“Get rid of the superintendent,” I told him.
“How? He’s been an icon out here for a decade, a local hero who writes Cajun cookbooks on the side,” he said. “They’ll never fire him.”
“They will if you bring enough heat on him,” I said. “Get your Coalition of Pastors for Action involved. These statistics are a scandal. The kids in the black schools are even outperformed by kids in all of the surrounding parishes, where the schools have less money and fewer resources. Educate your preachers.”
Sixty pastors joined Franklin in the campaign to oust Superintendent Jude Theriot. They kept the issue on the front pages of the newspaper, circulated petitions, and would not be ignored. In June, the school board voted that Theriot would have to leave within a year.
After I helped with that campaign, I occupied myself with some other local politics. I advised the black community in the race for the congressional seat of southwestern Louisiana held by Democrat Chris John, who was making a run for retiring John Breaux’s spot in the Senate. But during that contest, on July 1, 2004, we had a hearing that concerned a portion of some interviews with Billy and me that Jodie Bell Sinclair had conducted in 1981 and shared with Bryant to help prosecute me. Although the tape contained nothing that had not already appeared in print, the district attorney apparently thought that my taped admission that I killed Julia Ferguson was a smoking gun. During a break in the hearing, Assistant District Attorney Wayne Frey managed to get a copy of Jodie’s tape to a reporter for local TV station KPLC, in blatant violation of the gag order that had been imposed in the case. In shades of 1961, KPLC-TV assisted the district attorney in further poisoning the potential jury pool against me not only by repeatedly airing out-of-context sound bites from the tape, but by posting them in streaming video on its website. Judge Ritchie learned of the leak only when he saw the footage on TV.
The result of this collaborative undermining of the justice system was the same as it was in 1961—a change of venue. Bryant was willing to go along with it only if he and Judge Ritchie were to retain control of the case and merely import a jury from elsewhere. We argued that an impartial jury, alone, would not ensure the fair trial demanded by law. The state had demonstrated its malfeasance over and over again. Like so many of our pleas for simple fairness, this one also fell on deaf ears. Judge Ritchie would not send my case elsewhere, and no higher Louisiana court would make him do it.
As it became clear that none of our motions to fend off a fourth trial would succeed, we began preparing in earnest for the courtroom battle. I pored over the old trial transcripts and identified for Linda where the defense team needed to focus—on “facts” that, although untrue, had been accepted as gospel for more than forty years.
Linda moved to Lake Charles for a week, typing into her laptop during our visits not only the fabrications, exaggerations, or outright lies I found in the old trial transcripts, but also everything I remembered about growing up in Lake Charles in the 1940s and 1950s. We covered my home life, school life, work life, events leading up to the crime, and everything that happened in its wake, both immediately and during the three previous trials. Linda was a thorough inquisitor, forcing me to remember more than I ever would have believed I could. Every night she returned to my mother’s house, where she was staying, typed up a report, and sent it along with our day’s work to Julian and George. These materials, together with the scant remaining physical evidence in the case, which George and Linda scrutinized, became the basis for our defense. George sought out the top experts in the country to evaluate the autopsy reports and photos, the handling of the crime scene and evidence, even the language used in various 1961 police reports and witness statements, which, surrealistically, we acquired from a reporter who got them from Bryant, who wouldn’t disclose them to us. Linda was struck by the uncanny similarity not only in the diction and phraseology of the statements given to police first by Hickman and then McCain, ten days later, but also by the identical linear progression of the statements. The two statements, she felt, were similar far beyond what coincidence could account for. She saw that as evidence that Frank Salter had orchestrated the testimony of witnesses just as he had orchestrated the secretly filmed and televised “interview” between Sheriff Reid and me that led the Supreme Court to declare my 1961 trial “kangaroo court proceedings.” Julian, who was to question me on the witness stand, began studying the earlier trial transcripts and my life and times as Linda and I set them down in the interview room.
When we were all together in Lake Charles, George and Julian were concerned that we didn’t have a silver stake to drive through the prosecution’s story. They felt it would be a very delicate matter to confront Dora McCain about her statements; the jury might well interpret our questions as an attack on an old woman who’d been victimized. Getting at the truth was not going to be easy.
“We’ll have to hope they give us gifts at trial,” George said. “Their fatal flaw—what has always caused them to lose their convictions—is that they go overboard in their rhetoric, their claims, their attitude. None of that matters when they’re pitching to a hometown jury, but outsiders may not like it. We’ve seen that happen before. We have to hope that in this trial Bryant and his team will stay true to their tendencies to overreach, and that we can exploit them.”
Shortly before trial, we learned that Dora McCain would not be appearing in the courtroom. She’d had open heart surgery a couple of years before, and a doctor said she was too frail for the stress of a trial. Her “testimony” would be that old transcript. One of our few opportunities to attack the prosecution’s story had suddenly disappeared.
As things continued to go against us, I wondered, in the solitude of jail, why I had previously been rescued from the forces in Calcasieu that had tried so hard, so many times, to kill me. I had long since come to believe that I had been saved too many times to chalk it up to chance. Who would have thought that a bankruptcy and real estate lawyer would have hit upon an issue of interest to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1961 and that my case—over all others presenting the issue of pretrial publicity—would have been selected for review? And who would have thought after my second trial, as I waited on death row, that the Supreme Court would make a ruling in an Illinois case that would give me a new trial? And who would have guessed that after my third trial the U.S. Supreme Court would have, seemingly out of the blue, abolished the death penalty as it was then applied? And how could a man who had served forty years on a murder conviction get a federal court to set aside that conviction because the system used to select the grand jury that returned the indictment in 1961 was unconstitutional? All of this, together, led me to believe that a higher power than man was at work in my life. Now, lying on my bunk, I wondered: What if I had been saved only to portray prison life from the inside and never to go free? Everything in me cried out that there had to be more than that for me, that Providence had not saved me for a purpose that would forever chain me to guard towers and locked gates.
And yet, the judge and the prosecutor were making it almost impossible for us to mount a defense, moving us closer to yet another judicial lynching. I thought of everything I’d given up at Angola for what was my last shot at freedom. I was at the top of the pecking order in Angola’s inmate society. I had the best job in the prison, where I could weave meaning into my existence. I sat on the boards of several inmate clubs, which expanded my ability to make a difference in the quality of prisoners’ lives. I was the president of the Human Relations Club, which enabled me to bring resources to bear to help elderly prisoners and hospice patients. I was one of a handful of inmate leaders who worked together for the good of the whole institution, inmates and staff alike, rather than for their own personal ends. We worked to keep peace and order in the prison, though this was sometimes misunderstood by inmates who saw Angola only through the narrow lens of their personal pain. And I had perks. I worked in an air-conditioned office rather than in the field. Even though my traveling was cut out and media
access to me increasingly restricted and monitored after Burl Cain’s arrival in 1995, and even though The Angolite was increasingly censored, what I left behind at Angola was a relative paradise compared to what I could look forward to if we lost this trial. I had to believe Providence had something better in store for me; still, the specter of a cell at Wade haunted my waking thoughts and gave me night sweats whenever things took a turn for the worse.
Judge Ritchie asked both sides to submit a list of possible places from which to draw a jury. Bryant’s list included the whitest judicial districts in the state, beginning with Jefferson Parish, which had gained infamy even in Louisiana as the district that sent David Duke to the state legislature. Small, rural, heavily white judicial districts completed his list. Our list included all the metropolitan areas of Louisiana. Judge Ritchie refused even to consider New Orleans, where nearly 60 percent of the voters, and potential jurors, were black. Nor would he send the case back to Baton Rouge, where it belonged. Lafayette, he said, was too close to Lake Charles; Shreveport was out, doubtless because Johnnie Cochran was its most famous native son.
In the end, Ritchie ruled that we would select a jury from Monroe, in the conservative Bible Belt reaches of the state. Carla Sigler, the prosecution team’s newest assistant district attorney, hailed from there. For us, it looked like the worst of the state’s metropolitan districts. One of our chief barometers for trying to gauge the jury pool was the race for governor between Edwin Edwards and David Duke in 1991. The Monroe area went solidly for Duke.
Just days before the trial was to begin, George and Julian came to the jail for a conference and gave me the dark news I’d long feared: Johnnie Cochran was too ill to participate in the trial. He’d been battling a brain tumor with experimental treatments when conventional medicine had failed him, and although he had rallied a few months earlier and even went back to work briefly, he’d gotten much worse. He was not even going to be able to travel from California to sit at our defense table. I returned to my dorm and lay on my bunk, staring into empty space, remembering the lapel pin Johnnie had given me years before that said EXPECT A MIRACLE. I remembered his deep faith and prayed for a miracle to heal him, and another to help me since he couldn’t.
13
Deliverance
2005
Deputies roused me out of my bunk one Sunday morning, trussed me up with cuffs and shackles, and stuffed me in the back of a sheriff’s car for the four-hour trip to Monroe, where we were to pick a jury. I felt I was heading into still another jail autocracy where I was friendless and vulnerable to being set up or sucked into violence. There was always the chance that some inmate would cooperate with Bryant in exchange for a deal, planting dope on me or making up some damaging story. I also had to be on the lookout for something the deputies might do to hurt me or set me up.
My fears were unfounded. Almost all of the jail staff knew who I was, and every one of them treated me courteously. I was held in a solitary cell—the largest cell I’d ever seen—where at the end of each day in court I could think calmly about the day’s events and jot down ideas for my lawyers. Even though I sometimes returned from court after supper was served, I was always given a tray of hot food to eat, unlike the bologna sandwiches I’d gotten after a day in court in Lake Charles. I was also given medical attention. The jail would not release me for court each morning until the jail’s nurses drained and bandaged an inflamed blackhead on my back. I was then able to sit attentively in court for the long days of jury selection.
On the day I arrived, there was a front-page Associated Press story about me in the Monroe News-Star, which the newspaper followed up with a story of its own on Monday. The two articles had an impact on the potential jurors, many of whom were dismissed for cause, either because they were convinced of my guilt or because they thought I had served enough time and weren’t willing to send me back to prison whether I was guilty or not. Bryant amazed me by instructing the potential jurors that the burden was on him to prove every element of the crime with which I’d been charged and asking them, should they have any doubt at all about my guilt or if he failed to prove every element of the case, whether they could release me. He did this with an air of graciousness that I’d never seen in him, as though he wanted the jury to bend over backward to be fair to me. On the heels of that thought came the realization that he was acting so graciously because he was absolutely confident that he would be sending me back to prison for the rest of my life.
After five days, we ended up with a jury of two black women, one mixed-race woman, one black man, seven white women, and one elderly white man named Percy Ritchie—no relation to the judge—who became the foreman. Six of the whites were registered Republicans. The jurors were bused to Lake Charles on Sunday, January 9, to begin the trial the next morning. Our defense team worked out of Ron Ware’s office during the day and a bloc of rooms at the local Holiday Inn at night. With Julian, George, and Ron were Vanita Gupta, now a lawyer at the Legal Defense Fund; Parisa Tafti and Chris Hsu, young lawyers George had brought on board from his new employer, Holland and Knight; and, assisting the lawyers, a battalion of New York University law students whose boundless energy and eagerness gave buoyancy to the whole team. Linda was the only non-lawyer on the team, the fact expert and a contributing strategist. Laura Fernandez, now clerking for a federal judge, came to offer moral support.
It was not lost on Judge Ritchie that the media seats in the courtroom were filled by journalists from New York, Chicago, Washington, Boston, Houston, Atlanta, New Orleans, and elsewhere. Even the local media realized that the eyes of the nation were on the trial. That made an enormous difference in the judge’s rulings.
Usually quick to cave in to the prosecutors, Ritchie stood firm in ruling that we had a right to use photocopies of what were clearly authentic transcripts of court hearings from 1961, even though Bryant claimed they had “disappeared” from the clerk’s office and insinuated that perhaps they had never existed or that we had somehow made them vanish. Linda found their disappearance highly suspect, since the last time she, Chris Hsu, and an investigator went to look at the files—in the presence of a deputy clerk—they had to be retrieved from the locked evidence room, to which only insiders, including Bryant, had access. In granting our request to use the transcripts, the judge noted that he had denied every one of our pretrial motions and I did, after all, have a right to present a defense.
In preliminary matters, George and Julian objected to Dora McCain’s not appearing, because we would not be able to cross-examine one of the state’s few living witnesses, but said we would waive our objection if the prosecution would agree to let us introduce into evidence comments McCain made in 1999 to a British tabloid. Wayne Frey fairly jumped out of his seat in enthusiastic agreement, as though he couldn’t believe our stupidity. Since we intended to use her own statements to undermine her credibility, my lawyers were perplexed by Frey’s exuberance. I wondered nervously what guerrilla assault our opposition had planned.
Mike Perlstein of the Times-Picayune and Laura Sullivan of National Public Radio both noted in their reporting that the courtroom was divided along racial lines (the Lake Charles press didn’t), with white people sitting behind the prosecution and mostly black spectators sitting on the defense team’s side of the aisle. In opening arguments, Bryant painted me as a calculating, cold-blooded murderer who ruthlessly turned on three people I knew by name, people who were my personal friends. It was the same sensational portrait Frank Salter had painted in my three previous trials. Bryant told the jury that before I entered the bank I had decided to kill the employees because they could identify me. He said I took them to a deserted spot ten miles outside town where I “lined them up and shot them.” He said I kicked Mrs. McCain like a rag doll as she feigned death and physically fought with Mrs. Ferguson, yanking her to her feet, before shooting her twice. He would prove to them, he vowed, that “Julia Ferguson, who was already shot, begged—begged—for her life,” saying, “Think about
my poor old daddy,” before I stabbed her and slashed her throat. Turning dramatically to point at me, he said, “That man committed the murder of Julia Ferguson.”
George made the opening statement for our side. He told the jury that they would not have to decide whether I killed Mrs. Ferguson, because I did. The question they would have to answer was whether it was the cold-blooded murder described by Bryant, or manslaughter, defined under Louisiana law as the exact same crime as murder but committed in the heat of passion.
George told the four blacks and eight whites who would decide whether I would live free or die in prison that the ill-conceived and spur-of-the-moment bank robbery spun out of control almost before it began when a phone call came that startled everyone and I realized I wouldn’t be able to just walk out of the bank as I had planned because police were on the way. He told them I put the employees in a car with the intention of dropping them off out in the country, where it would take them an hour or two to walk back to town, and that I panicked when the bank employees jumped from the car, began to flee, and wouldn’t stop when I told them to stop or I’d shoot.
“As scared as he was,” George said, “he shot,…these were the acts of an impulsive, confused teenager. He was so confused he started to head right back into town.” He told jurors that in order to understand what happened that night, and what subsequently led to evidence and testimony that was not true, they had to understand the racial atmosphere of Louisiana in 1961, an atmosphere in which the community response to an interracial crime was a white mob that waited at the jail for the black defendant. “We are not suggesting in any way that what Wilbert Rideau did that night could be excused by the racial inequities of that time.” But, he told them, in order to understand how authorities investigated and prosecuted the crime, including holding me in isolation with no attorney for two weeks, “it’s going to be important for you to consider the mores and customs of the time.”
Wilbert Rideau Page 39