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Thread: Florida Capital Punishment History

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Florida Capital Punishment History

    September 25, 1999

    The story of Old Sparky

    By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG
    The St. Petersburg Times

    It has inspired late-night jokes about sizzling bacon and T-shirts declaring "Only Sissies Use Injections."

    It has endured lawsuits, constant criticism and even the visual impact of gruesome photos of Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis moments after he was electrocuted in July.

    And now, once again, Florida's electric chair -- one of the most colorful and notorious execution devices in U.S. history -- has survived another challenge before the Florida Supreme Court.

    Robert Snyder, a professor of American Studies at the University of South Florida, credits the chair's longevity to "a kind of frontier, eye-for-an-eye mentality in Florida." Its staying power, he says, "is a testament to people who want to protect old ways."

    The electric chair was born in the 1880s, an outgrowth of a marketing battle between electricity titans George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison. It had an odd coterie of pro- and anti-death-penalty supporters who saw it as a quick, more humane alternative to public hangings.

    "The electric chair was seen as a technological miracle," said Craig Brandon, author of The Electric Chair. "It seemed like magic."

    But there was no magic when New York became the first state to use the chair, putting William Kemmler to death on Aug. 6, 1890. Witnesses said the convicted wife-killer smoked and bled, and they reported smelling charred flesh.

    "They could have done better with an axe," Westinghouse ruefully acknowledged.

    Amid rising homicide rates and a growing public demand for law and order, the chair's popularity grew. Fourteen states were already using it when Florida sheriffs, tired of presiding over hangings, persuaded the Legislature to replace the noose with a chair in 1923. A death chamber was built at the prison in Raiford.

    Dr. Ralph Greene Sr. of Jacksonville, a state health official, later said he devised the chair and built the head electrode like a "helmet . . . with felt, mesh wire and straps." It featured homemade accessories, such as a leg electrode made from an old Army boot and some roofing copper, and was wired by Westinghouse.

    Although prison officials boasted that inmates cut down an oak tree and constructed it for free in Raiford's sawmill and carpentry shops, the Jacksonville Journal reported it was made at Cook's Cabinet Shop on Newman Street in Jacksonville.

    Frank Johnson became the first to die in the new chair. On Oct. 7, 1924, the Duval County man, convicted of killing a railroad engineer for his watch and $100 cash, was electrocuted before 12 witnesses.

    The chair quickly earned the names "Old Sparky" and "Old Smokey," and for the next few decades, about five inmates a year were electrocuted.

    The job of pulling the switch fell to the sheriff in the county where the crime had been committed. But when Jim Williams was condemned for killing his wife in 1926, Sheriff J.C. Blith asked two deputies to do the job. Both refused.

    For 10 minutes, Williams sat strapped in while Blith and a deputy argued. The sheriff finally ordered Williams back to his cell. Some years later, he was pardoned after he jumped off a prison truck and saved a woman and her baby from a mad bull.

    One of the most famous people to die in the chair was Giuseppe "Joseph" Zangara. He fatally wounded Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak during an attempt to assassinate President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami.

    "I'm not afraid of the chair," said Zangara, who hurled invectives at "capitalists" before Dade Sheriff Dan Hardie pulled the switch on March 20, 1933. "See?"

    There has always been something "eerily medieval" about electrocutions in Florida and elsewhere, author Brandon noted. As the condemned walks down a 40-foot corridor to the Florida death house, the warden and guards follow silently.

    A black-hooded executioner was added in 1941, replacing the sheriffs. The Legislature authorized a fee of $150 per execution and agreed that his identity would be kept secret.

    By 1945, the chair had lost its magic in at least one state, North Carolina, which switched to lethal gas. But in Florida, where vomit bags were sometimes issued to the official witnesses, some office-holders pushed to make Old Sparky more public.

    Sen. Charles E. Johns of Starke proposed a portable chair, to be transported by truck with an electric generator and set up in a jail or a courthouse where the convicted was sentenced -- much as in the days of public hangings.

    The proposal failed, but the chair's continuing popularity spoke to Floridians' basic fears about crime and revealed much about the South's vigilante tradition, said professor Snyder.

    "There's always been a sense in Florida that if you feel you have been victimized, you have an obligation to protect your honor by avenging what has taken place," Snyder said. "A sort of bestial spirit resides deep within the heart of people in Florida. When it comes to meting out punishment, this naturally translates into continuing use of one of the more brutal, callous ways of legally executing a person."

    By the early 1960s, the nation's death-penalty laws were under attack by critics who contended that capital punishment was meted out in an arbitrary way. In Florida, defense attorneys produced statistics showing that two-thirds of the 196 men executed in the chair were black, and for 15 years the Florida chair went unused.

    In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, ruling that it had been applied unfairly. Florida and other states rushed to rewrite less-arbitrary laws.

    When the court upheld them four years later, Oklahoma became the first state to switch to lethal injection. Texas, worried about the possibility of a televised death in the electric chair, followed suit and became the first state to use the method in 1982.

    But Florida was determined to keep Old Sparky and its time-honored death rituals.

    The first to die when executions resumed in Florida was John Spenkelink, a white man condemned for murdering his roommate in a Tallahassee motel.

    In vain, Spenkelink's lawyers -- among them David Kendall, who later became President Clinton's private attorney -- argued that the electric chair was "unnecessarily torturous and wantonly cruel."

    On May 25, 1979, Spenkelink, 30, was given two shots of whiskey, then executed in front of 32 witnesses, including 10 reporters.

    It took three jolts to kill him. But because the venetian blinds separating the witness section from the death chamber were closed until Spenkelink was strapped in, witnesses did not get a good look. Spenkelink had straps drawn tightly across his mouth and was denied a final statement by prison officials.

    After the execution, rumors spread that a fighting, shouting Spenkelink had been dragged to the chair, gagged and beaten, so officials decided to leave the blinds open the next time. And after Spenkelink's body was exhumed for an autopsy, the state decided to perform autopsies on all executed inmates, a job that fell to William Hamilton, the Gainesville-area medical examiner.

    Hamilton's reports on electrocuted inmates gave ammunition to critics of the chair. Though he has consistently maintained that the jolt of electricity causes nearly instant and painless death, his autopsy photographs depicting burned inmates have been used by scientists as evidence of the mutilating effects of electricity.

    What's more, new research into the way the human brain processes pain began to accumulate. It suggested that because the skull insulates the brain from an electric current, some inmates might experience a slow motion death of boiling body parts, paralyzing muscle contractions and intense pain.

    By 1986, 19 capital-punishment states had switched to lethal injection. Florida's chair, meantime, became the nation's busiest instrument of death, with the most prisoners in line for execution.

    In an age of guns, gore and drugs, office-seekers hoping to prove they were tough on crime used images of Old Sparky in political ads. Sometimes, they invoked the name of Ted Bundy, the serial killer who abducted, raped and murdered women in a cross-country carnage.

    During his campaign for governor in 1986, for example, Tampa Mayor Bob Martinez vowed that if he was elected, "Florida's electric bill will go up." Two years after he was sworn in, he signed Bundy's warrant, and on Jan. 24, 1989, Bundy went to his death.

    In the years that followed, executions increasingly took on entertainment value as David Letterman and Jay Leno cracked jokes about the chair. Time magazine listed it as a big winner of the 1994 elections.

    Seventeen months after Bundy's execution, witness accounts of flames shooting from the head of convicted cop killer Jesse Tafero made headlines around the world. For four minutes, Tafero, 43, clenched his fists, convulsed and appeared to breathe deeply as smoke and sparks shot out of his death mask.

    State-hired experts blamed a sponge in his headpiece that didn't properly conduct electricity. But a former maker of electric chairs said the chair's aging electrodes caused Tafero to be burned alive.

    Two federal judges ruled that Tafero's death wasn't unconstitutionally cruel. But after a botched execution in Virginia in 1993, three U.S. Supreme Court justices hinted that old court decisions might no longer apply in light of modern evidence of electrocution's effect on the body.

    The debate over Old Sparky stalled Florida's execution engine. In 1996, the Office of Capital Collateral Representative, which represents death row inmates, turned up the pressure by filing a court motion to have the execution of John Bush videotaped.

    When the court refused, chair opponents began collecting autopsy data and amassing affidavits from anti-chair scientists.

    Then, on March 25, 1997, flames leaped from the death cap of Pedro Medina. Again, a sponge was blamed.

    Medina's execution led to the fiercest battle yet about the old killer. The Florida Supreme Court put executions on hold as courts held new hearings.

    Ultimately, the court cleared the chair in a 4-3 decision, but dissenting justices likened it to a time capsule from another age and electrocution to a contemporary burning at the stake, a Frankenstein-like spectacle.

    The justices and an independent commission again urged lawmakers to switch to lethal injection. But again, the Legislature voted to retain the chair, 36-0 in the Senate and 103-6 in the House.

    The decision came despite two 1997 polls suggesting Floridians were ready to banish Old Sparky, and last year, the Legislature passed a bill authorizing lethal injection -- but only if the courts were to retire the chair.

    Lawton Chiles presided over 17 executions during his two terms as governor in the 1990s, including that of Judi Buenoano, 54, the only woman ever electrocuted in Florida (she poisoned her husbands), and Leo Jones, 47, who challenged the constitutionality of the chair and convinced many observers that he might have been innocent.

    With each death came more controversy, more court briefs.

    Kentucky and Tennessee switched to lethal injection, making Old Sparky a true rarity. Only three other states -- Georgia, Alabama and Nebraska, which has a moratorium on capital punishment pending a review -- still relied solely on electrocution by the end of 1998.

    Earlier this year, corrections officials decided that Old Sparky, whose wood was cracking, needed to be replaced. They worried it might break under the strain of Allen Davis' 344-pound frame.

    They paid $706.40 for the red oak lumber to build a new chair, which has an adjustable headrest and a higher seat that prison officials said would be "more accommodating" to bigger inmates. But the electrical components, dating back to 1961, remained the same.

    During Davis' execution on July 8, some witnesses gasped as blood flowed from under his death mask and soaked his white shirt. Gov. Jeb Bush attributed it to a minor nosebleed, and legislative leaders vowed to continue using the chair. But the Florida Supreme Court postponed the execution of Thomas Provenzano the next day and ordered another hearing.

    Later that month, scientists faced off in an Orlando courtroom to debate whether Davis, 54, condemned for murdering a Jacksonville woman and her two daughters, had suffered pain.

    Key to the debate were photographs of Davis taken moments after his death. In the pictures, the first ever released of an electrocution, Davis' face is contorted and purple. His nose appears to be crushed by the leather chin and mouthstraps that tied him to the chair.

    Retired Circuit Judge Clarence Johnson ruled that the thick brown mouthstrap might have caused Davis some discomfort but that the chair's electrical circuitry functioned as intended.

    Later, however, when the seven Supreme Court justices looked at the pictures, some were stunned.

    "Can you hold that picture up to the people of the state and say this is what we want to do?" Justice Harry Lee Anstead asked Richard Martell, Florida's chief lawyer for death-penalty appeals.

    On Friday, Anstead was in the minority as once again the court upheld the constitutionality of the chair.

    And at Florida State Prison, officials continued making preparations for the executions next month of two more inmates.

    http://www.sptimes.com/News/92599/ne...Old_Spar.shtml

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    Executions in Suwannee were swift, sometimes gruesome

    If James Lindsey Howze and Lonnie Robert Munn are convicted and sentenced to death for the triple homicide of which they stand accused, they will be the only Suwannee County men on Florida's death row. They would not, however, be the first convicted Suwannee County murderers to die for their crimes.

    Florida began using the electric chair to execute inmates in 1924. In the years prior, all executions in Florida were performed in the county seat where the conviction had taken place. The county's sheriff served as the hangman. Death row records compiled by noted Georgia defense attorney Kenneth Driggs show 8 confirmed hanging executions in Suwannee County between 1878 and 1903.

    Few details are available about the 1878 hangings, except that the condemned men were Samuel Godwin and Morgan Patrick, who were both hanged on September 17, 1878 for the shooting death of Mathew Boseman on May 28, 1877 in Lafayette County.

    More information is available on the later executions, however, thanks to the efforts of Suwannee County historian Eric Musgrove.

    Kelly Stewart was executed in Live Oak on July 31, 1890 for the December 12, 1888 shooting death of John Hawkins. Records indicate the 2 were arguing just prior to the incident. The trial and execution were delayed, not for legal reasons, but because of a yellow fever outbreak in the county.

    In 1895, three men were executed in Suwannee County for the murder of Alfred Ryeberg. The three were workers on a freight train and had agreed to slip Ryeberg aboard, if he would pay them 30 cents. They later demanded his watch as well and when he refused, Ryeberg was stabbed and clubbed repeatedly. His was thrown from the train near McAlpin, but survived long enough to identify his killers.

    Henry Brown was the 1st to be executed for the Ryeberg murder. He was hanged on July 17, 1895, in an event that attracted a crowd of some 2,000 witnesses, according to the Florida Times-Union newspaper. Appeals delayed the executions of his 2 codefendants, but only temporarily. George Mitchell was hanged in August, while Mike Stevens was executed Sept. 18.

    Suwannee County's last hanging execution took place on April 24, 1903. The condemned man was John Burns, who confessed to slitting his stepmother's throat in a dispute over ownership of an 80-acre tract of farm land. Evidence suggests a photo exists of that execution. County Judge William Slaughter II says he stumbled across a photograph of the hanging in the early 1970s, as a young attorney doing legal research in old county records. Efforts to relocate that picture however, have thus far been unsuccessful, according to the county historian.

    Great differences exist between today's executions and those of Florida's pioneering days. Large crowds of witnesses were the norm back then, while today there are no more than 24 witnesses. They sit in a room with a glass window that looks into the death chamber.

    Today's executions -- whether by electrocution or lethal injection -- are described by many witnesses as almost clinical events. In fact, convicted inmates are even offered tranquilizers to assist them in confronting their deaths.

    Hangings, on the other hand, could be quite messy and brutal. In some documented cases, rather than the condemned person’s neck snapping, the individual slowly strangled to death. In other instances individuals were nearly decapitated.

    Another major difference today is the length of time between when a capital crime occurs and when the individual or individuals convicted of the crime are executed. All of today’s death sentences are automatically appealed and as a result convicted murderers, on average, spend about 14 years incarcerated prior to their deaths.

    In the pre-electrocution days, death penalty appeals -- if an appeal was filed at all -- were normally handled in less than 6 months. And in cases where confessions had been obtained, the hanging might take place just a few weeks after the jury returned its guilty verdict. Such was the case in Live Oak in 1903. John Burns was convicted on March 14, sentenced on March 16, and hanged near the Suwannee County Courthouse just 40 days later.

    http://suwanneedemocrat.com/local/x1...often-gruesome

  3. #3
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Florida follows specific protocols during executions

    The next scheduled inmate to follow the protocols leading up to his execution will be Gary Ray Bowles on Aug. 22.

    By Suzie Schottelkotte
    Jacksonville. com

    RAIFORD — When Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant in June for 57-year-old Gary Ray Bowles, ordering his execution Aug. 22 for a 1996 murder conviction, his signature triggered a protocol within the state Department of Corrections that, except for the manner of execution, has remained essentially the same for decades.

    It began when corrections officers at Florida State Prison near Raiford told Bowles the warrant had been signed, and they moved him to death watch — a specific area of the prison housing inmates under a death warrant. With about 30 more square feet than the standard 6-foot by 9-foot death row cell, his new housing affords Bowles a little more space.

    From there, he’ll await word from his lawyers as they pursue an onslaught of appeals to halt, or at least delay, his execution.

    Florida State Prison holds one of the state’s two death row facilities for men — the other being just down the road at Union Correctional Institution. Women are held at Lowell Correctional near Ocala, but all executions are carried out at Florida State Prison.

    As Aug. 22 draws closer, assuming there is no legal delay, prison officials will identify the execution team, including medical personnel and a private citizen to be paid $150 as the primary executioner, along with a secondary executioner, according to the
    Department of Corrections. The team will begin checking equipment, planning for a last meal and arranging for witness credentials, including up to 12 media representatives.

    The execution warden arranges for 12 official lay witnesses, often including family members of the victim, and Bowles can ask to have his lawyer and a minister of religion present.

    On the day of the execution, the prison’s food service director will oversee preparation of Bowles’ last meal, and will serve it to him. Bowles will decide the menu, but the ingredients must be available at the prison, can’t include any alcoholic beverages and not cost more than $40.

    After that, another member of the execution team will escort Bowles to the shower area, then return him to his death watch cell to put on the clothing he’ll wear into the execution chamber.

    Since Bowles didn’t request death by electrocution, he’s scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. The electric chair hasn’t been used in Florida since 1999, a year before the Legislature adopted lethal injection as the state’s method for executing condemned inmates.

    The team will ensure the telephone lines and public address system are functioning in the execution chamber, and the lethal injection drugs and related medical supplies are labeled and prepared for application. The warden will explain the lethal injection process to Bowles, and offer to administer an injection to ease his anxiety, according to the DOC.

    The warden will use a cheek swab to check each member of the execution team and the executioners for chemical substances and a breath analyzer to check for alcohol usage, which could cause a member to be removed if either test is positive.

    As the witnesses are seated in the observation room, and with the curtain covering the glass window between the witness room and the execution chamber closed, team members will escort Bowles to the execution chamber. He’ll lie on the gurney and the warden will read the death warrant to him. Then the team will secure him with body restraints.

    They’ll place two heart monitors on his chest and insert a needle in each arm — a primary line and a secondary one — to administer the lethal drugs, using saline solution to ensure the lines are flowing freely.

    Communication lines will remain open to the governor’s office throughout the process, providing updates to the actions being taken.

    Team members will open the curtain to the witness room, and Bowles will be given the opportunity to make a final statement.

    With that, the executioner, whose identity will remain anonymous, will begin the three-step injection process.

    Once Bowles is pronounced dead, a team member will notify the governor’s office and announce to the witnesses that the sentence has been carried out, and Bowles’ body will be taken by hearse to the Alachua County Medical Examiner’s office for an autopsy.

    https://www.jacksonville.com/news/20...ing-executions
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Martin McClain, ‘titan’ Florida death row lawyer, dies at 67


    Tampa Bay Times

    Martin McClain, a trailblazing attorney whose representation of Death Row inmates earned accolades from judges, Supreme Court justices and his peers, died suddenly at his Wilton Manors home this week, sources close to the lawyer said Tuesday.

    In a Florida career that spanned more than three decades, McClain played an instrumental role in the elimination of the electric chair as the state’s sole means of execution, championed clients whose death sentences were overturned and led more than 300 post-conviction appeals in capital cases at the Florida Supreme Court.

    “Marty McClain, in my view, set the gold standard for advocacy for Death Row inmates, and he did it with such professionalism, meticulous preparation, and unwillingness to give up on his clients,” former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Barbara Pariente told The News Service of Florida in a phone interview Tuesday. “From my point of view, I think he was respected by the justices that I sat with, even if we didn’t agree with his argument. But his arguments were often very compelling, and I don’t know how many but he was successful in getting retrials for several inmates over his time when I was on the court.”

    McClain, 67, was found dead Monday, numerous sources told the News Service.

    News of McClain’s unexpected death shook the close-knit death-penalty legal community. McClain, who served as a mentor to many top death-penalty attorneys, was acclaimed for his encyclopedic knowledge of one of the most complex areas of law.

    “Marty really spanned everything about capital post-conviction work. On an individual level, he was extremely successful but also on an institutional level he was on the forefront of changing the way things worked and improving the way lawyering was done,” Linda McDermott, a former law partner of McClain’s who now serves as capital habeas unit chief for the Office of the Federal Public Defender in Florida’s northern district.

    McClain’s advocacy for Death Row inmates included a stint in the 1990s running a statewide office that represented inmates who are condemned to death. During his time at the office, McClain drew candidates from across the country who wanted to work beside him.

    “A lot of people stood on Marty’s shoulders,” Pete Mills, an assistant public defender in the 10th Judicial Circuit who is chairman of the Florida Public Defender Association’s death penalty steering committee, told the News Service. “Marty was an intellectual giant when it came to capital litigation, and a seasoned practitioner. He was generous with his skills and sharing them and hoping that others would use them to save lives.”

    McClain’s decades of tangling with the state over the death penalty included showdowns over the drugs used in lethal injection, capital sentences imposed on people with intellectual disabilities and the use of the electric chair after a number of botched executions.

    McClain was “especially good” at last-minute appeals involving Death Row inmates whose death warrants had been signed by the governor, according to former Supreme Court Chief Justice Harry Lee Anstead.

    “Once a warrant was signed, it’s like the last-gasp efforts to prevent a prisoner from being executed. Marty had very much of an expertise, and a trait of human nature, to really be able to capture in succinct and understandable language where the flaw might be in the previous proceedings leading up to a death warrant being signed,” Anstead said in a phone interview Tuesday. “We’re not talking about one or two or three or four or a half-dozen or a few times. We’re talking about consistently, in dozens of cases over a long period of years. … Marty McClain was as competent and dedicated as any lawyer that I ever had come before me as a judge. … I could not say enough about my admiration of his character, passion and competence and dedication in the area of death-penalty law.”

    https://www.tampabay.com/news/florid...er-dies-at-67/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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    Frank Johnson, the first man to die in Florida’s electric chair. The photo was taken before his execution began
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