Wilbert Rideau - Legal History of The Case

Legal History of The Case

Rideau’s criminal case, which dates from the pre-Civil Rights era, is widely studied in law schools for the landmark decision made by the United States Supreme Court concerning pretrial publicity. The Court overturned Rideau’s 1961 conviction because the local television station, together with local law enforcement officials, filmed an “interview” with the teenaged Rideau and repeatedly broadcast it, resulting in what the Court called “Kangaroo Court proceedings.” Rideau was retried in 1964 and 1970; each of those convictions was also overturned because of constitutional violations. He won a new trial after 40 years incarceration because people of color were excluded from the 1961 grand jury that indicted him on the murder charges.

Rideau’s trials and convictions split the Lake Charles, Louisiana, community along racial lines for four decades, even to the fourth and final trial in 2005, when white spectators sat behind the prosecutor’s table and those seated behind the defense were primarily black.

Rideau had always admitted robbing the bank, fleeing with the employees, and killing one of them. The final trial pitted the prosecution’s 40-year-old version of events, which held that Rideau lined up his victims before shooting them and that Ferguson begged for her life, against the defense’s contention that Rideau reacted impulsively - first, when a phone call interrupted the robbery, and then when employee turned hostage Dora McCain jumped from the get-away car and ran and the other two employees followed suit, and that the killing was done in panic rather than premeditatively. The defense successfully challenged elements in the prosecution’s version to the satisfaction of the jury.