Where is wilbert rideau now

Did he confess freely on TV or was he pressured into doing so by a sheriff asking leading questions? Did he get a fair trial or was it undermined by a jury that included friends and relatives of the victim and witnesses? And how much did the death sentence come down to the fact that he was black, the victim white, and the crime occurred in Louisiana at a time of extreme racial tension, when blacks lived in mortal dread of being lynched by the KKK, and the state was resisting pressure to integrate its schools?

Having finally won release after a fourth trial in , Rideau has now written a memoir, In the Place of Justice , recounting his version of events. It featured no description of the actual crime.

He says he sometimes needs subtitles even for Hugh Grant movies. We should be grateful that his editor insisted on the description. A prisoner targeted for turnout had to defeat his assailant; otherwise the rape for ever branded him as property.

Despite this, the most remarkable thing about the book is, paradoxically, the hope it conveys. He admits people are often stunned by this revelation, but is keen to stress that he was not untypical — for all the violence, most inmates did not engage in behaviour that would put them at risk. Also, Angola improved during his time there: by the end of the late Seventies, the death rate fell to about one a year.

But then an enlightened new warden persuaded Rideau to edit the prison magazine, The Angolite. They congratulated me, some women slipped me their phone number or address.

One treated me to a tour of the city, and we made love on crushed clover on the outskirts of town, making far-fetched prison fantasy come true. There were times, perversely, when Rideau was sometimes so busy with his work for The Angolite that he had to cancel speaking engagements. Rideau, despite his clean record, effectively passed that point in He applied for a commutation of his sentence in and was turned down. The United States Supreme Court and lower courts ordered a total of three new trials; the USSC overturned his conviction and ordered a new trial because of adverse pre-trial publicity.

He was convicted again of murder two more times, in and , each time by all-male, all-white juries. He served more than 40 years in the State Penitentiary; parole was never approved. In Rideau was tried a fourth time. He was unanimously convicted by the jury of the lesser charge of manslaughter; they did not believe he had planned the killing. Rideau was sentenced to the maximum of 21 years; as he had already served nearly 44 years, he was freed.

A Life magazine article in March referred to Rideau as "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America. He participated in making two documentaries, including The Farm: Angola, USA , about the lives of six men at Angola, including himself. It was drawn from his memoir Life Sentences and much of the film was made at the prison. In what? In awareness. In life. Take the Tour. Residents Our Resident Program is for people who wish to practice and learn at Upaya for a minimum of 4 months.

Dharma Podcasts We have hundreds of hours of talks spanning over a decade, all available for free listening. Turning the Mind toward the Body. The two civil lawyers handling the defense were not aware that no transcript was being made until jury selection was well underway because the court stenographer sat in her place, as usual, even though she was not recording the proceedings.

As the trial continued, the lawyers laboriously made longhand notes of their objections. Had they not, there would have been no record at all upon which to appeal the jury's verdict. Wilbert's lawyers did not cross examine the key witnesses against him, challenge evidence, or present a defense.

As soon as the state finished presenting its case, the defense rested. The jury retired for an hour and Wilbert was convicted of murder, which carried a mandatory sentence of death. Louisiana , US In , Louisiana law only permitted trials to be moved to an adjoining judicial district and no further. Because all the adjoining judicial districts fell within the broadcast range of KPLC-TV, the trial judge declared a judicial impasse, saying Wilbert could not be retried.

The district attorney appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which basically suspended state law so that a retrial could go forward. The district attorney insisted upon moving the retrial to Baton Rouge. The defense strenuously objected, both because KPLC-TV could be received in Baton Rouge and because there had been massive newspaper coverage of the case. Their objections were to no avail.

During jury selection, the Baton Rouge DA, who was assisting the Calcasieu prosecutor, nonchalantly admitted that he was a member of the Citizens' Council , the genteel counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan. The second trial went pretty much the same as the first.

A second all-white, all-male jury spent 15 minutes deliberating before convicting Wilbert of murder again. That murder conviction was thrown out by a federal court in There was another trial in Baton Rouge in A third all-white, all-male jury "deliberated" for eight minutes before convicting Wilbert of murder.

He was moved back to Death Row at Angola. In , the U. Supreme Court vacated all death sentences across America, saying that the way the death penalty was applied was capricious and unconstitutional. Furman v. Georgia , US Louisiana, instead of retrying those on Death Row, resentenced them to Life in prison. In May , Wilbert Rideau was put into the general population of prisoners at Angola, which at that time was one of the most dangerous prisons in the country.

Inmate cliques, sexual enslavement, and rifle-toting convict guards made violence a fact of daily life. At this time, Louisiana had what was known as the "" life sentence, meaning that lifers with clean conduct records were eligible for release after serving 10 years and six months. It was virtually automatic. Rideau had a spotless conduct record and a "" date that had passed in mid He applied for a commutation of his sentence in and was turned down by the pardon board.

The same thing happened in Rideau and asked him to vote against the inmate, who had by now become a high-profile, award-winning journalist. In , , , and , pardon boards recommended commuting Mr. Rideau's sentence so he could be released. Governor Buddy Roemer denied clemency to Mr. Rideau in and This is what he said: "His only chance to overcome what he did is what he might propose he could do so that those kinds of crimes would happen less in the future, not more.

Only he can address that. Rideau's case to understand what Governor Roemer might have meant. Rideau had already spent more than a decade working with judges to deter kids from a life of crime. In , Wilbert Rideau filed a petition of habeas corpus in the U. Middle District Court for Louisiana, alleging racial discrimination in the way his grand jury was selected because the white commissioners used race-coded cards to pick anyone they wanted to sit on the grand jury panels.

The case was assigned to a magistrate, who recommended in that the habeas be granted. In , the chief judge overruled the magistrate and denied the habeas. In , the Shreveport Journal's editorial board wrote: "Numerous corrections officials - from every warden at Angola who has worked with Rideau to former Secretary of Corrections C.

Paul Phelps - have said that if there is any prisoner in America who has been rehabilitated it is Wilbert Rideau, and that he is no threat to society.

The average length of incarceration for a convicted murderer in the United States is roughly seven years. Rideau has served [many] times that long. This is a mockery of the corrections system because Rideau has done everything the judicial system asked of him and much more. His continued incarceration despite universal agreement of his rehabilitation is a black mark on the state's judicial system. Now, the district attorney of Calcasieu Parish is saying he will retry Wilbert Rideau, who has already spent 40 years in prison - longer than any offender in the history of Calcasieu Parish.

January 17, Wilbert Rideau, an acclaimed prison journalist and confessed killer, walked out of the Calcasieu Parish Courthouse in Lake Charles, La.

In Mr. Rideau's fourth trial for the killing, a jury on Saturday found him not guilty of murder, which would have resulted in a life sentence. Instead, the jury convicted him of manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 21 years, effectively freeing him. In an interview yesterday, Mr.

Rideau, 62, said he had wasted no time in leaving Lake Charles, a racially divided city near the Texas border that remains fiercely split about whether he has paid his debt for the killing or whether he should have been executed long ago.

Rideau said cheerfully over the phone, suggesting that he needed to disguise himself. Three all-white juries sentenced him to death for the killing in , and All three convictions were overturned by appeals courts for government misconduct.

The last conviction was thrown out in when a federal appeals court ruled that the exclusion of blacks from the grand jury that indicted Mr. Rideau was unconstitutional. Rideau, who is black.

The latest jury, which also contained seven white women, two black women, a woman of mixed race and a black man, was from Monroe, in northern Louisiana, in deference to the tensions in Lake Charles. Rideau said. These things happened 44 years ago, before many of them were even born. This time, the jury deliberated for five and a half hours, returning with a verdict at on Saturday night. Rick Bryant, the Calcasieu Parish district attorney, said the jury had ignored the evidence.

The jury basically said, there is still a conviction and he's done a lot of time. Two of the employees survived, one by jumping into the swamp, the other by feigning death. But Mr. Rideau caught and killed Julia Ferguson, a teller, stabbing in her in the heart. The two sides at the trial last week agreed on those basic facts. They differed about whether the killing was part of a calculated plan or the result of a bank robbery gone awry committed by a hapless year-old.

Rideau said yesterday. They said I lined them up execution-style. The evidence never supported that. Between the local media and the legal system, though, they pretty much did what they wanted.

A lot of what the community thought, through hand-me-down word of mouth, never really happened. Rideau testified in his own defense, a potentially risky move given his acknowledged responsibility for the crime. But George H. Kendall, one of Mr. Rideau's lawyers, said the testimony was crucial. Kendall said. When that was foiled by an ill-timed phone call from the bank's main branch, he said, he came up with a second plan.

He would drive the employees far out of town in a teller's car and escape as they walked back. But they jumped from the car before he could accomplish that, and he started shooting.

Rideau testified on Thursday, according to The Associated Press. Theodore M. Shaw, the director-counsel of the N. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which also represented Mr. Rideau, said he found it hard to reconcile Mr. Rideau's crime with the thoughtful and accomplished man he has become. Shaw said. It's a story of redemption. Shaw pointed to Mr. Rideau's journalistic work as proof of his transformation.

As editor of The Angolite, a prison newspaper, Mr. Rideau won the George Polk Award, one of journalism's highest honors. Bryant, the prosecutor, said Mr. Rideau's achievements were irrelevant. Bryant said, referring to the robbery. He's a crook. Bryant said the prosecution had been at a disadvantage throughout the trial. Rideau said yesterday that he had not dared make plans for what he would do as a free man. The pardon board recommended clemency four times, he said, but governors rejected each recommendation.

He declined to say where he planned to live. Then he started to collect his thoughts. Most people my age are retired, and I have no health insurance, no pension, no Social Security. I've got to start producing. I've got to get a job. I'd like to write. I've got so much to say. I'm going to continue, to the extent that I can, to be a journalist. Lake Charles, LA Wilbert Rideau, acclaimed as America's most rehabilitated prisoner, walked out of a Lake Charles, Calcasieu Parish jail today, a free man after 44 years of incarceration and four trials for killing a white female bank teller in The verdict was delivered by a jury of ten women and two men four of whom were Black selected and transported to Lake Charles for the trial from the Northeastern Louisiana city of Monroe because of intense pre-trial publicity in Lake Charles.

All three previous death sentence convictions were delivered by all-white, all-male juries from Calcasieu Parish, and overturned by federal courts as unconstitutional.

Wilbert Rideau's case goes to the core of the nature of our criminal justice system--to issues of fairness, punishment and rehabilitation. LDF has represented Rideau since and won the December ruling by a federal appeals court, which found that purposeful racial discrimination had tainted the grand jury process for his third trial. The State of Louisiana was ordered either to free Rideau or retry him in a constitutional manner.

It opted to retry him for a fourth time. Upon his release, an emotional Rideau expressed "remorse and deep sympathy to the families of the victims and the community of Calcasieu for their suffering," regrets that he has not been allowed to personally deliver for the past four decades. Rideau was 19 years old at the time he was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white male jury for the killing of a white female bank teller following a bank robbery, a crime that he has never denied committing.

The United States Supreme Court overturned his conviction, calling the trial proceedings a kangaroo court because the trial court refused to move the trial after the sheriff allowed a local television station to secretly record an interrogation session and repeatedly air the tape on the evening news.

The local news station in the months leading up to this trial again repeatedly broadcast the same tape. In , a federal court overturned a second conviction and death sentence returned by an all-white male jury because the prosecution unnecessarily removed numerous qualified jurors who said they would be hesitant but not completely unwilling to impose the death penalty. In , Rideau's third death sentence, from his retrial, was overturned by the Louisiana Supreme Court after the U.

Supreme Court had struck down the death penalty as then administered in this country, in Furman v. Georgia, a case won by LDF attorneys.

While incarcerated in one of America's toughest prisons, Rideau educated himself, and became an award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker, and model prisoner. For 25 years he was the editor of the Angolite, the official news magazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where he earned it a national reputation.

Chief Justice Warren Burger. In the time that Rideau has been incarcerated, more than other prisoners convicted of murder have been released from Angola State Prison. Many did not serve as much as 20 years in prison, and only a handful has served more than Today's jury found Rideau guilty of manslaughter and not murder, which permitted his immediate release for time served.

The maximum sentence for a manslaughter conviction in Louisiana is 21 years. A murder conviction would have allowed the State to continue his incarceration for the rest of his life. All-white, all-male juries convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death in , and Now, prosecutors are trying once again to obtain a conviction against Mr. Rideau, one that will stick. But the passage of almost half a century presents difficulties. So many of the original witnesses are dead, for instance, that prosecutors have asked stand-ins to play the part of 13 witnesses, reading their original testimony to the jury.

Rick Bryant, the district attorney here, addressed the jurors on Monday with a version of events that is largely undisputed. He forced three of the bank's employees, all white, into a teller's sedan. They drove to a gravel lane near a bayou on the edge of town, where Mr. Rideau shot all three of them. Jay Hickman, the bank's manager, took a bullet in the arm but managed to escape by jumping into the swamp.

Dora McCain, a teller, was shot in the neck and lay still, feigning death. Rideau caught another teller, Julia Ferguson. He stabbed her in the heart and slit her throat. Almost nothing tangible remains of those events so long ago.

The fabric shop is gone; so is the bank. The gravel lane is now an on-ramp to Interstate Much of the evidence is lost, and most witnesses are dead. Rideau, now 62, is transformed, too.

He has, from prison, become an acclaimed journalist and documentary filmmaker. But the community's rage lives on in this racially divided oil and gambling town near the Texas border. Franklin, a black pastor, who had come to the courthouse to see the State of Louisiana make its case.

Rideau has never denied killing Ms. Many whites here say he should have been executed long ago. Many blacks say Mr.