THE MOST PRIVILEGED INMATE IN AMERICA
In his recently released memoir, In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010), Wilbert Rideau informs the reader that he was a “victim” of Old South-style racism growing up in southwest Louisiana—the heart of “Cajun Country.” He says these experiences made him an angry and dangerous young man who robbed a bank and tried to kill three people (killing one) to escape to a new life in California. He said he was convicted of this crime in 1961 by a racist all-white jury, and that racism would play a continuing factor in his 44 year incarceration.
The truth is that Rideau was the most privileged prisoner and criminal defendant in American history. He was granted three new trials by federal courts. His first murder conviction and death sentence were reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963. The high court said Rideau’s filmed confession to law enforcement by a Lake Charles television station, which was aired repeatedly on the evening news, deprived him of his right to a fair and impartial trial.
A change of venue was ordered by the Louisiana Supreme Court in Rideau’s case. He was convicted and sentenced to death a second time by another all-white jury in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1969 the most conservative federal judge in America, E. Gordon West, who sat in Baton Rouge, reversed Rideau’s conviction and death sentence because jurors who expressed opposition to the death penalty were automatically excluded from jury duty in his case. Judge West’s decision was based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision rendered just weeks earlier—a decision that did not require an automatic reversal of a state conviction. Thus Rideau benefitted either from Judge West’s generosity (something he was not in a habit of giving to convicted felons) or his ignorance of the law (something he had an abundance of because he was one of the most reversed federal judges in America).
Rideau was convicted and sentenced to death yet a third time by another all-white jury in Baton Rouge. His conviction was upheld but his death sentence was reversed in 1973 by the Louisiana Supreme Court. He once again benefitted from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. This time it was a 1972 decision by the high court which effectively held that the death penalty as it existed at that time was unconstitutional. The ruling resulted in most of the 408 inmates with death sentences in America being re-sentenced to life imprisonment.
Then in 2000 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed Rideau’s conviction yet a third time. This time because blacks had been excluded from jury duty in his case. He was tried a fourth time in 2005. This trial was conducted in Lake Charles but was decided by a racially-mixed jury selected in Monroe, Louisiana which was bused to Lake Charles to hear the case. Ironically, members of the District Attorney’s Office overheard jurors on the bus ride to Lake Charles talking about what they would say or wear on The Oprah Winfrey Show after they rendered their verdict. The jury found Rideau guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. That verdict carried a maximum sentence of 21 years at the time of Rideau’s 1961 arrest. The judge imposed the maximum sentence. Since Rideau had already served 44 years, he was released from custody the moment the judge imposed the sentence.
How many other convicted murderers who robbed a bank, took three employees hostage, wounded two of them as he tried to kill them, and killed a third (by cutting her throat and stabbing her in the heart) in American history received four trials to make sure he had “justice?” None. The same year the U.S. Supreme Court granted Rideau, a black man, a new trial for excessive pretrial publicity it denied appeals on the same issue for the Truman Capote In Cold Blood killers Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith, both of whom were white and who were hanged in Kansas in 1965. Judge West gave Rideau a new trial on the Witherspoon rule yet denied a number of white condemned inmates a new trial on the same issue. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted Rideau a new trial when just weeks before the court had denied a white man who presented essentially the same arguments raised in Rideau’s case.
At every turn Rideau received special, preferential treatment from the federal judiciary who bent over backwards to make sure his constitutional “rights” were protected. Even the 2005 jury that found him guilty of manslaughter did so outside the bounds of the law. There has never been another criminal defendant in Louisiana history who robbed a bank, took hostages, tried to kill all of them, and killed one in cold blood that was found guilty of manslaughter.
If Rideau was a “victim” of racism as he and his supporters claim, the federal and state judicial systems went way beyond the normal call of duty to make sure the “wrongs” against him were corrected and his “rights” protected. No criminal defendant has ever benefitted from the nation’s system of justice as Wilbert Rideau.
While incarcerated in the Louisiana prison system and hailed as “the nation’s most rehabilitated prisoner,” Rideau and his supporters pointed to the fact that all the inmates on death row at the time he arrived there had been “released” before him. Rideau was placed on Louisiana’s death row in April 1962. He was the 18th condemned inmate placed on death row after condemned inmates started being sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1956 for execution. That means 17 inmates were placed on death row before him. What he and his supporters did not say is that several of those inmates were executed. Many of them died in prison. Several more had their convictions reversed by the courts, just as the courts had reversed Rideau’s convictions, and pleaded guilty to or were found guilty of a lesser charge just like Rideau was in 2005. There may have been one or two of those 17 inmates who were released through the Louisiana executive clemency process, but they did not rob a bank, take hostages, try to kill three people, and killed one by cutting her throat and stabbing her in the heart. No inmate in Louisiana’s executive clemency history who committed such a crime was ever granted a pardon or a commutation of sentence.
In post-memoir interviews and in the memoir itself, Rideau says that while there is violence in prison, it is a “targeted” kind of violence—that most inmates live a rather mundane life in a peaceful environment just trying to do the “right thing.” That’s was the case in Rideau’s “safe and secure” prison world. He knows absolutely nothing about the kind of “gang violence” that plagues most of the nation’s maximum security prisons. Rideau would be like a “gold fish” in a tank of sharks trying to survive in one of those prisons. Throughout most of his incarceration at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, it was one of the “safest” maximum security prisons in the nation. The threat of violence was minimal and when it did occur, it did not occur in Rideau’s cloistered little privileged world.
For the first twelve years of Rideau’s incarceration, he was locked in the safety of a cell either in a parish jail or on death row where there was no threat of violence. He was placed in general population at Angola in 1973 when the prison was known as “the bloodiest prison in America.” But Rideau was on the prison’s Big Yard, where most of the violence occurred, just a short period of time before being granted trusty status and placed in a safer environment. He was editor of the prison’s newsmagazine, The Angolite, for the last 25 years of his incarceration. He enjoyed more privileges and benefits than any inmate in American penal history. His memoir overflows with self-praise and self-adulation of the immense amount of power and influence he amassed in the prison system.
Rideau should not even speak about violence (or corruption) in prison. That would be like John D. Rockefeller talking about poverty. In fact, one review of Rideau’s book points out that it reads more like the memoir of an “entertainment” mogul than that of an inmate. In his own mind, and the way he portrays himself in the memoir, that’s precisely what Rideau was—an “entertainment” mogul, not an “awarding-winning” convict journalist working on behalf of the inmate world as he would like everyone to believe. Everything he did was motivated by self-aggrandizement; the amount of power he could accumulate to pursue his agenda of being “the nation’s most rehabilitated prisoner.”
Wilbert Rideau served 44 years in the Louisiana prison system. Yes, that’s a long time. Rideau is fond of that he served more time than 99 percent of the convicted murderers released in Louisiana. He may be right, but none of those murderers committed crimes that can even be remotely compared to the heinousness and gravity of Rideau’s crimes. There is an inmate in the Louisiana prison system right now who has served 51 years for an aggravated rape. He is a black man and his victim was white. His crime in no way compares to Rideau.
Did Rideau deserve to be freed? A jury said he did. But that verdicts does not give the famed prison journalist the right to claim he suffered injustice after injustice by a racist Louisiana criminal justice system when, in fact, he was the most privileged prisoner and criminal defendant in the history of that state.
