Rideau’s Release Makes Justice Weep
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Hallelujah! After 44 years one of America’s most famous convicts, a black man named Wilbert Rideau convicted of murdering a white woman in Louisiana during the Jim Crow era, is free. Headlines worldwide proclaim justice has been done. But they couldn’t be more wrong. Justice is weeping. For Rideau remains what he was when I knew him 17 years ago—a cold-blooded murderer.
Three different juries convicted Rideau, now 62, of murder. But all were overturned on technicalities, providing Rideau an incredible fourth chance. This time he was convicted only of manslaughter, downgrading his sentence to a maximum of 21 years and thereby freeing him. But here are the uncontested facts of the case.
In 1961 Rideau robbed a St. Charles, La., bank using a gun he had purchased the day before along with a buck knife. He ordered three employees into his car and drove them to a bayou. There he emptied his gun into them at point blank range, hitting two in the neck and a third in the arm. One escaped into the water; one feigned death. The third, Julia Ferguson, made the mistake (according to the others) of begging for her life. Rideau drew his knife and plunged it into her heart, killing her.
You’ll note that I didn’t call them “victims.” As the frustrated prosecutor, Calcasieu Parish District Attorney Rick Bryant, told me sarcastically: “He’s the victim. The rest of us are the bad guys.”
Rideau was a victim of circumstances. He didn’t plan on robbing the bank, he said. He’d bought the weapons for self-protection. He decided on the robbery at the spur of the moment after missing his bus home from work (a victim of public transportation). “I needed a new life,” he explained.
Rideau was a victim of the hostages. He said he was forced to seize them because he thought police were coming. Then he had to shoot them because they had the audacity to attempt to escape. “I didn’t intend to harm any of those people,” Rideau said during cross-examination. Bryant asked him incredulously: “What did you think would happen when you stabbed a middle aged woman in the chest?”
Rideau was a victim of racism. After all, he’s black and his hostages all had the temerity to be white. (O.J. Simpson was similarly victimized.) “This jury,” Rideau told The Washington Post, “reached back and pulled a judgment out of the racial clutches I was long in.”
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(Posted on January 26, 2005)