Following a manslaugh­ter con­vic­tion for a crime com­mit­ted when he was 19 years old in Louisiana in 1961, Wilbert Rideau, the acclaimed prison jour­nal­ist, was set free by the tri­al judge on Saturday, January 15. His con­vic­tion car­ries a max­i­mum sen­tence of 21 years and Rideau has already served 44 years in prison, pri­mar­i­ly in Angola. Rideau, who is black, was orig­i­nal­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death by an all-white, all-male jury for killing a white woman. His death sen­tence was over­turned when the U.S. Supreme Court found that the death penal­ty was being applied in an arbi­trary man­ner in 1972. He has had three pre­vi­ous tri­als. In 2000, a fed­er­al appeals court grant­ed him a new tri­al because blacks had been exclud­ed from the orig­i­nal grand jury that indict­ed him in 1961. In his cur­rent tri­al, he faced a mixed-race jury for the first time.

During his years in Angola, Rideau served as the edi­tor of the prize-win­ning pub­li­ca­tion, The Angolite, and has received numer­ous awards for his writ­ing and his part in pro­duc­ing the doc­u­men­tary ​“The Farm” about life in the prison. (Washington Post-AP, Jan. 16, 2005).

Citation Guide