In the Place of Justice - A Story of Punishment and Deliverance

Convicted of the murder of a white bank teller in 1961, Wilber Rideau (left), who is black, spent 44 years in prison, most of them at Angola, before being released. His painfully candid memoir, “In the Place of Justice,” is indeed, as its subtitle promises, “a story of punishment and deliverance,” told by a high school dropout who escaped Angola’s electric chair to become an award-winning prison journalist. As such, Rideau is the rarest of American commodities — a man who exited a penitentiary in better shape than when he ­arrived.


The details of his crime would be contested for decades. There is agreement that Rideau robbed a bank at closing time, kidnapping the male manager and two female tellers. Rideau claimed he was about to release them when one of the women bolted out of the car and the manager tried to overpower him. Rideau opened fire, hitting all three as they fled. When one of the women rose to her feet, he writes, “I grabbed the knife, stabbed her and ran to the car.”


The surviving victims told a different story, insisting that Rideau had used his weapons at close range and that the woman he killed had begged for her life. Word of his arrest brought hundreds of angry whites to the jailhouse, intent on a lynching. The trial itself was vintage Louisiana, circa 1961. The all-white jury, which included two deputy sheriffs, a cousin of the dead victim and a bank vice president who knew the wounded manager, found Rideau guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death.


In 1963, the Supreme Court threw out Rideau’s conviction, citing numerous violations. Rideau would be retried, found guilty and sentenced to death twice more in the coming years, each time before an all-white, all-male jury that deliberated for less than an hour.


Then, in 1972, the Supreme Court halted the death penalty. In a landmark 5-4 decision, Furman v. Georgia, it determined that the state statutes then in place were so arbitrary as to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.


[As a consequence] all death row prisoners — 587 men and 2 women — were resentenced to life in prison. Rideau was spared.


Angola, though, was a living hell. Like other Deep South prisons, it used a trusty system in which violent, gun-toting inmates, known as “khaki-backs,” served as guards. Everyone carried a weapon for protection, usually a blade. About a dozen prisoners were stabbed to death each year in the early 1970s, and dozens more were seriously wounded. The weakest inmates served as slaves, or “galboys,” a process that began with the “turn-out,” in which the new arrivals were sized up, challenged and frequently gang-raped. “Slavery was commonplace in Angola,” Rideau writes, “with perhaps a quarter of the population in bondage.” Men were sold and traded like cattle.


Slight of frame, weighing barely 120 pounds, Rideau seemed like easy prey. What spared him physically, he believes, was the respect he earned for repeatedly dodging the electric chair. And what saved him emotionally, he insists, were the books he devoured in his solitary death row cell. “Reading ultimately allowed me to feel empathy, to emerge from my cocoon of self-centeredness and appreciate the humanness of others. . . . It enabled me finally to appreciate the enormity of what I had done.”

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