Cry freedom

All Wilbert Rideau needed to do for four decades as an inmate in one of America's harshest prisons - the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana - was to keep his head down.

But that isn't his style. Instead Rideau, incarcerated in 1961 for murder, took precisely the wrong path. He turned himself into a model prisoner.

His "mistakes" have ranged from editing the prison magazine, The Angolite, to writing books, lecturing and co-producing an Oscar-nominated film about life behind bars. In the process, he has earned some of the highest accolades in US journalism.

ABC News once named him "Person of the Week". In Life magazine he was "The Most Rehabilitated Prisoner in America".

Amazing feats these may be for a man who was 19 years old and barely educated when he first went inside. But today, Rideau, now 63, has the poise and glint-in-the-eye of a man with intact self-respect and admits that although his feats have earned him the admiration of people around the country, they may also have cost him the one prize every prisoner craves: freedom.

That is because there are others in the country - and especially in southwest Louisiana - who do not care for Rideau one bit. Rather than being impressed by his deeds, they become increasingly infuriated by them. Just as his supporters say it is time to let him go, these other folk, many of them powerful, wish to see him rot and die inside his cell.

It is a battle that may soon be resolved. What is happening in the long saga of Rideau's confinement is unprecedented in US judicial history. The model prisoner went on trial this week for the fourth time over the killing of a young woman more than 40 years ago.

This is not a story about a black man wrongfully convicted and locked up for a crime he never committed. True, at the new trial which opened on Monday, Rideau pleaded not guilty, but that is how the system works.

Rideau's crime dates from February 1961 when he was 19. Having robbed a bank in the small town of Lake Charles, he took three bank employees hostage and drove them to a remote bayou before shooting them. The bank manager was hit in the arm but managed to flee, another woman was shot in the neck but lay still feigning death. Rideau stabbed the third, Julia Ferguson, in the heart and then slit her throat.

Rideau has never denied killing Ferguson but his defence lawyers argue his behaviour was the act of a rash teenager caught up in a robbery that had gone wrong.

When the case opened for the fourth time in Lake Charles on Monday, his lawyers urged the jury to convict him of manslaughter, not murder.

"Let me tell you right now," one of Rideau's lawyers, George Kendall, admitted to the jury. "Mr Rideau is responsible for the death of Julia Ferguson." But: "You will see these are not the acts of a well-conceived plan to eliminate witnesses but the impulsive acts of a nervous and confused man."

The prosecution is no longer seeking the death penalty but it wants to ensure Rideau does not leave prison alive.

Rick Bryant, the Calcasieu County district attorney, told the jury: "[Rideau] took [the hostages] 10 miles [16km] east of Lake Charles ... lined them up and shot them. Julia Ferguson, who was already shot, begged - begged - for her life."

Rideau was tried in 1961, 1964 and 1970 and on each occasion he was convicted of murder. On each occasion an appeals court threw out the verdicts, citing misconduct by the Government.

Many of his defenders claim he would have been released years ago if his victim had been black and if he had not become such a high-profile prisoner.

All three of his previous convictions for murder were successively overturned because of blatant racial manipulation by white prosecutors (each verdict was delivered by all-white, male juries). And on the three occasions when the state parole board recommended that he be released, between 1984 and 1990, the sitting governor flatly refused; no explanation given.

Rideau did have one piece of luck. His first 11 years in Angola - a sprawling 7284ha prison farm that earned its name because it was first worked by slaves from that African country - were spent on death row. When the US Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that the death penalty as it was being exercised at the time was unconstitutional, his sentence was commuted to life.

But there the luck ended. Most galling of all: back in the early 1960s when he was first convicted, the law in Louisiana said that lifers, even murderers, who showed good behaviour should be released after between 10 and 15 years. And many of his co-inmates in Angola benefited from it. Murderers walked out. Some committed murder a second time, returned to Angola and were released once more.

It is for this reason that Rideau goes to trial this time with some of the country's most eminent lawyers defending him - for no fee. They include Johnnie Cochran, who defended O. J. Simpson against murder charges 10 years ago, and Julian Murray, perhaps the best-known defence lawyer in Louisiana. Their message is clear. Says Murray simply: "Enough is enough."

"All he is saying is don't treat me better than anyone else," says another defence lawyer, George Kendall, whose practice is in New York. "But make me pass the same test everyone else must pass to get out." It sounds like common sense. But common sense takes second place in this case to raw emotion and racial politics. To understand that, visit Lake Charles in southwest Louisiana near the Texas line, where, on some days, the fumes from the nearby refineries burn the nostrils. This is where the murder was committed at a time when the struggle over desegregation in the South was at its fiercest.

Lake Charles was Ku Klux Klan territory. So outraged were city officials when federal authorities ordered an end to racial segregation of the city's public schools, they vowed to close them and sell off the buildings.

The retrying of Rideau is set to take the town back to those times. With a population that is one-third black and two-thirds white, the Rideau story has remained a polarising force for all these years. Now the anger and mutual distrust will be forced back to the surface.

"The city is waiting to explode. It's a time bomb waiting to blow," warns the Rev J. L. Franklin, a local pastor and African-American leader. Last year, he led the biggest-ever march of African-Americans in the parish to the old courthouse to demand a fair trial for Rideau.

Outside the court there stands a monument to the soldiers who fought for the old Confederacy and defended slavery, with two words inscribed on it, "Our Heroes".

But the racial static was never so charged as on February 16, 1961, when the Sheriff's office in Lake Charles got word of the robbery at the bank on Ryan St. About $14,000 was gone and the perpetrator, quickly identified as a black man, had raced away in a car with three bank employees, all of them white women. It did not take long to track them to a swampy patch of ground off an interstate highway east of the city.

On that February afternoon, Sheriff Ham Reid drove the 18km east of Lake Charles to take charge of Rideau from the arresting officers. As he drove back to town, a white mob had already gathered outside the police station to bay at the black teenager as he was brought in.

Without delay, Rideau was interviewed by Reid and mumbled a confession in response to leading questions. All the town saw and heard it because the Sheriff had invited the local television station into the interrogation room to record it.

Four months after the robbery, Rideau was convicted and sentenced to death. The repeated television broadcasting of the "confession" tape was only one of the trial's problems. So egregious were its flaws that, two years later, the US Supreme Court reversed that first 1961 conviction, stating that the trial had been a "hollow proceeding" held in a "kangaroo court".

Not only had the jury been all-white and all-male but it had also included a relative of the victim, a friend of the victim and two local deputy sheriffs.

Trial number two in 1964 was at least held outside Lake Charles, 160km away in Baton Rouge. Again, Rideau was convicted and sentenced to death, again by an all-white jury (it reached its verdict in eight minutes). And once again the conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that jury selection rules had been violated.

And so, in 1970, to a third trial, also in Baton Rouge. This time the guilty verdict of the jury (all white, all male) seemed to stick, at least until 1972, the year the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty as it was being exercised in the US was unconstitutional and should be suspended. Rideau's death sentence was automatically commuted to life.

Off death row, Rideau was able to show his self- transformation. He was helped by successive wardens who, showing a surprising degree of accommodation, gave their most ambitious prisoner rein to express himself, including editing his own magazine.

The Angolite was not subject to censorship. It chronicled the violence of Angola, the rapes and sexual slavery of inmates. Meanwhile, hundreds of school children were bussed in to listen to Rideau warn against a life of crime. He was allowed out to lecture on prison reform at universities in the state and, occasionally, appeared on national television to address the same issues.

Perhaps most surprising was how he was allowed to co-produce the film, called The Farm: Angola USA. Aside from the Oscar nomination, it won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.

But his legal manoeuvres to find his freedom came to nought. Most frustrating were the three occasions the parole board recommended his release and the then governor, Edwin Edwards, demurred.

An ABC TV news report alleged some years later that Edwards had personally promised one of the survivors of the bank robbery, Dora McCain, that he would never let Rideau go free.

Four years ago, the landscape shifted again. In response to fresh motions from Rideau, a federal appeals court ruled he should either be released or tried all over again because of the racially biased make-up of the grand jury that delivered the original murder indictment against him back in 1961. Rideau and his lawyers tried to negotiate for the former option.

The man who stood in their way was the District Attorney in Lake Charles, Rick Bryant, who is now leading the prosecution. He was having none of it. He blocked successive attempts by the Rideau team to have the new trial held either before one of its two black judges or, preferably, to be moved from a jurisdiction far from Calcasieu Parish.

In a telephone interview from the Lake Charles jail, where he was transferred after a new trial was ordered, Rideau openly voiced his scepticism about his chances of a fair trial this time.

"You are talking about an area that harbours a good deal of prejudice, where all the players in the judicial system, the judges and everyone else, they all know the prosecution witness and what-not and are all friends. They are trying to send me back to prison; they are not trying to help me."

The atmosphere at the trial will not be pretty. To say that there is open enmity between the two camps is an understatement.

Murray decries Bryant's unwillingness to even consider the efforts made by him and his co-defence lawyer to negotiate a settlement in the form of a manslaughter plea that would have meant Rideau being freed on the 43 years already served.

"Bryant? There is a lot of hate in that man."

As for Bryant: "I get a little irritated with all these people coming on with their 'poor, pitiful Wilbert Rideau' deal. What do you want me to say? That he is a great guy?"

Both sides are downplaying their chances of prevailing.

Bryant rightly points out the difficulties of prosecuting a murder case that is more than 40 years old with almost all the evidence gone and nearly every witness dead.

The defence team points to the ferocity of Bryant and to the history of judicial bias in Lake Charles.

Perhaps most absurd of all is the truth that Rideau would be in a far better position now if he had not shone so brightly while in Angola. Rideau sees the irony also.

"Am I a victim of my own success? I don't know," he muses. "It did put me in the spotlight. While a lot of people celebrated my efforts to do good - blacks and whites - apparently some people didn't like it.

"And this country is meant to celebrate success. What can I say?"

- INDEPENDENT