishing in the prison’s biggest lake. Cain was a colorful personality, made-to-order for the camera. He was short, overweight, and talked like an old-time Southern Baptist preacher with a piney-woods twang. He had a certain good-old-boy charisma about him, and a knack for simplistic cornpone sayings and biblical quotes that made great sound bites. He was also a ham.

  Cain assured me that we could film everything except the actual execution, which the law forbade. The state supreme court, however, halted the execution four hours before James was to die, and the project was shelved until a new execution date was scheduled.