Soon afterward, Antonio James, a “changed man” even in the opinion of the warden, lost his final court battle, and his execution was to go forward, despite evidence that he was not the shooter. His lethal injection was to be administered March i, and Michael and I resumed filming the countdown to his death.
On February 19, Michael collapsed and died of an apparent asthma attack as he prepared for bed. I lost a valued friend and an ally in my pursuit of journalistic excellence. I mourned most, however, for his widow, Debi, a true Christian who brought love and joy into Michael’s caged life and took him out of Angola at long last, though not in the way either had hoped and prayed for.
I contacted TBS Productions and CNN, asking for camera assistance to replace Michael, but their bureaucracies were too slow in responding. I appealed to Gabriel Films, a New York production company, which assured me of instant assistance to finish my film. Jonathan Stack, the head of the company, and Liz Garbus, a young filmmaker, met me at Michael’s funeral in Baton Rouge, where I had been driven by a lone female security lieutenant, something so unprecedented that I spent the entire trip suspicious it was a setup.
One day during the week of the execution, we were told the surprising news that we could not film at the death house because an ABC-TV crew was filming there. They had also been on death row talking to Antonio. I asked Antonio why he was cooperating with ABC when he had committed to giving me the exclusive. He apologized and explained that Cain had brought Prime Time Live’s correspondent Cynthia McFadden to meet him and had asked him to cooperate with the lady. “I have to do this,” James told me. “I don’t have a choice.” Cain was getting Antonio’s son out of a juvenile prison to visit with him, and was helping his mother by providing transportation for her to visit him.
I told him that I understood. I would have done the same thing.
Cain, learning that I was angry, said that I was to continue my film, that there was no conflict, that what I would produce would be the superior film because he had made ABC promise that they had to allow me to use the footage they would tape at the death house of Antonio’s walk to the execution chamber. “This way, you’ll have not only what you film, but also what they do, too,” he said. “This is a better deal for you.”
I reminded him that I had been filming this project since the day he became warden and that he had promised me the exclusive on Antonio’s last walk. He promised to make it up to me on something else. We continued filming, tweaking, and changing our project so that it didn’t end up appearing to be a copy of what ABC would produce.
In June, Prime Time Live aired “Judgment at Midnight,” a special hour-long feature that focused on the final week’s countdown to Antonio’s execution. Prior to the broadcast, Cynthia McFadden appeared as a guest on The Charlie Rose Show to talk about ABC’s unparalleled access to the execution. She explained that while at Angola on a totally unrelated story about another inmate, Cain invited her to accompany him to death row, where he introduced her to Antonio James and suggested the story to her, guaranteeing her unprecedented camera access to everything except the actual execution. Cain had deliberately sabotaged my film project. McFadden, none the wiser, understandably leaped at the opportunity.
But she also touted Cain’s openness and the access accorded ABC-TV, unaware that less than two weeks before The Charlie Rose Show, Cain had punished inmate boxer Donald Vallier for his “openness” in innocent comments to the New Orleans Times-Picayune about homosexuality and drugs at Angola by putting him in chains and transferring him across the state to another prison. Cain’s openness and media access were calculated and orchestrated for his own purposes.
Stack told me that Cain discouraged him from working with me. Nonetheless, we labored on to produce the hour-long documentary, now renamed Final Judgment: The Execution of Antonio James, which was to air in August on the Discovery Channel. Stack said Cain had a real problem with what I was doing and that it might help if I wasn’t listed as one of the producers of the film. So I reluctantly settled for the minimal credit line “Story by Wilbert Rideau,” and decided to discontinue my film work until Cain became comfortable with my doing it and I could gain more control over my work, and the credit I would receive for it.
In the wake of Michael’s death, I had reassumed control of The Angolite. Cathy Jett now indicated that Cain might want to import someone from another prison to run it. That idea stunned the entire staff. Then Angolite staffer Keith Elliott died shortly after Michael, and production of the magazine fell behind schedule. While Cain was out of state, I phoned Sheryl Ranatza and told her that the magazine had a contractual obligation to subscribers and that I was going to take charge of the operation until the warden decided whom he wanted to serve as editor. She agreed. Once I reestablished my position, I didn’t think Cain would oust me, because that would be a hugely controversial move.
It felt like death was everywhere I turned, and I wrote more about it in the September/October 1996 issue of The Angolite.
While “Final Judgment” was produced, the story of another prisoner facing death went undone.
His name was Anthony Fields, but everyone called him “Beaver Duck.” He came to Angola in 1971, a teenager with life terms for two New Orleans rapes. The prison was sinking into an era of barbarity that would earn it the distinction of being the bloodiest prison in the nation. It was a bad time. Beaver Duck was raped and enslaved, forced to be a wife to his rapist. Afterwards, he was used and abused by predators, traded, sold and used as collateral, escaping this role only a decade ago. Vengeful souls might regard this horrific experience as a kind of poetic justice.
Beaver Duck came to me in early February, dying of lung cancer, robbed of whatever dream for the future that had sustained him through his ordeal. He wanted to tell his story on film, to share the tragedy of his pained existence with the world. Having become a Christian, he wanted his 25 years in Angola to be of value to others, for it all not to have been a waste. His was a story I yearned to tell.
Too many things were happening, not enough time. There was the merciless countdown to the execution of Antonio James. I was committed to that story, wanting to salvage some value from his needless, yet inevitable death. Then two Angolite members died and the magazine fell far behind schedule.
Beaver Duck lived in my dormitory. There was no escaping him. His eyes asked when I’d bring the camcorder and begin filming. He reminded me each morning, “I’m ready when you’re ready. Waiting on you.” “Hang in there,” I’d say. “Soon!” Though ever mindful his health was deteriorating, I was caught up in a tide of demands and activities. I was very frustrated at my inability to find the time to get back to him. Friends warned, “Time’s running out.” Beaver Duck became so weak he was placed on the medical ward. Still, he sent word from his hospital bed not to forget his story. I really wanted to do it, had even gotten a green light from my boss, but couldn’t find the time. He remained unfinished business. I finally went to the hospital, not to film, but to tell him his request to be furloughed to die outside with his family had been denied. “That means I’m gonna die in prison, huh?” he said, his voice low and filled with despair. I watched life leave his eyes. He died a week later. He was 43.
Antonio James’s story was told, but not Beaver Duck’s. I failed him. His sad eyes and imploring, “I’m waiting on you,” join a litany of others I could never find time to get back to. They haunt my soul during times of reflection because I understand their disappointment. Like Beaver Duck and others, I too am unfinished business. Those who promised with the best of intentions to help, and could have made a difference, couldn’t make the time. They never got back.
As 1996 was drawing to a close, I was more than a little surprised to hear from Jonathan Stack. He wanted us to start working on a film I had suggested to him called “Where I Live,” about life in Angola. Stack told me that Cain was okay with that. I told him that I’d seen no change in Cain’s attitude, and I could do nothing until I did.
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bsp; One evening soon afterward, I went to a Christmas function at the chapel, a white, high-ceilinged, octagonal building without statuary or other ornamentation save the beautiful stained-glass windows depicting symbols of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religions. Leaving early, I stepped onto the brightly lit Walk nearby.
“Hold up, Wilbert,” said Cain, who fell in alongside me as I headed to my office. “I’ll walk with you.” He asked if I was going to work with Stack on another film. “Nope,” I said. He flattered me about our Antonio James film and said he “knew that a little competition would make you work harder and turn out a better product.” He suggested that I should work with Jonathan again. “Y’all make a good team,” he said, then added meaningfully, “I like Jonathan.”
A few days later, Cain phoned to tell me that Stack and Liz Garbus were at the prison to film some of the Christmas activity. They were already filming in the employee community. “But they don’t know what else to film. Look,” he said, “they need you to help them make this film. They don’t know anything about Angola, but you know this place and how to do what they want to do. They can’t do it without you, so they gonna be coming to your office to talk to you, and I’m counting on you to make this work for ’em and for us. If you have any problems or need anything, you just call.”
Hardly a simple request for a personal favor, this was a nicely presented command from a dictator armed with arbitrary power. I knew I had to do what he asked.
I wondered what Stack could have done to get Cain not only to overcome his animosity toward me but to order me to make another film. I knew Stack had arranged speaking engagements for Cain in the northeast, even traveled with him. Now Stack had carte blanche in Angola. I had to be wary of him.
I told him and Liz, whom I liked, about various things happening in different parts of the prison that would collectively provide a slice of life in Angola. We walked over to the prison hospital with Checo and Norris to film a visit with Logan “Bones” Theriot, who was dying, and my film, now renamed The Farm, was under way. We filmed for months all over the prison, and despite my initial reservations, I soon warmed to the project. Filmmaking was something I enjoyed.
Two months into the project, on March 5, 1997, Advocate reporter James Minton phoned to ask me about an award I had won. I had no idea.
“You won the Louisiana Bar Association’s top journalism award for Final Judgment,” he said. “No one told you?”
I was stunned to learn from the front-page news story the next day that the Bar Association had requested my presence at the awards ceremony five weeks earlier. Cain had instead sent an assistant warden to the ceremony to pick up the award—actually two awards—inscribed with my name, and kept them on his desk without even telling me about them. The negative press, including an editorial critical of him in the Advocate, was an utter embarrassment to Cain. A week later, he struck back.
On March 12, 1997, I was ordered out of the Angolite office while three unidentified men in civilian clothing, carrying briefcases and black bags, went in. When I was permitted to return to the office that afternoon, I saw that our two office phones had been removed. In their place was a new phone that Cain wanted us to have, so that we could phone anyone, anywhere in the world—as long as they accepted the collect charges. (Many of our calls were to governmental agencies, libraries, and research agencies that could not accept collect calls.) The new phone, unlike our old ones, couldn’t receive incoming calls and allowed us to call only outside the prison, so we could no longer have telephone contact with any official in the prison, including our own supervisor. And all our calls were now to be recorded. The Angolite and I were just being tolerated.
I’d spent a lifetime gaining experience and knowledge of the prison world from a unique perspective. It was my only real asset. But after two years of trying to acquire credibility as a film producer both for myself and for The Angolite, I had little to show for it. When The Farm was nominated for an Academy Award in the best feature-length documentary category, I wasn’t included in the nomination. I never knew why.
Cain was doing everything he could to isolate me. He ended twenty years of my traveling outside of the prison to talk to university students, civic organizations, and probationers. My personal mail was being read. Cain was telling some of my closest allies, like Ginger Berrigan, now a federal judge, that I was no longer the upbeat, rehabilitated person they had known—that I’d given up, become depressed, let myself go. Ginger, who came to see for herself, was surprised to see me unchanged. I shuddered to think what Cain was saying to people who didn’t really know me.
Cain’s efforts to undermine me sometimes got me down. Now I often felt I would die in Angola, thinking all the doors were shut—state courts, federal courts, and now executive clemency.
But I would always rebound. I’d had a long life, certainly longer than anyone had expected, and that was a very precious gift, as were the opportunities and the forums given me. I had tried to make the most of them, tried to make a difference, tried to help people both in and out of prison, even helped others win the freedom that continued to elude me and that I might never know. To be sure, I regretted the suffering I had inflicted on so many innocent people with the horrible crime of my youth, the wounds that for some would never heal. Nor had my own life been easy. There had been the pain of isolation, the occasional struggle against going mad, the physical and emotional deprivations, the heartbreak of repeated denials of clemency, which forced me to dig deep within myself to find strength that I didn’t even know I possessed. But I also had professional success, the blessing of remarkable supporters and friends, and the satisfaction of helping others. I felt good about myself and proud of the way I’d handled my imprisonment and, in this world of extremes, proud of the way I exercised the power I’d attained. Most of all, I had Linda, who smoothed the rough edges of my existence. I definitely was not happy; I was still a prisoner yearning for freedom, unable to make many of the decisions that controlled my life. But all in all, I had much to be thankful for.
And now hope was rekindled. In September 1997 U.S. Magistrate Christine Noland ruled that the evidence proving racial discrimination and tokenism in Calcasieu’s jury selection process in 1961 was overwhelming. Citing U.S. Supreme Court decisions going back to shortly after the end of the Civil War, she recommended that my conviction be thrown out and I be given a new trial or freed.
Although Noland was not his magistrate, Judge Frank Polozola somehow came to preside over the review of her decision. He did not rush into what would normally be a formal acceptance of a magistrate’s recommendation. He let it sit for a year and a half. Then, on May 5, 1999, he held a hearing on the state’s objections to the magistrate’s recommendations. I was brought to his Baton Rouge courtroom at Calcasieu district attorney Rick Bryant’s request. The district attorney brought with him his entire top brass to fight the nearly forty-year-old case. By my side was my longtime pro bono attorney, Julian Murray. Friends and supporters of mine had come from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Grambling, and Lafayette; three drove all night from Texas. They had come in vanloads from Lake Charles to show their support for me. Except for the seats occupied by the media, the courtroom was filled to capacity by people wearing FREE RIDEAU pins, which the judge made them remove.
As the hearing began, Judge Polozola reminded everyone that “this is not a parole or pardon board hearing. The purpose of the hearing is to determine whether or not constitutional rights were violated.” The state had conceded in its pleadings that the method of selecting grand juries in Calcasieu Parish in 1961 was susceptible to racial discrimination, although they denied that the presence of Acton Hillebrandt’s yardboy on my grand jury was either tokenism or discrimination. In court, however, Bryant argued that none of that mattered anyway because I had waited too long to file my habeas appeal. In earlier pleadings, he had suggested that I had deliberately sat in prison biding my time for four decades just waiting for everyone concerned with the case to die or grow
so old they wouldn’t be viable witnesses at a new trial. It was hard to sit still for such hallucinogenic logic.
Bryant put me on the stand and grilled me about why I hadn’t filed this habeas petition in 1973 after the Louisiana Supreme Court last reviewed my conviction. I answered that I didn’t know I had a basis for a claim until 1993 and explained that in 1973 my lawyers told me they had done everything for me that could be done. Bryant called James Wood, one of my 1973 lawyers, to the stand, and he confirmed what I said. The district attorney suggested that since I had educated myself as a writer, I should have also known my legal rights. Alternatively, Bryant’s assistant, Wayne Frey, suggested that since I had chosen to become a writer rather than a jailhouse lawyer, I would have to live with the consequences of my choice.
Because the district attorneys could not defend against the charge of discriminatory practices, they were trying to make me the problem. In their through-the-looking-glass view, the fault wasn’t what they did in 1961 but that I didn’t catch them soon enough.
At the end of the daylong hearing, Judge Polozola overruled Magistrate Noland’s recommendation, saying I had presented no evidence of racial discrimination in the jury or in the selection process in 1961 Calcasieu. I was immediately taken back to Angola, where Cain refused to let me talk to the media. I don’t know what he told them. They reported that I either declined to be interviewed or that I would not accept their calls.
In the aftermath of Polozola’s ruling, George Kendall, a nationally prominent civil rights attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, enrolled as cocounsel with Julian on an appeal of Polozola’s action to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. After fighting my case alone and pro bono for more than fifteen years, Julian welcomed George’s help and the resources he brought to the equation. And so did I.
Wilbert Rideau Page 33