Abstract
In 1961, nineteen-year-old African-American Wilbert Rideau was sentenced to death for the murder of Julia Ferguson, a white bank teller in Lake Charles, Louisiana, In a succession of trials, three all-white juries sentenced him to death. The sentence was commuted to life in 1972, after the US Supreme Court temporarily halted executions. In December 2000, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rideau had 'established a prima facie case of racial discrimination in the process used to select the grand jury that indicted him'. It ordered his conviction be 'reversed' and the 1961 indictment 'quashed'. He remains in prison.