La. Prison Journalist Freed After 44 Years

By ADAM NOSSITER
Jan 16, 8:39 AM (ET)

LAKE CHARLES, La. (AP) - An award-winning black journalist convicted of murder
three times by all-white juries in the 1961 death of a bank teller was set free
after a racially-mixed jury found him guilty of manslaughter.

Wilbert Rideau, a confessed killer who gained fame for exposes of harsh
Louisiana prison life, won his release Saturday after nearly 44 years in state
prisons. A manslaughter conviction allows his release for time already served.

Seven whites and five blacks deliberated for nearly six hours before reaching an
unanimous decision.

Rideau, 62, showed little emotion as the verdict was announced late Saturday
night. His only comment in court was "Yes, sir," when the judge asked whether he
wanted, in effect, to be released immediately.

He left the Calcasieu Correctional Center with his lawyers, making only a few
passing comments to reporters. A news conference was planned for Sunday.

"I'm still trying to assess it," Rideau said. "It's unreal. It's all so new."

A small but jubilant crowd of supporters cheered Saturday's decision, shouting,
"All right, Wilbert!" and "Thank you, Lord!"

The case has haunted this lakeside city near the Texas line for
decades. Rideau's advocates have contended that his years in prison have
rehabilitated him.

Rideau was 19 at the time of Julia Ferguson's death. He never denied killing his
victim, who was white. His lawyers contended he panicked after a botched bank
robbery and stabbed her impulsively amid Louisiana's 1960s-era climate of racial
hostility.

Rideau, who escaped death row in the 1970s when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed
then-existing death penalty laws, has had three previous convictions for
Ferguson's death. The convictions were overturned on appeal.

Two governors turned him down for pardons, under strong pressure from citizens
here, despite repeated board recommendations that he be released. In 2000, a
federal appeals court said his original 1961 indictment was flawed because
blacks were excluded from the grand jury.

In his fourth trial, Rideau's defense sought a manslaughter verdict. Prosecutors
wanted the jury to find him guilty of murder to ensure Rideau would end his days
in jail, barring a pardon.

Shortly before the jury was handed the case, Rideau's attorney Julian Murray
suggested that racism had distorted the crime, keeping local passions inflamed.

"You have to understand that time, and then it comes together," Murray
said. "You think they would hesitate to exaggerate the facts of the case, to get
the result they wanted?"

Ferguson's stabbing on a lonely rural road on February 16, 1961 was "a terrible
act, a criminal act, one for which he deserves great punishment, but not one for
which he deserves to be locked up for the rest of his life," Murray said. "He
did a terrible thing, but it wasn't murder."

Prosecutors derided Rideau's contention that he acted in confusion. The crime
was deliberate and coldly executed.

"I thought the most interesting part of his entire story was, 'I didn't murder
her, I killed her,'" Calcasieu Parish District Attorney Rick Bryant said in his
closing argument.

"The passage of time has made him older and hopefully wiser, but it certainly
has not made him less guilty," Bryant told the jury Saturday. "Time and age do
not give you innocence."

Rideau was a nearly illiterate janitor when he held up the bank in 1961. He
became a self-educated writer in prison and helped transform The Angolite into a
nationally acclaimed magazine dealing with the criminal justice system.

He also co-directed "The Farm," a prison documentary that was nominated for an
Oscar in 1999, and wrote and narrated an award-winning National Public Radio
documentary.