[lbo-talk] Dean: hang 'em high!

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue Jun 17 16:27:23 PDT 2003


On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Doug Henwood wrote:


> And how is imprisoning someone for life any less brutal?

Apropos, some reflections from today's NYT:

New York Times June 17, 2003

When Forever Is Far Too Long

By DANIEL BERGNER

W ilbert Rideau's résumé reads like this: named "Person of the Week"

by ABC News; called "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America" by

Life magazine; co-directed documentary film nominated for an Academy

Award; given the George Polk Award, one of the highest honors in

journalism. Mr. Rideau is 61. Guilty of a brutal killing committed in

the aftermath of a hapless bank robbery, he has served 42 years for

that crime. Unless a current legal fight a revealing and

truth-distorting struggle turns his way, he will stay locked up until

he dies.

Mr. Rideau's story is both unique and symbolic. Across the country, at

least 31,000 state and federal inmates are serving terms of natural

life. That means they have been put away forever, without opportunity

for parole. Except in the most unusual circumstances, we need never

think of them again. And though national support for capital

punishment may be softening, this does not mean that fewer people will

be sentenced to die in prison. A decade ago, according to the Criminal

Justice Institute, the number of natural lifers was about 12,000.

Then, 31 states had adopted the sentence; now, 46 have chosen the

safety of permanence and the luxury of not thinking.

Mr. Rideau, convicted in Louisiana, a state that pioneered

life-without-parole terms back in the 1970's, is a reminder that

thought is always necessary. Like the great majority of the 31,000

inmates a few locked away for minor repeat felonies but most for

murder, rape or robbery he has no claim to innocence. Some details are

in dispute but, granting the prosecution's version of what took place

on Feb. 16, 1961, Mr. Rideau shot one teller in the shoulder and neck,

then ended her life by driving a hunting knife into her chest as she

pleaded for his mercy. He also shot another teller and a bank manager.

The manager fled. The second teller survived only because Mr. Rideau

believed he had killed her.

He was sentenced to execution. When the Supreme Court's ruling in

Furman v. Georgia emptied the nation's death rows temporarily in the

early 1970's, his term was commuted to life. But by the end of that

decade, Louisiana remade its sentencing laws and made up for Furman's

attack on certainty and severity: all lifers became natural lifers.

For a long while now, Louisiana has been a leader in the use of

forever. But the rest of the country is catching up.

Yet Mr. Rideau, even as he spent his first years of incarceration

waiting to die, wasn't abiding by any vision of permanence. A

ninth-grade dropout, he taught himself on death row at the Louisiana

State Penitentiary at Angola. He read all he could, from the Bible he

was allowed to the political biographies he had smuggled in. He later

became co-editor of The Angolite, the convict-run prison publication,

which has, under his leadership, been a finalist for the National

Magazine Award seven times. His book of essays has been praised by

Russell Banks in The New York Times Book Review. Because of his

near-perfect disciplinary record, he's been allowed to travel, not

only around the state to speak with groups like the Boy Scouts, but to

Washington to address the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Promises of jobs in journalism await him if he ever gets out. And past

Louisiana prison officials believe he is a threat to no one and

deserves release. "Whatever standard of rehabilitation you pick," C.

Paul Phelps, former state secretary of corrections, once said,

"Wilbert Rideau exceeds it." In 42 years, he has apparently had just a

single infraction, the possession of one contraband item: a bottle of

Wite-Out.

But to think back to the woman he murdered, and to her wounded

colleagues, is to know that there is nothing easy about his case or

about those of the country's other natural-life inmates. The nascent

shift in perspective on capital punishment has come, for the most

part, through easy moral reckoning, through proof that mistakes have

been made and that innocent people have been sentenced to the

irrevocable punishment of execution. Any argument against natural-life

terms, on the other hand, must rely not on the chance of innocence but

on the possibility of rehabilitation despite the hard fact of guilt.

Does the ideal of personal transformation however infrequently it may

be achieved remain a fundamental value of our society when it comes to

criminal justice? The ugly contortions in Mr. Rideau's current legal

battle suggest that the ideal may not matter at all. Partly because

racial bias infected the selection of his juries (Mr. Rideau is black,

his victims white), his conviction has been reversed three times over

the years and he now faces a fourth retrial. At this point, the

district attorney could offer a pragmatic bargain: plead guilty to a

lesser charge for a sentence of time served.

But, understandably, the second teller Mr. Rideau shot wants him in

prison forever and, whether following her lead or political winds, the

district attorney has railed that Mr. Rideau is "evil" and has

promised to make sure he never sees a day of freedom. And Mr. Rideau,

who has long admitted his guilt and spoken of "the inadequacy" of

words like regret and sorry, now prepares to abandon his confessions

and declare his innocence at trial. The simple dignity of truth, the

ennobling power of honesty, and the redemptive possibilities of

remorse have been lost, and both prosecutor and defendant have been

twisted into inhuman shapes by a law that rules out the human capacity

for change.

In the rest of the Western world, the desires for retribution and

permanence so compelling when one sees through a victim's eyes do not

drive legal policy as they do in the United States. The European Court

of Human Rights has suggested that to deny lifers the consideration of

change and the chance of parole is "inhuman and degrading," and of the

Western European nations, only England does. It has all of about 20

such prisoners.

Like our use of the death penalty, our embrace of the natural-life

sentence is seen as alien by almost all the countries that share our

culture and legal heritage. (Tellingly, death penalty opponents in the

United States have been vocal advocates of life without parole, as

though to supply a substitute answer to the acute American need for

vengeance and finality.)

Were we to do away with the natural-life sentence, 31,000 convicts

would not come flooding out from penitentiaries. Most, depending on

how laws were rewritten, would have mandatory minimums of decades to

serve before they could be even considered for parole. And most would

be turned down, periodically, forever. But rightly, some like Wilbert

Rideau a ruthless and ignorant killer at 19; a deeply wrinkled, deeply

educated, deeply self-restrained 61-year-old now would win a second

chance at freedom.

Some years ago, when I first met Mr. Rideau as I wrote a book about

Angola's natural lifers, I also met a slight, smooth-skinned inmate

named Danny Causey. After an education that ended around the fourth

grade and a childhood in and out of juvenile homes, he was, at the age

of 20, in his first days of an endless sentence. He'd killed a fellow

drug dealer, then spent two weeks at his mother's house until his

arrest. When I asked why he hadn't fled to another city or state, he

answered in his small voice, "I wouldn't have known where I was

supposed to go unless someone gave me a map."

The odds may not be great, but perhaps, over the coming decades, Danny

Causey will find a map, one that guides him not in flight but in

self-transformation. Perhaps, by some mixture of personal will, prison

programs and sheer luck, he will be an utterly different man at the

age of 61. Shouldn't we, then, so many years hence, affirm the

spectacular changes we as human beings can sometimes accomplish?

Shouldn't we give him the chance Mr. Rideau may never have, to take

his first steps back into society?

Daniel Bergner is author of "God of the Rodeo: The Quest for

Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison" and of the forthcoming "In

the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West

Africa."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company



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