Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

           I have presented through this site indisputable, undeniable evidence that Wilbert Rideau’s memoir, In The Place of Justice (Random House 2010), is a literary fraud chocked full of fabrications, factual errors, and misrepresentations. The truth has never been, and will never be, enough for the former “famed prison journalist.” He has an incurable propensity to take a kernel of corn and present it as a bushel he personally harvested. And some of the nation’s most respected journalists and historians have aided and abetted in perpetuating the myth that Rideau, during his award-winning tenure as editor of The Angolite, somehow transformed the infamous “Angola prison” from the “bloodiest prison in America” into a showcase of modern penology.

            Nothing could be further from the truth. Wilbert Rideau is a media con artist. Let me support this harsh assessment with a perfect illustration. In chapter 10 of his memoir, titled “Hope,” Rideau wrote about the difference of executions by the electric chair and lethal injection. The staff of the prison magazine had secured photos of inmates put to death in electric chairs in Florida and Louisiana, including some taken of Robert Wayne Williams who was put to death in Louisiana’s electric chair in 1983. Rideau, and his co-editor Ron Wikberg, convinced Angola Warden John Whitley to allow the prison “newsmagazine” to publish the photos in an upcoming edition. At the time a New Orleans-based anti-death penalty group had filed a legal challenge to the continued use of the electric chair because the device was “defective” and its use amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

            The Louisiana Legislature in the spring/summer of 1990 amended the state’s statute governing the method of execution announcing its intention to change the method of execution from electrocution to lethal injection. In 1991 the state formally changed its method of execution with an amendment that provided all inmates sentenced to death prior to September 15, 1991 would be put to death by electrocution and those sentenced to death after September 15, 1991 would be put to death by lethal injection. The language of the statute remains the same today.

            Rideau said The Angolite’s proposed intention to publish the post-mortem photos of Robert Wayne Williams stirred considerable controversy within the Louisiana corrections department. I do not doubt that. The photos were published in the September/October 1990 edition of The Angolite and, according to Rideau, produced the following reaction: “The photos of Williams, the medical diagnosis of his burns, and the conclusions of expert electrical engineers that Louisiana’s electric chair was defective made news throughout the state. It was out hottest, fastest selling magazine ever. Everyone wanted to see what an electrocuted person looked like, it seemed.”

            I cannot factually dispute Rideau’s claim that the story “made news throughout the state.” I was housed at the Louisiana State Police Barracks in 1990 and stayed abreast of all state and local news. I don’t recall any major media event associated with the publication of the photos. A Google search does not produce any “hits” about such coverage. Thus, given Rideau’s propensity for embellishment, I question whether the publication of the Williams photos “made news throughout the state” but I cannot factually refute it.

            As for that particular edition of The Angolite being the “hottest, fastest selling magazine ever,” that’s another Rideau fabrication. The prison newsmagazine was a subscriber-only publication. It was not on “newsstands” around the state for public sale. The Angolite at that time probably had no more than 2,000 subscribers with many of those being “complimentary” subscriptions. Further, there’s no way that particular edition could have been the “hottest, fastest selling [edition] ever” because the prison’s print shop printed a fix number of copies each edition. The copies not mailed to subscribers were distributed “free” to the general inmate population. Thus, the “hottest, fastest selling magazine ever” claim is just another Rideau lie.        

            Beyond this obvious fabrication, there are two distinct misrepresentations associated with the event in the memoir. The first involves Rideau attending a pardon board hearing for death row inmate Robert Sawyer. The New Orleans anti-death penalty group was trying to get Sawyer’s scheduled execution delayed until the legal issues surrounding the continued use of the electric chair were resolved. Rideau wrote that during a break in the pardon board session, “board member Sally McKissack” walked up to him and asked: “You heard what we’ve heard. What would you do?”

            Rideau, the “solution man,” replied: “Sarah and Nick (the death penalty people) have already filed this issue in court. Having seen the pictures, I’d find a reason to dodge this execution, because if something goes wrong with it after you’ve refused to hear their complaint, you’re going to catch flak from everywhere. But you know that.”

            Rideau’s memoir recounts episode after episode where he was called upon to advise wardens, prison officials, politicians, and educators on how to effectively deal with crises affecting their positions. It quite literally boggles the mind, much less the normal bounds of logic, to believe that a member of the Louisiana pardon board would walk up to a convicted murderer, albeit an “award-winning” one, and ask him how the pardon board should handle a particular case. It makes a rational mind seize up with shock to realize that many of the nation’s prominent journalists actually believe this kind of crap—a claim that cannot be proven because Sally McKissack is conveniently dead.

            The second misrepresentation was that in the wake of the publication of the Williams death photos, the Louisiana corrections department “without acknowledging anything was wrong with the electric chair, announced it would ask the legislature to mandate that the present death row population be executed by lethal injection.”

            The corrections department I’m sure made such a recommendation, but the obvious implication by Rideau that the agency did so in response to The Angolite’s publication of the Williams death photos is a stretch, to say the least. The Louisiana Legislature at the time was already in the process of preparing to switch from electrocution to lethal injection as the state’s method of execution. The corrections department’s recommendation was made in conjunction with that legislative process, not The Angolite.

            In a YouTube video about the need to end prison censorship, Rideau takes this misrepresentation to step further by claiming that The Angolite was responsible for forcing the State of Louisiana “to change” its method of execution. That is just an outright lie, one so typical of Wilbert Rideau. The legislature’s decision to change the state’s method of execution had nothing to do with either The Angolite in general or its “award-winning editor” personally. And the other “changes” Rideau attributes to The Angolite in the YouTube video are either blatant lies (like changing the culture of rape at Angola) or misrepresentations (like changing the delivery of health care to inmates throughout the state’s penal system).

            Wilbert Rideau is an incurable liar. An objective analysis or a serious fact-checking of his memoir by any responsible researcher or journalist would produce the same conclusion.