This
week brought justice at last when Gary Dobson and David Norris were finally
convicted 18 years after killing teenager Stephen Lawrence.
A catalogue
of failures in the original investigation made this a landmark case, exposing
institutional racism within the Metropolitan police.
For me it
was interesting that this case came to a head as I was reading ‘In the Place of
Justice’ by Wilbert Rideau.
The book is
a memoir of Rideau’s 44-year stint in one of America’s most violent prisons,
Angola.
He ended up
there after he killed a cashier during a botched bank robbery.
As a
19-year-old black man in 1960’s Louisiana – at a time of racial segregation,
the Klu Klux Klan and mob rule – killing a white woman made him public enemy
number one.
During his
three trials Rideau was never allowed to give a defence against his crime,
which was grossly embellished by the prosecution.
For
example, they claimed he decapitated the bank cashier. This was not true.
What he did
was terrible – after all he did take someone’s life. But while he always
admitted his crime, his enemies continually made out he was a dangerous man who
had set out to kill that day.
In reality
he was a frightened teenager who did the unthinkable in a moment of panic.
The
prosecution’s claim was later disproven but these stories – a result of anger
and bigotry by the overwhelmingly white population meant Rideau served double
the time for what he did.
After
escaping the electric chair when the state introduced a moratorium on
executions Rideau made it his life’s mission to try to put right his wrongs
while inside.
He became
the prison’s first black editor of its all-white newspaper The Angolite,
winning a plethora of journalism awards for writing exposés on life behind
bars.
But as
those guilty of similar crimes were released he continued to lose countless
appeals for clemency, despite having the support of corrections officials.
Even in the
‘90s Rideau came up against prejudice as politicians used his case to win votes
from the white population.
Rideau was
eventually freed in 2005 after a retrial found him guilty of manslaughter not
murder.
Now I don’t
think for one minute his case can be directly compared to that of Stephen
Lawrence, who was killed in an unprovoked attack. He was the victim while
Rideau’s actions put him where he was.
But I was
struck by the power of racism to interfere with justice - keeping the guilty
free and the reformed locked up.
As Doreen
Lawrence said, this week’s verdict is not a cause for celebration.
This is a
step in the right direction for the fight against racism in this country, but
both here and in the US we still have a long way to go before we can stand up
and say we are free from prejudice.
