A Life in the Balance
The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story, A Journey from Murder to Redemption Inside America's Worst Prison System
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Sentenced to death in 1965 at age twenty for an unpremeditated murder during the bungled holdup of a convenience store, Billy Wayne spent his first seven prison years on death row. When the death penalty was abolished, his sentence was life. Three-and-a-half decades later, Billy Wayne is still behind bars—feared by many politicians and prison officials for his well-known incorruptibility and unrelenting crusade for prison reform. This is his memoir.
A Life in the Balance begins with an almost unbearable account of his early years—when he was so abused by his father one wonders how he survived—and his “escape” into a crowd of hooligans, which led him to the fateful day in 1965 when he held up the convenience store. His story takes you behind the metal doors of the Angola State Penitentiary to reveal the brutal truth of life inside. Here you will meet Billy Ray, Billy Wayne’s blood brother; old Emmitt Henderson, who died of prison neglect; Jamie Parks, a seventeen-year-old kid whose fate was sealed the day he arrived in Angola; Big Mick, who ran drugs in the prison to earn money to put his handicapped sister through college; Wilbert Rideau, Billy Wayne’s coeditor on The Angolite; the Dixie Mafia; and Richard Clark Hand, the young lawyer who took on Billy Wayne’s case and has been fighting for his release for thirty years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This blistering memoir of a reformed killer, still incarcerated after more than 35 years, points to deep inequities in the correctional system in this country. After a brutal childhood, Billy Wayne aimlessly took to stealing cars and robbing convenience stores and served jail time. Then, in 1965, he killed a store owner in a botched robbery. Following a trial in which favorable witness statements were suppressed by the DA, he was initially sentenced to death. In 1972, due to the Supreme Court ruling on the unconstitutionality of the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia, his sentence was changed to life in prison. He served his first 20 years in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison, where he studied law, wrote for a groundbreaking prison newspaper (for which he won the prestigious George Polk Award), married a journalist and participated in a grievance committee that assisted in the difficult racial integration of the prison in the 1970s. Sinclair and his wife detail 1980s-era federal investigations into pardon selling, mail fraud and administrative corruption. In this dense, multilayered tale, readers may see ambiguities in Sinclair's crime and in his prison experience (he says that hadn't intended to kill the store owner during the robbery and claims that other killers were paroled while a powerful clique of friends of Sinclair's victim made sure he remained in prison). This is a powerful tale, and readers will be shaken by the sorrow, greed and corruption they encounter in it. 16 pages b & w photos not seen by PW.
