Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Louisiana.
Wilbert Rideau is an American convicted killer and former death row inmate from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who became an author and award-winning journalist while held for 44 years at Angola Prison. Rideau was convicted in 1961 of first-degree murder of Julia Ferguson in the course of a bank robbery that year, and sentenced to death. He was held in solitary confinement on death row, pending execution. After the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that states had to rework their death penalty statutes because of constitutional concerns, the Louisiana Court judicially amended his sentence in 1972 to life in prison.
The Louisiana State Penitentiary is a maximum-security prison farm in Louisiana operated by the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections. It is named "Angola" after the former slave plantation that occupied this territory. The plantation was named after the country of Angola from which many slaves originated before arriving in Louisiana.
Antoinette Renee Frank is a former officer of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) who, on March 4, 1995, committed a violent armed robbery at a restaurant which resulted in the killing of two members of the Vietnamese-American family who ran the establishment, and fellow NOPD officer Ronald A. Williams II. She was aided by her probable lover, drug dealer Rogers Lacaze. Frank currently resides at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, the only woman on the state's death row.
Carlos Joseph Marcello ;[Mor-sel-lo] born Calogero Minacore[kaˈlɔːdʒero minaˈkɔːre]; February 6, 1910 – March 3, 1993) was an Italian-American crime boss of the New Orleans crime family from 1947 to 1983.
Joseph Harry Fowler Connick Sr. is an American attorney who served as the district attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, from 1973 to 2003. His son, Harry Connick Jr., is an American musician. Connick is also a singer, long performing a few nights a week at local clubs as a hobby.
Malik Rahim is an American housing and prison activist based since the late 1990s in the New Orleans area of Louisiana, where he grew up. In 2005 Rahim gained national publicity as a community organizer in New Orleans in 2005 to combat the widespread destruction in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; there he co-founded the Common Ground Collective.
John Ashley Brown Jr. was an American from New Orleans who was convicted of first-degree murder and incarcerated on death row in Louisiana State Penitentiary for 12 years. He was one of six inmates featured in the 1998 documentary entitled The Farm: Angola, USA. He was executed in 1997 for the murder of Omer Laughlin in New Orleans in 1984.
Chamber of Horrors is a 1966 American psychological horror film directed by Hy Averback and starring Patrick O'Neal, Cesare Danova, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Wayne Rogers and Laura Devon. The screenplay is by Stephen Kandel, from a story by Kandel and Ray Russell.
The Angola Three are three African-American former prison inmates who were held for decades in solitary confinement while imprisoned at Louisiana State Penitentiary. The latter two were indicted in April 1972 for the killing of a prison corrections officer; they were convicted in January 1974. Wallace and Woodfox served more than 40 years each in solitary, the "longest period of solitary confinement in American prison history".
Gary Tyler, from St. Rose, Louisiana, is an African-American man who is a former prisoner at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola, Louisiana. He was convicted of the October 7, 1974 shooting death of a white 13-year-old boy and the wounding of another, on a day of violent protests by whites against black students at Destrehan High School in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. He was tried as an adult and convicted of first-degree murder at age 17 by an all-white jury; he received the mandatory death sentence for that crime, according to state law. When he entered Louisiana State Prison (Angola), he was the youngest person on death row.
The New Orleans crime family or New Orlean Mafia was an Italian-American Mafia crime family based in the city of New Orleans. The family had a history of criminal activity dating back to the late nineteenth century. The family reached its height of influence under bosses Silvestro Carollo and Carlos Marcello. In the 1960s, due to Marcello’s stubborn refusal of inducting new members into the family, they dwindled down to a paltry four or five made men with hundreds of associates throughout the United States. However, the Federal Bureau of Investigation believed there were a bit over 20 made men at the time, or 20+ associates so close to Marcello and to each other, that they were considered a formal part of the New Orleans’ family hierarchy. A series of setbacks during the 1980s reduced its clout, and law enforcement dismantled most of what remained shortly after Marcello's death in 1993. In spite of this, it is believed that at least some elements of the American Mafia remain active in New Orleans today.
Nathan Burl Cain is the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections and the former warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in West Feliciana Parish, north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He worked there for twenty-one years, from January 1995 until his resignation in 2016.
Moreese Bickham was an American resident of Mandeville, Louisiana who was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death for the July 12, 1958 killing of a sheriff's deputy, reportedly a local Klan leader. In 1974, Bickham's death sentence was converted to life without parole after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia, which invalidated death penalty convictions in certain circumstances. In April, 1995, through a detailed legal challenge to Bickham's 1958 conviction, the Governor of Louisiana consented to commute Bickham's sentence to 75 years. Several months later, Bickham's attorney won a full release, and Bickham left Angola State Penitentiary in January, 1996, after 37 1/2 years in prison. Bickham lived the rest of his life in California, and in April 2016, died in hospice care in Alameda, California after a short illness, at the age of 98.
Belton O'Neal Compton Jr. was an American actor and director.
Ivory Brandon Harris, known as B-Stupid, is a gangster from New Orleans, Louisiana, United States who gained notoriety when police accused him of committing murders in Houston and New Orleans. After a 2006 arrest and 2007 plea deal, he is in a Federal Bureau of Prisons prison as of 2008.
On the morning of September 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), ostensibly responding to a call from an officer under fire, shot and killed two civilians at the Danziger Bridge: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other civilians were wounded. All the victims were African-American. None were armed or had committed any crime. Madison, a mentally disabled man, was shot in the back. The shootings caused public anger and further eroded the community's trust had in the NOPD and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina overall.
Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW) is a prison for women with its permanent pre-2016 facility located in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. It is the only female correctional facility of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Elayn Hunt Correctional Center is immediately west of LCIW. LCIW includes the state's female death row. As of 2017 the prison has temporarily moved due to flooding that occurred in August 2016, and its prisoners are housed in other prisons. The administration is temporarily located in the former Jetson Youth Center near Baker. By 2021 the Baker area address was given for the prison on the LCIW website.
Billy Wayne Sinclair is a former prisoner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, convicted of first-degree murder and originally sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life in 1972. He became a notable journalist, known from 1978 for co-editing The Angolite with Wilbert Rideau; together they won some national journalism awards at the magazine, and were nominated for others. It published articles written by inmates at the prison.
Robert Hillary King, also known as Robert King Wilkerson, is an American known as one of the Angola Three, former prisoners who were held at Louisiana State Penitentiary in solitary confinement for decades after being convicted in 1973 of prison murders.