Billy Sinclair

Billy Wayne Sinclair (born 1945) is a former prisoner at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola), 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.

In 1987 Sinclair cooperated in a federal investigation at the prison of pardons-for-sale during the administration of Governor Edwin Edwards. No charges were made against Edwards but Howard Marcellus, head of the pardon board under the Edwards administration, was convicted of bribery following a state investigation. Sinclair was incarcerated from December 11, 1965 to April 21, 2006, a 40-year span.

In 1978 Sinclair became a co-editor with Wilbert Rideau of The Angolite, a prisoner-edited and published newsmagazine. Rideau and Sinclair became famous for their work and won numerous awards for reporting. Neither Rideau nor Sinclair had gone beyond the ninth grade in their formal educations before their arrests and incarcerations as young men; they had become self-taught in the prison, especially through reading widely.

In 1979, Rideau and Sinclair won the George Polk Award. In addition, the magazine won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award.

On March 17, 1981, Jodie Bell, a television reporter for WAFB-TV of Baton Rouge, interviewed Sinclair. Sinclair and Bell gradually developed a relationship, While Sinclair was incarcerated, Jodie Bell Sinclair maintained his website. The federal investigation did not result in an indictment of Edwards. But a parallel state investigation resulted in bribery charges against Howard Marcellus, who was the head of the pardon board under the Edwards administration. Marcellus was convicted of bribery.

By 1989, Sinclair filed a $100,000 ($ in today's money) federal lawsuit against Rideau, concerning the textbook The Wall Is Strong: Corrections in Louisiana, a University of Southwestern Louisiana compilation of magazine and newspaper articles and papers from the Center for Criminal Justice Research of the university. Rideau edited the book, and about half of the book's articles had first been published in The Angolite.

Sinclair said that C. Paul Phelps, then the director of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety & Corrections, and Wilbert Rideau were the most vocal of a group of journalists and officials who had opposed his release. Sinclair was moved to the Louisiana State Police Barracks, and later, to the N-5 Special Management Unit cell block in the David Wade Correctional Center because of the stigma against "snitches" in prison.

In 1987 Rideau said that he felt "betrayed" by Sinclair's actions and that The Angolite s credibility suffered with its readers. Sinclair said that a journalist agency in a prison could not operate like one in the free world. Sinclair and his wife live in Bandera, Texas. Sinclair works as a paralegal for attorney John T. Floyd.