Moreese Bickham

Burl Cain, the Angola prison warden, resigned from his post in 2015 after pressure arose over his business dealings with relatives of inmates. Over a period of several years, Cain had entered into business partnerships with two men who had close ties with state inmates. Cain was trying to develop a subdivision in West Feliciana Parish, about 30 miles from Angola. He transacted with two businessmen, one the stepfather of a double-murderer and the other a friend of a killer who helped underwrite the convict's appeals.

In 2001, Edwin Edwards, the Louisiana Governor who commuted Bickham's sentence, was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. In 2010, Bickham wrote to President Barack Obama to ask the President to release Edwards a year early, but the request was not granted.

The Louisiana Department of Corrections agreed with this analysis. At 12:01 am on January 10, 1996, Alcamo was accompanied by journalist David Isay, and escorted Bickham from the prison. Bickham was thus a free man, not subject to parole.

Alcamo then immediately requested a hearing for a release on parole, for which an inmate is eligible after having served a third of his sentence. However, despite the passage of 37 years, the parole hearing drew massive news coverage and local protests. In April 1995, after a highly contentious hearing at the Louisiana State Parole Board, Bickham's request for parole was denied.

In August 1994, New York corporate lawyer Michael Alcamo accepted Bickham's case pro bono. Working with 35-year-old trial transcripts and newspaper clippings, Alcamo investigated the circumstances of the conviction. He began to present the case to Louisiana authorities that Bickham had been wrongfully convicted.

As part of the legal strategy, Alcamo organized a national letter-writing campaign. Through 1994, working from a corporate law office in Manhattan, Alcamo focused public attention on the case, arranging radio interviews on public radio stations in New York City and Chicago. Twice, Bickham was able to join a radio program with his family members, speaking with them for the first time in decades. Finally, in January 1995, Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards granted the request for a sentence reduction to 75 years.

In 1972, after the U.S. Supreme Court determined that death sentences applied in certain ways were unconstitutional, states across the South converted numerous death sentences to life without parole, before the sentences could be challenged by inmates. As part of this pattern, the State of Louisiana in 1974 converted Moreese Bickham's sentence to life without parole. Bickham was at that time released into the general prison population in Angola.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Bickham worked in a variety of capacities at Angola. He assisted in the visitors' center, maintained a garden in the prison cemetery, learned leather-making, and he became ordained as a minister in the Methodist faith. In 1989, independent radio documentarian David Isay interviewed Bickham for a documentary on long-timers at Angola, entitled "Tossing Away the Keys". Bickham was freed in January 1996 through the efforts of New York City attorney Michael Alcamo.

In 1958, Bickham lived in Mandeville, Louisiana, a town north of New Orleans. According to trial transcripts, at around 11 pm on the evening of July 12, 1958, Bickham became drawn into an argument with two sheriff's deputies in a bar called "Buck's Place" in Mandeville. At trial, prosecutors submitted evidence that Bickham's girlfriend, Florence Spencer, had been "acting unruly." At approximately 11 pm the two deputies—Gus Gill, 68, and Jake Galloway, 74—drove Spencer home. The deputies wore street clothes, and many in the community reported that they believed the two deputies were associated with the Ku Klux Klan, something not unusual for law enforcement personnel in a small, rural town in 1958 Louisiana.

Moreese Bickham (June 6, 1917 – April 2, 2016) 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 died in hospice care in Alameda, California after a short illness, at the age of 98.

Born in 1917, the grandson of enslaved Africans, Bickham lived most of his life in Mississippi and Louisiana. He served in the United States Navy in World War II, stationed at Pearl Harbor.