Profile of Wilbert Rideau on Famous Like Me

Wilbert Rideau (born February 13, 1942) was described by Life magazine in March 1993 as "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America". Rideau was incarcerated in Louisiana State Penitentiary (better known as Angola Prison) from 1961 to 2000, convicted of murder three times before a fourth trial in 2005 convicted him of manslaughter, allowing time already served to fulfil his sentence. In 1976, Rideau became editor of the prison magazine, The Angolite, which he developed into a professional, award-winning bimonthly magazine. He is also known for helping to produce a number of award-winning documentary films, including The Farm, a film about Angola Prison that was nominated for an Academy Award for Documentary Feature and which won best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998.

When he was six, his family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana (a city about 40 miles from the Texas border on Interstate 10). He attended the all-black Second Ward Elementary School. He was born into poverty, and when his parents later divorced, he became even poorer. He transferred to W.O. Boston Colored High School when he was in eighth grade and soon started playing hooky, shooting dice, and vandalizing tombs in a cemetery. Then he started selling cigarettes, three for a nickel. At 13, he got a job at a grocery store by pretending to be 16 and eventually stopped going to school.

According to trial testimony, on February 16, 1961, Rideau, then 19 years old, robbed $14,000 from the Gulf National Bank, kidnapped three bank employees — tellers Dora McCain and Julia Ferguson and manager Jay Hickman — and forced them into Ferguson's car, directing her to drive out of town. After Hickman tried to escape as Ferguson slowed the car to determine where she was, Rideau exited the car and chased Hickman. Rideau shot him, then shot McCain and Ferguson as they also tried to flee the car. Hickman hid in a nearby bayou, and McCain feigned death, but Rideau found Ferguson alive, stabbed her in the heart, and allegedly slit her throat (although the 2005 trial would dispute this, with defense witness Dr. Werner Spitz noting that autopsy pictures showed the cut was only an inch long and more likely a tracheotomy). Rideau was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white, all-male jury. While in parish jail and on death row, Rideau began to read books smuggled in to him by guards and began to write, starting with writing letters for fellow inmates in exchange for cigarettes or money. He also began corresponding with Clover Swann, an editor at the New York Times.

Later, the United States Supreme Court overturned his conviction in Rideau v. Louisiana, 373 U.S. 723 (1963) on the basis that a secretly taped interrogation session was aired repeatedly on the local television station KPLC-TV's evening news, resulting in a biased jury pool and a "kangaroo court." A second trial in 1964, again by an all-white male jury, reached the same result, but in 1969, a federal appeals court overturned this conviction as well: the prosecution had removed numerous qualified jurors because of their hesitancy to impose the death penalty.

In 1970 he was retried — again by an all-white, all-male jury — and again with the same result. The death sentence was overturned in 1973 by the Louisiana Supreme Court, in accord with the United States Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia, which had voided all death penalty statutes then extant in the U.S., but let the conviction stand. Rideau asked to be transferred to The Angolite prison magazine's all-white staff and, when that was refused, started a prison magazine called The Lifer with an all-black staff. He started writing a column called "The Jungle" for black newspapers in the South.

In 1975, the federal court ordered the Angola prison to be reformed, the outgoing warden C. Murray Henderson appointed Rideau editor of The Angolite. The incoming warden, C. Paul Phelps, ratified the choice and made it so that The Angolite had to be held to the same standards as any respected publication. Rideau brought on two co-editors, Tom Mason and Ron Wikberg, and Billy Wayne Sinclair in 1978. Soon, the magazine transformed from a mimeographed newsletter into a glossy magazine, and it started winning awards.

In the 1980s, four pardon boards unsuccessfully recommended Rideau for release; he has been an exemplary prisoner, and nearly all other surviving prisoners convicted of murder in the same time period in Louisiana have been released.

In 1988, Loyola University of New Orleans' Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice established the Rideau Project. The purpose of the project was to obtain freedom for Rideau.

Rideau became a sought-after lecturer. In 1991, he, along with Wikberg and University of Louisiana Professor Burk Foster, wrote a criminal justice textbook.

In the December 2000 case of Rideau v. Louisiana, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans threw out the 1970 conviction on the basis that "purposeful" racial discrimination tainted the grand jury process. The case returned to Calcasieu Parish, which, to the surprise of many outside of the area, decided to try Rideau for a fourth time. He was re-indicted in July of 2001.

After much legal maneuvering, that trial took place in January 2005 in Lake Charles, Louisiana in the court of Louisiana 14th Judicial District Judge David Ritchie. Jury selection began January 3, 2005 in Monroe, Louisiana rather than Lake Charles, because finding an unbiased jury in Lake Charles at this point was ruled an impossibility. The prosecution was led by District Attorney Rick Bryant. The defense team included nationally-recognized defense attorney Johnnie Cochran and famed New Orleans defense attorney Julian Murray.

In a key victory in the trial for the defense, the only two verdicts Judge Ritchie allowed were on the 1961 definitions of murder — a premeditated killing with a sentence of life imprisonment without parole — and manslaughter, which carried a 21-year sentence. By 2005's standards, the killing would have fallen under Louisiana's second-degree murder offense, as Rideau killed while committing another crime, but no distinction between first- and second-degree murder was made in the trial.

On January 15, 2005, Rideau was convicted of manslaughter by a jury of seven whites, four blacks and a person of mixed race after nearly six hours of deliberation, and with credit for 44 years served was quickly released from the Calcasieu Correctional Center.

He quickly left the Center in a waiting car and traveled to a small hotel, which happened to be on the same street where he killed Ferguson, before travelling to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he gave his first full interview as a free man to the Associated Press. Twomey Center legal researcher Linda LaBranche said the move was in fear for his safety. Julian Murray said Rideau had been sent threatening e-mails, which he dismissed as the work of "kooks." In interviews, Rideau's family had expressed surprise that Rideau had already made extensive plans for his freedom and was quickly acting on them.

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