Moreese Bickham

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.

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.

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.

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.

Later that night, at approximately 2 am, Gill and Galloway arrived at Bickham's home on Villerey Street in Mandeville.

The deputies approached Bickham's front door, and fired at Bickham, striking him in the stomach.

Bickham returned fire with a shotgun.

Bickham was arrested several hours later at Baton Rouge Hospital.

Prosecutors had argued that he "lay in wait" at his home for the deputies to arrive, and then murdered them in cold blood.

An all-white jury convicted Bickham of one count of first degree murder (premeditated homicide) and sentenced him to death by electrocution.

For fourteen years, Bickham avoided execution, winning seven stays of execution.

He lived on death row in the Angola State Penitentiary, in solitary confinement 23 hours per day.

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 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.

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.

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.

In 1989, independent radio documentarian David Isay interviewed Bickham for a documentary on long-timers at Angola, entitled "Tossing Away the Keys".

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.

Alcamo pointed out that the deputies contradicted themselves in their own testimony.

If Bickham had been violent or dangerous at 11 p.m., at Buck's Place, the two deputies would have arrested Bickham at that time.

Instead, the deputies arrested Florence Spencer, Bickham's companion.

Alcamo presented the conclusion that there was no reasonable basis for Galloway and Gill to have gone to Bickham's home later, at 2:10 am, and that they had no grounds to arrest him.

Alcamo said that it could be further inferred that the two men meant to do Bickham harm.

Alcamo argued that at the least, these circumstances indicated that Bickham should have been charged with manslaughter, a lesser offense, which carried a maximum term of 25 years, or that Bickham should have been exculpated on principles of self-defense.

As a secondary position, Alcamo sought a commutation of Bickham's sentence from life without parole to 75 years.

Because local sentiment made a full pardon out of the question, Alcamo took the position that Bickham's sentence should be commuted, or reduced, to a specific term of 75 years.

This would make it possible to seek a parole date or a specific release date based on Louisiana's "good time statute," which allows a sentence to be reduced by one day for each day served on good behavior.

As part of the legal strategy, Alcamo organized a national letter-writing campaign.

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.

Bickham was freed in January 1996 through the efforts of New York City attorney Michael Alcamo.

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.