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We have documented his story, most recently on January 24, 2005, when Rideau was released from a Louisiana prison after his 1962 conviction for murdering a Lake Charles bank teller was changed to manslaughter. (Rideau originally was sentenced to death.) The African-American Rideau gained fame as "the most rehabilitated prisoner in America" for editing the National Magazine Award- nominated Angolite and co-producing/co-directing the Academy Award- nominated documentary The Farm: Angola USA while incarcerated, and while no one condones his crime, the fact is that no one else in Louisiana--black or white--ever served such a long sentence for an equivalent felony. "Wilbert [was mistreated] in part because he's black and in part because he's Wilbert Rideau," says Loyola University (New Orleans) law professor Linda LaBranche, who worked to get him freed through the Twomey Center Rideau Project. "The power structure in Louisiana has always resented Wilbert for not being the horrid person they wanted him to be."