Wilbert Rideau (born February 13, 1942) is an American convicted killer and former death row inmate from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who became an author and award-winning journalist while held for 44 years at Angola Prison.

Rideau was convicted in 1961 of first-degree murder of Julia Ferguson in the course of a bank robbery that year, and sentenced to death.

[3][4] Before Rideau was arraigned, a local television news station, KPLC-TV, filmed his being interviewed by the parish sheriff at the jail.

Rideau responded to leading questions and admitted to killing teller Julia Ferguson in the course of a robbery.

This material was broadcast three times in Calcasieu Parish, exposing a large part of the population to the interview and confession before Rideau was arraigned or taken to trial.

[citation needed] The defense requested a change of venue because of possible influence of the broadcast on potential jury members, which the court denied.

The jury included "two deputy sheriffs, a cousin of the dead victim and a bank vice president who knew the wounded manager".

The District Attorney of Calcasieu Parish, Frank Salter, Jr., reindicted Rideau for the killing of Ferguson.

After another appeal, based on the exclusion of blacks from the grand jury that had indicted him in 1970, despite passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s to end racial discrimination, Rideau's last conviction was vacated.

In 1972 the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that state laws for the death penalty were unconstitutional as currently written.

States were ordered to judicially amend death sentences to the next level of severity, generally life imprisonment.

)[8] The Lake Charles, Louisiana, community divided largely along racial lines for four decades over the Rideau case.

The prosecution held that Rideau used premeditation to line up his victims before shooting them, and that Ferguson had begged for her life.

The defense said that Rideau had panicked and reacted impulsively - first, when a phone call interrupted the robbery, and then when hostage Dora McCain jumped from the get-away car and ran, followed by the other two employees.

[16] In 1979, Rideau and co-editor Billy Sinclair won the George Polk Award for the articles "The Other Side of Murder" and "Prison: The Sexual Jungle".

[2] Rideau was permitted to travel the state accompanied only by an unarmed guard to lecture about the prison newspaper.

[20][clarification needed] Rideau and co-editor Ron Wikberg were named "Person of the Week" for their journalism on Peter Jennings's World News Tonight in August 1992.

[22] After being released, Rideau wrote In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance (2010), recalling his experiences in Angola.

[24] With Ron Wikberg, associate editor,[22] Rideau edited The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana (1991), used as a textbook.

This textbook was a compilation of magazine and newspaper articles, and papers from the Center for Criminal Justice Research of University of Southwestern Louisiana.

[25] Rideau and Wikberg collaborated on the book with Professor Burk Foster of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Rideau and Wikberg also collaborated on Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars, a 1992 anthology of articles from The Angolite.

Rideau was credited for his work with them on the film; he was also among the six men featured in the documentary, which has won numerous awards.

An investigation by 20/20 revealed statements by Governor of Louisiana Edwin Edwards, who said that he believed that Rideau was rehabilitated, but that he would not release him "under any circumstances'.

In December 2000, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans threw out Rideau's 1970 murder conviction, based on grounds of racial discrimination in the grand jury process in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, which had indicted him.

To the surprise of many outside the area, the Calcasieu Parish prosecutor decided to try Rideau for a fourth time for first-degree murder.

[35] The Louisiana Court of Appeals stated: In 2008 Rideau married Linda LaBranche, a former college professor who had become one of his supporters years before.

In 2009, he co-directed and was included in the documentary The Farm: 10 Down (2009), Jonathan Stack's follow-up to the survivors among the six men he had featured in his earlier film on Angola.

[37] In April of that year, he was invited to the Roosevelt Hotel to receive the George Polk Award for journalism and give a long overdue speech.

He had won the journalism award in 1980 for a series of essays titled The Sexual Jungle, which he published in The Angolite when he was still in prison.