Billy Wayne Sinclair spent seven years on death row, over thirty-five years behind bars. Every day of his life he is in danger of being murdered for exposing corruption both in the prison system and in the statehouse of Louisiana. 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 commuted to 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. It 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 convienence story. His unvarnished story takes you behind the metal doors of the Angola State Penitentiary--and other Louisiana prisons--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 Agngolite; 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. Written in collaboration with his wife, Jodie, A Life in the Balance will leave you shaken and upset. And as Assistant Sheriff of the city and county of San Francisco, Michael Marcum, noted after reading the manuscript, it will doubtless also leave you ""outraged . and ashamed of the criminal justice system."".