Manslaughter verdict sees writer freed after 44 years

An award-winning black journalist, convicted of murder three times by all-white juries following the 1961 death of a bank clerk has been found guilty of manslaughter by a racially-mixed jury.

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

Rideau, who escaped death row in the 1970s when the US Supreme Court outlawed then-existing death penalty laws, has had three previous convictions for the death of Julia Ferguson, a white bank clerk. The convictions were overturned on appeal.

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

In his fourth trial, Rideau’s lawyers sought a manslaughter verdict, a strategy that won his freedom. 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, adding that it was “a distinction without a distinction.”

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

Two governors have turned him down for pardons, under strong pressure from the public, despite repeated board recommendations that he be released. In 2000, a federal appeals court said Rideau’s original 1961 indictment was flawed because blacks had been excluded from the grand jury.

Rideau was a nearly illiterate cleaner 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.