Walking outside the prison gates for the first time in nearly 40 years, Moreese "Pop" Bickham picked up a handful of dirt and kissed it.
"I'm glad to see my friends on the outside, but I hate to leave my friends on the inside," the 78-year-old inmate said after being released from the Louisiana State Penitentiary early Wednesday.Bickham was convicted in 1958 in the shooting deaths of two white policemen he said were Ku Klux Klansmen trying to kill him.
He spent 14 years and 10 months on death row, during which time he received seven stays of execution. In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out his death sentence, which was commuted to life imprisonment.
Last March, Gov. Edwin Edwards cut Bickham's sentence to 75 years. Because of time off for good behavior and other sentence reductions, Bickham became eligible for parole Wednesday. He was a free man as of 12:04 a.m.
At an informal prison reception before his release, Bickham expressed remorse about killing the two officers and apologized to their families.
"I'm really sorry. . . . If I could, I'd give my life to bring them back. I hope they forgive me," he said.
Since his arrest, Bickham has maintained that he killed officers Gus Gill and Jake Galloway on July 12, 1958, in self-defense. He said they were Ku Klux Klansmen and that they had told him they were going to "get him." They showed up with guns and shot him in the chest, but he managed to kill them both. Gill and Galloway were members of the police force in Mandeville.
In those days, blacks who shot whites had little chance of beating a murder charge. Bickham was convicted and sentenced to die.
His cause was taken up in a 1990 documentary, "Tossing Away The Keys," and last year, his case was included in a new book, "Holding On," by David Isay and Harvey Wang.
"The trial transcript is an eerie read," they wrote. "The prosecution's case against Bickham only seems to bolster his claims of self-defense. It seems that in pre-civil rights Louisiana, self-defense was not an acceptable claim for a black man accused of killing two white law enforcement officers."