LAKE CHARLES, La. — An award-winning black journalist who was convicted of murder three times by all-white juries in the 1961 death of a bank teller was found guilty of manslaughter Saturday by a racially mixed jury.
Wilbert Rideau, a confessed killer who gained fame for exposes of harsh Louisiana prison life, won his freedom after 44 years in Louisiana prisons. A manslaughter conviction allows his release for time already served.
Rideau, who escaped death row in the 1970s when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed then-existing death penalty laws, has had three previous convictions for the death of Julia Ferguson, a white bank teller. The convictions were overturned on appeal.
Rideau, who was 19 at the time of Ferguson's death, never denied killing her. His lawyers contended he panicked after a botched bank robbery and stabbed her impulsively amid Louisiana's 1960s-era climate of racial hostility.
In his fourth trial, Rideau's lawyers sought a manslaughter verdict, a strategy that won his freedom. Prosecutors wanted the jury to find him guilty of murder to ensure Rideau would end his days in jail, barring a pardon.
Shortly before the jury was handed the case, Rideau's attorney Julian Murray suggested that racism had distorted the crime, keeping local passions inflamed.
"You have to understand that time, and then it comes together," Murray said. "You think they would hesitate to exaggerate the facts of the case, to get the result they wanted?"
Ferguson's stabbing on a lonely rural road on Feb. 16, 1961 was "a terrible act, a criminal act, one for which he deserves great punishment but not one for which he deserves to be locked up for the rest of his life," Murray said. "He did a terrible thing, but it wasn't murder."
Prosecutors derided Rideau's contention that he acted in confusion. The crime was deliberate and coldly executed.
"I thought the most interesting part of his entire story was, 'I didn't murder her, I killed her,' " Calcasieu Parish District Attorney Rick Bryant said in his closing argument, adding that it was "a distinction without a distinction."
"The passage of time has made him older and hopefully wiser, but it certainly has not made him less guilty," Bryant told the jury Saturday. "Time and age do not give you innocence."
Two governors have turned him down for pardons, under strong pressure from citizens here, despite repeated board recommendations that he be released. In 2000, a federal appeals court said his original 1961 indictment was flawed because blacks had been excluded from the grand jury.
Rideau was a nearly illiterate janitor when he held up the bank in 1961. He became a self-educated writer in prison and helped transform The Angolite into a nationally acclaimed magazine dealing with the criminal justice system.
He also co-directed "The Farm," a prison documentary that was nominated for an Oscar in 1999, and wrote and narrated an award-winning National Public Radio documentary.