Wilbert Rideau

by In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment

  “Do you know anyone in jail who’s had a trial by jury?” I asked.

  Adili thought long, then shook his head. “No, don’t know anybody. The only people you see going to trial is for big charges, like murder. You barely ever see anybody else go to trial.”

  About 10:00 p.m. George and Linda came to prep me for the next day’s hearing. They told me that the sheriff had a press conference scheduled for 10:00 a.m. to announce what the media’s access to me would be. George said media from around the country had been trying to get an interview with me, either through him or Julian or directly through the jail. So far they’d all been turned down.

  On Wednesday morning, I was shackled hand and foot and transported to court in a caravan of vans and escorts with two other men, each charged with triple murder.

  George and Ron Ware came to my holding cell in the basement of the courthouse, where I was being held, isolated from anyone else. George handed me black trousers and a blue shirt to wear in the courtroom. Cops took the chains and flak jacket off so I could dress. One asked if I wanted to wear the body armor under or over the shirt. “I don’t need it at all,” I said. “I don’t think anyone is going to try to do anything to me and, if they do, I have confidence that you all will stop them, in which case, perhaps one of you needs to wear this thing.”

  They laughed and reshackled me over the clothing. Everyone left. The cops returned shortly afterward, informing me the judge said I had to wear the orange jail uniform.

  The small courtroom was just about filled, mostly with white people. I took my place between George and Ron, with two cops taking seats behind me. One leaned forward: “Take a look around the room. See if there are any hostile faces you think might try to hurt you, anyone who might be dangerous.”

  My eyes swept the audience, catching Linda and a few black faces, who I assumed were supporters. The white faces defied easy definition. The pockmarked district attorney was standing in the aisle talking. I leaned back to the cop. “I see one.”

  He stiffened into alertness. “Who?”

  “Rick Bryant,” I whispered.

  He smiled as his body relaxed. “I think I can handle him.”

  Court came to order. Presiding, as predicted, was Judge Canaday, who hailed from aptly named Sulphur, a white enclave across the river in West Calcasieu, where the noxious odors emanating from chemical plants can be smelled, when the wind is right, ten miles away.

  Canaday immediately rejected George’s argument against disrupting an existing attorney-client relationship and then appointed the only local capital-certified attorneys he knew: Ron Ware and a New Orleans attorney who had recently lost a death penalty case in Calcasieu.

  Canaday announced he would compile a list of lawyers who could visit me in jail; anyone not on the list would be turned away. Ron asked the judge to allow George to stay on the case and pleaded to be taken off, saying he could not adequately defend me because he had four other capital cases and another four hundred felony cases to defend personally, in addition to his administrative duties. Canaday refused to release him but allowed George to assist in the case pro bono.

  George never stood a chance of being officially appointed to defend me. He was the ultimate outsider, a Yankee from New York poking his nose where Canaday thought it didn’t belong. Worse, he was a white man working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, still considered a betrayal among some of the locals. Julian, one of the state’s preeminent criminal defense lawyers, was left completely out of the equation, even denied access to me by the judge. I wanted to ask Canaday why he was so insistent upon divesting me of my excellent lawyers and replacing them with attorneys unfamiliar with me or my case, but both Ron and George vetoed my getting into a fight with the judge.

  When I was back at the jail, a couple dozen inmates and I spent an hour of recreation in a small, walled-in area with two basketball courts. Whites played at one and blacks at the other. A female officer, clearly a descendant of the long line of pale-skinned offspring that began when white Louisiana masters coupled with black slaves, sat in the shade reading want ads. I was on my fourth lap of power walking when called for a visit with George and Linda. When I arrived, they asked the officer escorting me for another room. He said there were no others. Linda had spotted former district attorney Frank Salter in the adjoining attorney room talking with an elderly man, and she refused to believe it was coincidence. We pulled our chairs close together and huddled in whispered conversation.

  “You’re stuck in jail until pretrial motions in the fall,” said George, “but I think we’ll be able to get you out on bond then; meanwhile, we’ll have another hearing on getting Julian assigned to the case in about a month.”

  My life at the jail went on. I received several letters from female prisoners wishing me luck. I got a laundry connection, which meant I’d have bleached whites and pressed uniforms. One of my dorm mates set up a connection for salt, pepper, and sugar. Some fellow detainees made sure I saw a newspaper every day. I was grateful for even the smallest kindness.

  I slept fitfully in my new environment, alert to every sound. I knew how the justice system can work under the control of ruthless individuals. Snitches can be planted. Hit men can be moved near you—men who have no history of violence but are desperate to get out from under a charge that might send them to prison for years. (At Angola, my request that no prisoners from Calcasieu live in the same dorm as me had been honored for just these reasons.)

  I could afford to trust no one.

  The days passed slowly. I had nothing to do—no work, no court appearances, no visits from anyone. I was still trying to digest the fact that Julian, who had represented me for fifteen years, did not have access to me. When the judge and district attorney rearranged my defense team, the local media reported nothing amiss—and no other media people came to that backwater. The sheriff did indeed hold a news conference to announce that the media would not have access to me, and it’s difficult to sell an editor on the idea of a story without an interview. KPLC-TV—the same Lake Charles television station that had repeatedly aired my “interview” with Sheriff Reid in 1961—now repeatedly ran footage of me shackled or getting out of the transport van, or used the jail’s ID photo of me in orange scrubs, although the televised version was darker and made me look menacing. None of this surprised me, because the Lake Charles media was little more than an arm of the prosecutor’s office, at least where I was concerned. More often than not I wasn’t even allowed a daily hour of recreation, despite Sheriff Lundy’s public statement to the contrary.

  My fellow inmates also had nothing to do until it was time to clean the floors in the afternoon, so the morning TV report of my court proceedings became a subject of conversation. All ten men in the dorm agreed that I was about to be railroaded. Eric Alexander, who after six months in jail still had not met the public defender representing him, said it most straightforwardly: “They already got their game together, dawg. They hijacked your ass from Angola where you got everything goin’ for you and brought you down here where they control the game and all the players. They take your high-powered lawyers and give you some cheap-ass, overworked attorneys that guarantee you gonna lose. Then they give you this rookie-ass judge ain’t been in office a year, never handled a serious case before. Them bitches railroading you, dawg. Them DAs know they ain’t never dealt with heavy-hitting lawyers like you got. They ain’t no match for ’em. That’s the reason they takin’ ’em on out and getting you some lawyers they can control. But the way I see it, they playing so dirty with you that while they think they fuckin’ you, they really fuckin’ themselves, ‘cuz they givin’ you grounds to come back on ’em and win in the future.”

  What Eric didn’t see was that, in that scenario, I couldn’t win. The appeals process would be endless. In this case, a tainted conviction would be just as good as a proper one; the district attorney knew that. What I knew was that either my lawyers would have to settle the case by getting the prosecutor to agree to let me
plead to manslaughter, or we’d have to win it outright. At age fifty-nine, I couldn’t lose this case. I dreaded the court proceedings, but I never lost my faith.

  A month later the judge let Julian replace the other New Orleans lawyer and work with Ron Ware. George still couldn’t get appointed but could work for free. In the courthouse one day, Judge Canaday took us into the back room, away from the public, and instructed my attorneys that they had fifteen days to file all the motions they intended to file in connection with the case. Ron again pleaded to be taken off the case. Canaday instead told him he was lead attorney: “You are to do the lion’s share of the work on this case.”

  The prosecutors, who would not even speak to George or Julian, were looking smug.

  I told George and Linda that we couldn’t afford to trust Ron. As part of the Calcasieu justice machinery, he had hundreds of other defendants who could suffer if he pissed off the district attorney or the judge by fighting too hard for me. I even felt we had to be extremely careful about what we said around Ron, as he could hurt our case, even inadvertently.

  Another Wednesday rolled around, and I rose at daybreak to get ready for Linda’s weekly visit. She arrived like clockwork at 9:00.

  “I’ve got ’em!” she said, barely able to contain her glee. “I figured out how the DA got around the random selection to have Judge Canaday assigned to this case. Look at this!” She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of letters from the clerk of court to various judges informing them that they had been assigned to preside over a capital case. My heart was pounding.

  “There’s a flaw in the system. They use seven bingo balls—one for each judge—and mix them up in a hopper before selecting one at random. But the problem is, each time a judge has been selected, his ball stays out of the hopper until all the other balls are gone. The selection is only really random on the first pull, when all seven balls are in the hopper. In your case, Canaday’s ball was the only one left.” She lifted the cover of a manila folder to reveal a typed chart she’d constructed that graphically illustrated the cycles of cases assigned and the dwindling balls in the hopper since 1993. “There was a one hundred percent certainty that Canaday would be your judge. And, because Bryant gets copies of all of the clerk’s letters assigning the judges, he knew that.”

  “So the sonuvabitch timed his indictment of me to get the judge he wanted?”

  “Bingo! But it’s worse than that.” Linda shuffled her papers and brought a new one to the top. “See this? Here’s a guy who was indicted on capital charges on July 19. He would have gotten the last ball in the hopper, Canaday. The next thing that happens is that Bryant turns around and indicts you on the same day, only days after telling both Julian and Judge Polozola that it would probably be about a month before they indicted you.”

  “That’s why they yanked me out of Angola.”

  “But they still had some manipulating to do,” Linda said, “because cases are assigned judges according to their docket number. The DA assigns the docket numbers, so he could leapfrog you in front of this other guy. Otherwise, you would have had a full bingo hopper and two out of seven chances of getting a judge Rick Bryant doesn’t want handling your case.”

  “Oh, he’s not about to let either of the black judges anywhere near this case,” I said. “Junior, how did you get this information?”

  “Well, you have to understand, they don’t know me yet over at the clerk’s office. I told one of the clerks that I was researching Calcasieu’s capital allotment system and asked if there were any public records I could go through. The deputy clerk of court himself then gave me all these letters and even photocopied them for me for free. I thought I was going to have to spend a week sifting through ledgers or books of records. Can you imagine the clerk’s surprise when we file all this in court and he realizes his office handed it up on a silver platter?”

  “This may be what we need to oust this judge and rearrange their game plan,” I said. “What does George say?”

  “He’s pleased.”

  I returned to my dorm, my spirits buoyed by Linda’s discovery. Time and time again she had come through for me. I cannot imagine where I would have been without her.

  Two days earlier, I had relieved my boredom by getting involved with the plight of John Jollivette, a Creole-speaking black who slept on the bottom bunk to my right. He was forty-nine, but the guys called him “Pop” because he looked older than everyone else in the dorm, probably due to a hard and varied past. He had been a rhythm-and-blues and gospel lead guitarist when he was sent to Angola for rape. As a condition of his release, he was prohibited from working anywhere liquor was served, which effectively ended his ability to earn a living as a musician. He found work as a truck driver and as a merchant seaman. Earlier in the year, he was arrested for stealing two bottles of wine valued at $7. He was released on his own recognizance. Three months later he got into a dispute with his landlord, who called in the police. Pop was arrested for “remaining after forbidden” and “resisting an officer.” Bond was set at $1,000. The next day he went to the jail’s seventy-two-hour court and was appointed a public defender, who was not present. When he called the public defender’s office, he couldn’t get past the receptionist.

  “The receptionist says the charges over the dispute with the landlord were dropped,” said Pop, “and I should contact the DA or the jail to find out why I’m still being held here. When I asked the jail authorities, they said the charges weren’t dropped. I don’t know what’s goin’ on.”

  When he finally went to court, he learned that he was there on the old $7 wine-theft charge and was given credit for time served.

  “I didn’t see a public defender there,” he told me. “I pled guilty. I just wanted to get it over with, so I took the deal they offered.”

  But he was never in jail for the theft charge; he was in for the dispute with the landlord, a charge the receptionist said was dismissed. How could he be given credit for time served on a charge that had been dropped? When Warden LaFargue came to see me that afternoon on a minor matter, I introduced him to Jollivette and explained the situation.

  Looking at Jollivette, the warden said, “We don’t want you here if you’re not supposed to be here.”

  When I returned from my visit with Linda, I found Jollivette packing in preparation for his release.

  Months later, I was given an office right outside my dorm, where I could listen to inmates’ problems and try to facilitate solutions for those that were legitimate. Having a sense of purpose, something productive to do, was a lifeline for me, and the office provided me a quiet haven away from the constant cacophony of TV and jive in the dorm. For a while I had a computer there, until the administration tightened down on everything following an escape from the maximum-security section of the jail. I don’t know if the district attorney knew about my job and office or not. I’m not even sure the sheriff knew. But the curious thing about the law enforcement and criminal justice powers in Calcasieu Parish is that once they believe they have you snared, they can be downright gracious in small ways. In my own mind, the symbol for this has always been the black-walnut ice cream deputies used to bring to Robert Lee Sauls every day in the mid-1950s as the black man awaited execution.

  Saturdays always brought a visit from my seventy-seven-year-old mother. She could now visit me far more often than when I was in Angola, two hundred miles away. She would often apologize for not being able to do more to help me during the past forty years. Her sense of guilt was bitterly ironic because no one knew better than I that my actions so long ago had changed her life profoundly, causing her not only untold personal heartache but public scorn as well. Tied by poverty to Lake Charles, she was forced to remain there, mother to the most vilified defendant in the city’s history, whose demonization was fueled by the vengeance reserved for black men convicted of killing a white. I told her over and over that for decades she was my only friend and visitor, that during my darkest days she was the only reason I k
ept going, that I became the man I am today in an attempt to make up not only for the incredible damage I caused to my victims and their loved ones, but to my own family as well. No matter what I felt, though, this was still one more thing I couldn’t make right.

  One Saturday in early September, my mom brought Lawrence Morrow to the jail to share the forty-five-minute visit I was allowed each week. Lawrence is a little younger than me and was publishing Gumbeaux Magazine, a biweekly giveaway aimed at a black audience. I first became aware of the paper when one of its writers did a nice feature on me in the mid-1990s. Morrow asked how he could help me. I told him I was being held incommunicado from mainstream media, that the district attorney would not even say hello to my attorneys much less speak to them, and that we had discovered that Judge Canaday was essentially handpicked by the district attorney. Morrow immediately commissioned a piece by Bobbie Celestine, a Lake Charles native about my age, who based his article on a face-to-face interview with the district attorney. This was the only way independent news about my case reached the local community.

  I was just rinsing my coffee cup one Tuesday morning when Albert Bradley called down to me from upstairs, where he slept: “Man, there’s something on the radio about a hijacked plane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York. You might wanna check the TV to see if they’re showing anything.”

  The disaster immediately filled the screen—smoke billowing from one building, then another building, then the side of World Trade Center One crumbling and, below, people running for their lives through the streets, others looking back in stunned horror, still others sitting on curbs, shell-shocked and grieving in a landscape instantly turned ashes-to-ashes gray. My thoughts turned to all my friends in New York, and I prayed silently for their safety.

  As the television kept rerunning footage of first one plane and then a second plowing into the Twin Towers, my dorm mates became increasingly excited, their fervor a mix of patriotism and glee at the prospect of our country going to war and killing people in retaliatory violence. They became so boisterous it was difficult to hear the TV Every now and then some image would capture their attention, and a momentary silence punctuated the air before they erupted with renewed shouting and vigorous cursing. Some boasted about how they’d willingly go fight, if they could: “I’d teach them Arab terrorist motherfuckers about fucking with America.” There was something bizarre about this odd blend of criminality and patriotism and their fierce allegiance to a country in which they were outlaws, lumped by politicians and society into more or less the same class as the enemy on TV.