George motioned across the table toward Vanita Gupta, a young NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney he had brought into the case, and Laura Fernandez, who began working on my case in 2001 as an intern at LDF and now worked on the case in the pro bono section of her new employer, Holland and Knight. “Johnnie’ll fly straight into the airport in Lake Charles, where Vanita and Laura will pick him up and bring him to the hotel. They’ll use their room key to bring him through the back door, bypassing the front desk. The next morning, we’ll all meet at Ron’s office and walk over to the court.”
“You can’t let Ron know about this ahead of time,” I said. “We can’t trust him not to tell someone he trusts, who will tell someone they trust, and before you know it, the secret’s out. Our strength here is the element of surprise, and we have to do whatever we can to keep this quiet.”
“That’s understood. In fact, what we’ll do is have Ron meet us that morning at the hotel to prep for the hearing at one-thirty. That should prevent anyone in his office from finding out about Johnnie and getting on the phone. As you know, we’ve been contacted by a relative of one of Ron’s employees who told us that Bryant has Ron’s employee spying for inside information on your case.”
“Did you ever tell Ron about that?”
“No. We don’t tell him anything, anyway, except on a need-to-know basis.”
“George,” I said. “Do you seriously think we can sneak Johnnie Cochran into this one-horse town without everybody and his in-laws knowing about it?”
“Well, my friend,” said my ever-optimistic attorney, laughing, “we’re going to try.”
They succeeded. When Johnnie entered the small courtroom on the thirteenth, smiles broke out on our side of the aisle, and jaws slackened or fell agape on the prosecutor’s side. As word spread that Johnnie was in the courtroom, it quickly filled to standing room only.
Johnnie took his seat next to me at the defense table. “I told you I’d be here for you,” he said, smiling. “I’m your birthday present!”
We had subpoenaed both Judge Minaldi and Bryant as witnesses. Minaldi had reached 125 miles to Baton Rouge to hire one of the top criminal defense attorneys in the state, Jim Boren, to represent her. Cochran called Bryant to the stand to ask him about the affidavit he’d submitted. Looking wan and uncharacteristically anxious, Bryant asked the judge if he could have a cup of water from the pitcher on the bench, which he proceeded to spill all over himself and the witness stand. A collective gasp and several giggles escaped from spectators as deputies went scurrying for towels to sop up the mess. Johnnie whipped his handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to an unaccepting Bryant, then turned his back on the district attorney and walked to the defense table, a barely perceptible smile on his face. I remained impassive, but it wasn’t easy.
Once Bryant and the furnishings were dried off, Johnnie began his direct examination of the district attorney, who had sworn in his affidavit that Minaldi did not begin her employment in his office until September 3, 1986. The date was important, because we claimed in our motion that she began in February, before the date of my clemency hearing in May of that year. Our implied argument was that Minaldi’s presence in the office—her brain was clearly superior to anyone else’s there—was a factor in how Bryant proceeded.
I was blessed to have an army of help, not only some of the best lawyers in the country, but also young New York lawyers and law students who were working for free on my case. And, of course, Linda, who had encyclopedic knowledge of my case, was working for the defense full-time. We were in the fortunate position—rare for an indigent defendant like me—of having ample manpower to check out the prosecutor’s statements. We had been told by a former prosecutor that Minaldi began work in February, and it was Linda who took Laura Fernandez to the courthouse and pulled a document signed by Assistant District Attorney Minaldi in March 1986. Confronted with this document, Bryant blamed his payroll accountant for providing him with incorrect information. Bryant had also claimed in his affidavit that he and Minaldi had never discussed my case, but Laura had tracked down a court transcript where Bryant and Minaldi were cocounsel and argued about a change of venue based on what had happened in my case. Finally, Bryant had claimed that my case wasn’t active in his office after I filed my petition for habeas corpus in 1994, during the time Minaldi was there. Johnnie presented him with the docket sheet from the federal court showing all the status conferences in which the district attorney’s office took part, the motions they filed and responded to, and case records they submitted during Minaldi’s tenure with his office.
When Johnnie entered the docket sheet into evidence, Judge Savoie remarked, “The only purpose of this is to show that you quibble with what Mr. Bryant calls a nonissue?” to which Johnnie retorted, “I wouldn’t call it quibbling, Your Honor.”
In the end, Judge Savoie said he would require the district attorney to furnish us with certain information to answer the claims in our recusal motion. When it came time to consider whether Minaldi would have to do likewise, Jim Boren sent a note to the judge, who then said court would recess for ten minutes so he could read a motion Boren had filed that morning. In fact, the judge now met in the corridor behind the courtroom with my attorneys, Bryant and his team, and Boren. Boren said he was sure our evidence about Minaldi’s service in the district attorney’s office was sound. If the judge was recused on that basis alone, none of the other more sensational issues would have to be aired in court. Bryant was adamantly against this. Julian, who embodies old Southern gentlemanliness, was outraged that Bryant would allow his wife to be grilled in open court when he was being given a face-saving way out. Back in the courtroom, Savoie severed the grounds for recusing Minaldi and said the issue would be addressed at a hearing on February 28, which it was. After nearly eight months of combat, Minaldi was recused.
Of course, it didn’t end there. When Minaldi ascended to the federal bench in April 2003, Bryant appealed Savoie’s decision, arguing that only Minaldi, the individual, was recused. The division in which she served was not recused, and the judge who would replace her after a special election should inherit the case. This meant that another white judge from Sulphur would preside over my trial.
As the two-year anniversary of my return to Calcasieu approached, depression began to overtake me. My mother and Linda visited me, as did Sister Benedict Shannon, who had been my steadfast friend and supporter for thirty years—she came from Houston every other month with another friend, Geri Doucet. Reverend Franklin was a godsend. But I was increasingly fearful now that I was going to be railroaded by a system controlled by people who made up rules to suit them as they went along. I felt abandoned by the state and national media for not covering my hearings and for simply repeating what the local newspaper sent over the wire. After I talked to the Los Angeles Times, whose reporter exposed the vein of racism that cut from the present all the way back to 1961 in my case, the sheriff shut the lid on me completely, telling me and my attorneys that if I spoke to any more media, I risked losing all of my phone privileges, including the privilege of calling my defense team. I found this ironic, because the warden himself suggested that I put the Times reporter on my visiting list and because the article insinuated that I was some kind of con artist. I wanted to sue the sheriff, but my defense team convinced me that would just be one more distraction.
I realized about this time that if I were reconvicted, I would be sent to Wade Correctional Center, a small prison in the northern part of the state where high-profile prisoners are sent to live in solitary cells, for their own safety. Life there is very hard, with little in the way of clubs, activities, and the kind of opportunities to learn and grow that are part of the Angola world. This was a crushing weight on me. I came to think of suicide as an option if I wound up there. It was only when I thought of Linda and everything she had sacrificed to stand by me—her career, her pension, her savings—that I fell to my knees at the side of my bunk one afternoon and pleaded with God to show me the
way out, for her sake. I was about as demoralized as I’d ever been. I’d lie in bed for hours, listless and rumpled. I went a week without shaving, wandering aimlessly from my bunk to a stool at one of the steel tables, then back again. I was physically, emotionally, and mentally adrift.
One day my dorm mate Albert Bradley said to me: “Say, man, what the fuck’s wrong with you, anyway?”
“Bradley,” I said, “these motherfuckers got a cake baked for me out here.”
“So you just gonna lie down and die for them? Look at yourself, man. Did you lose your razor? Where are the creases in your clothes? You look like shit.”
“Well, I feel like shit. Besides, I’ve got no visitors coming today. No one’s gonna see me like this.”
“What the fuck you talking about, man? I see you. More important, all these motherfucking inmates and jailers around here see you. Dawg, you can’t go around here looking just any kind of way. You’re Wilbert Rideau. You represent us all. Get your shit together.”
His words snapped me out of my funk. I cleaned up and dug into my pile of legal notes and began looking for something that we could use against the district attorney. I began at the beginning. I scrutinized the indictment and Canaday’s court order to return me to Calcasieu from Angola.
“This order is illegal,” I told Linda on her next visit. “Look: It says that the federal court ordered me returned to Calcasieu Parish. The federal court never made such an order. What it said was that the state either had to retry me or release me. This case should have been returned to East Baton Rouge Parish, where I was tried after a change of venue in 1964. The law in 1964 was that a case could not be moved away from the changed venue under any pretense whatsoever. The law’s been changed, but that is not supposed to apply in this case. These suckers have literally stolen this case and brought it back here illegally.”
George and Julian agreed. But we were caught up in a judicial catch-22. We would have to litigate the legality of the actions of Calcasieu officials in Calcasieu Parish, meaning we would have to get the guilty parties to judge themselves guilty! It was at times like this that the judicial process dumbfounded me.
On May 31, 2003, Julian, George, and Johnnie held a press conference in New Orleans to announce that Ron Ware was filing a motion in Calcasieu to return the case to Baton Rouge, where the Louisiana Supreme Court had sent it because of state misconduct after the 1961 kangaroo court proceeding in Lake Charles. The motion accused Bryant of hijacking the case to Calcasieu for political purposes.
The next day, Johnnie and Julian joined Ron in Lake Charles for a prayer rally to support me, organized by Reverend Franklin and sponsored by a coalition of local black churches. The event, held at the Evergreen Baptist Church, drew more than eight hundred people to listen to a Catholic nun, a Catholic priest, a Muslim imam, numerous Baptist pastors, a civil rights advocate, and Johnnie, who told the audience: “Many white people do not understand African Americans’ distrust of the justice system, especially about all-white juries. What do you think would happen if the shoe were on the other foot? What would white folks think if white defendants, their sons, their fathers, their brothers were tried by all-black juries and black prosecutors, given the issue of race relations in America? Would they have confidence that a fair and just proceeding would take place? Of course they wouldn’t.”
After the rally, Johnnie joined a protest march to the old courthouse led by Franklin, who said the statue of a Confederate soldier on the lawn out front, with its pedestal inscribed THE SOUTH’S DEFENDERS, was a visible and constant reminder of white oppression to every defendant, lawyer, and visitor in the court. “It’s time for this statue to come down,” he said, “and time for Johnny Reb to stop standing guard over the halls of justice. All Americans deserve to be treated equally in the justice system. We’ve not seen equal justice here or anything remotely resembling equal justice.” Franklin decried the harsher treatment given to blacks accused of crimes against whites and noted that black-on-black crimes received relaxed punishment. He pointed to a current case in which four black defendants were indicted for the murder of four black adults and an unborn baby, noting that although there was an eyewitness to the crime, Bryant had cut manslaughter deals with all the defendants, meaning none would serve even half as long as I had already served.
The prayer rally buoyed my spirits even though I wasn’t able to attend. It was touching to know that so many people wished me well, and I was humbled that Johnnie and Julian took time out of their demanding schedules to participate. (George was representing an indigent in another state that day.) Ron’s presence was an act of courage—and not his first on my case—as the rally and march were negatively received by much of the white community, judging from commentary in the newspapers.
The state supreme court appointed an ad hoc judge to hear our motion. Charlie Quienalty, a retired district judge from Calcasieu who had earned a reputation among defense attorneys as a hanging judge, surprised everyone when he decided after a September 5, 2003, hearing that my case did indeed belong in Baton Rouge. He also forced the clerk of court to turn over copies of all public records in their files from 1961 onward when he learned that the district attorney had given us only those snippets of the 1970 trial transcript that he intended to use at trial. We were ecstatic. We needed to escape the toxic atmosphere of Lake Charles if we were to see justice served.
Bryant appealed Quienalty’s ruling and an all-white panel of the Third Circuit obligingly reversed it. The state supreme court refused to consider our appeal. So we were stuck in Calcasieu. In the election to replace Minaldi, her husband, a vice president and corporate attorney for Jack Lawton, Inc., which owned the biggest bank in the parish, ran against David Ritchie, a young Republican city councilman from Sulphur who had a private practice and also worked in Ron Ware’s office as a public defender. On November 15, 2003, Ritchie won the race and inherited my case.
Ritchie arrived with some baggage. Two years earlier he had told Linda and George that when he was a law clerk, a very emotional Dora McCain came to see him when I was up for clemency and argued passionately against it. As a result, Ritchie had made it clear to others, including Ron, that he didn’t think I should ever go free.
Linda and I felt Ritchie should recuse himself. George had a different take. “Look, the difference between Ritchie and the other judges in the pot—and let’s be honest, we’re looking at a white judge because it’s not going to go any other way out here—is that Ritchie admitted his bias up front. All these other guys are too clever and too experienced to put their prejudice on the record. They’ll just screw us without ever leaving a trace. And remember, until a few days ago, Ron Ware was Ritchie’s boss and they had a good relationship. For that reason, if no other, maybe our new judge will want to make at least a show of fairness.” We stuck with Ritchie.
Although Calcasieu’s indigent defender system was financially strapped and other trials had to be put on hold, Ritchie found a funding source so the forty-three-year-old charge against me could go to trial. Things did not start well for us. Bryant made a motion, which Ritchie granted, that no mention of my rehabilitation could be made at trial; it was judged irrelevant to the question of whether I should go back to prison. Likewise, we were not allowed to bring in statistical data showing that I had already served nearly twice as long as any other man from Calcasieu serving time on a murder conviction; nor that some local boys convicted of murder since my 1961 conviction served as little as four years. We were to be confined to the crime itself. Character witnesses on my behalf would be allowed to testify only to my reputation for truthfulness.
In return, we filed a battery of motions. We argued that because of state misconduct in three previous trials, a sort of three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule should apply. We moved to have Bryant recused on the grounds of prosecutorial vindictiveness, given his impassioned opinions and bitter statements, many factually untrue, about me to media over the past twenty-five years. We moved to dismiss the
case on the grounds that after more than four decades, it was impossible to have anything resembling a fair trial since many of the state’s witnesses were deceased and, although the prosecutor would be able to use their previous testimony by reading it for the jury from old transcripts, we could not cross-examine those witnesses, who had never been effectively cross-examined before because I had never had an adequate defense. Moreover, we argued, there was a mountain of evidence the state had not preserved that was no longer recoverable because the 1961 crime scene was now an interstate on-ramp, and none of the other pertinent sites—the bank, the fabric shop, the pawnshop, the sheriff’s office, and the 1961 jail—still existed. In short, there was no longer any way to investigate adequately the facts of the crime. A new trial would be little more than reading the old transcripts into the record for a new jury, which, of course, was exactly what the district attorney wanted.
It would take more than six months for our motions, each denied by Judge Ritchie, to make their way through the rubber-stamp process of appeal in the Third Circuit and for the state supreme court to either deny them or refuse to hear them.
While there was little to do on my case except wait, Reverend Franklin provided me another opportunity to make a difference for the citizens of Calcasieu Parish. Early in 2004, he told me he was frustrated about the substandard education the students in his district were getting and the fact that the superintendent of schools was ignoring the problem. He handed me a sheaf of papers that included statistical breakdowns on the parish’s school performances. The black schools performed abysmally compared to the white schools.
Wilbert Rideau Page 38