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Since 1972, 78 men and two women in the United States have been
sentenced to death and then freed from death row -- in some cases more than a
decade later -- when it became clear they were innocent, or at least wrongly
convicted because of flawed evidence, prosecutorial misconduct or other
problems.
Illinois, which has freed at least 12 condemned inmates, the
latest on May 17, has attracted most of the national publicity lately. But it is
Florida -- with 20 death row survivors -- that leads the nation in wrongful
death sentences.
Three of the 20 came within 16 hours of the electric chair.
Their last meals had been ordered, their $150 burial suits measured, tailored
and waiting.
One is dead, murdered on the streets of Medellin, Colombia, a
few years after his release.
Two never left state custody. They are serving out sentences for
other crimes.
Four got a taste of freedom. They are back behind bars for
offenses they committed after they were released.
The remaining 13 are back in society, free from death row but
not from its shadows.
Many of those 13 live on the edge, modestly and anonymously,
fearful that word of their past will get out, struggling to get back some of
what they lost: marriages, self-respect, jobs, health, mental stability.
Outwardly, three or four of the survivors seem perfectly normal,
with families, nice homes and good jobs. But every day, they must deal with the
memories, the bitterness, the anger and fear.
Experts say wrongful death sentences are built on similar
circumstances: police who use coerced confessions or questionable eyewitness
identifications; prosecutors who exploit false testimony or inaccurate
scientific evidence; jurors who are tainted by prejudice; judges who are out for
headlines; and suspects who are easy marks -- because of their race, criminal
background or inability to afford a good lawyer.
Only five of Florida's wrongly condemned have received
compensation from the state, and they say the money can't replace what they
lost.
There's an irony in the stories of death row survivors: It took
a death sentence to free them. If they had received a life sentence, they
probably never would have gotten out.
Michael L. Radelet, a University of Florida sociology professor
who documents wrongful executions, says death row survivors are the lucky ones
because only through good fortune and careful scrutiny of their cases were they
vindicated before a fatal error. "As long as we have the death
penalty," Radelet says, "innocent people will be executed."
With more capital punishment cases and shrinking legal
resources, the danger of wrongful convictions and wrongful executions is
"getting worse," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death
Penalty Information Center in Washington.
Most prosecutors, judges and Florida officials won't admit an
innocent person has ever been executed here or convicted in error.
But Gerald Kogan, who recently retired after 11 years on the
Florida Supreme Court, told the Associated Press in December that he wasn't
convinced of guilt in "two or three" of the 25 state executions while
he was on the court.
"There are several cases where I had grave doubts as to the
guilt of a particular person, (and) other cases where I just felt they were
treated unfairly in the system," Kogan said.
Kogan, a former prosecutor, refuses to elaborate on which cases
he had in mind. "I've said what I'm going to say on that. I don't want to
talk about that any more."
Gov. Jeb Bush, who has signed death warrants to send two
convicted killers to the electric chair this week, declined to comment for this
story. In meetings, Bush has voiced concern about people on death row who may be
innocent, according to Carol Licko, his general counsel.
She says the governor signed the warrants only after a careful
review of the cases to eliminate any possibility of a wrongful execution.
Inmates can't see into other cells, but they can look down the
corridor by angling a piece of a mirror. They communicate with one another by
talking down the corridor -- called "getting on the bars" -- or
yelling through a vent or the plumbing pipes. Or throwing a long stick with a
note attached to the person in the next cell.
Twice a week, they are let out for a two-hour trip to an
exercise yard. Three times a week, they are escorted to the shower stall, where
the water runs for five minutes. Occasionally, guards jerk open a cell door to
search an inmate's belongings or body for drugs or shanks (crude, homemade
knives).
Death row survivors remember the numbing cold in winter, the
hellish heat in summer and the non-stop din of hundreds of voices and noises,
relieved only by an eerie quiet on execution days.
Alone with nothing but time, they did almost anything to keep
their minds occupied.
They counted every dent in the walls, every crevice on the
floor. They learned the heavy footsteps of their favorite nighttime guard. They
prayed for life and sometimes hoped for death.
They slept and wrote poetry, usually at night when there was
less noise. They read and argued about things such as whether to go to the
execution chamber kicking and screaming or "like a man."
Anthony Peek, who survived a decade on the row, paced so much --
five steps back and forth -- that his knees are weak. Dave Keaton, released from
death row 26 years ago, could catch a glimpse of the afternoon sun if he stood
at the right angle. Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, who for a time was the only
woman in the country on death row, painted by dipping strands of her hair in
beet juice.
One rule of survival: be buddies with everyone but close friends
with no one. That's because it hurts too much when a friend is executed.
Anthony Brown, who watched and listened 12 times as guards
prepared for executions, tears up when he remembers his final hours with Marvin
Francois. Francois, 39, was executed in 1985 for killing six people during a
robbery of a Miami drug house.
"We wanted to send him out on a high," says Brown, 43,
recounting how they shared a cigarette and fantasized it was a joint. "It
took a little out of me when they killed him. I'd grown real attached to
him."
No matter how they passed the time, they had one thing in
common: a date with death in Florida's electric chair.
THE CRIME: Juries twice convicted Lee and Pitts of killing two
gas station attendants at Port St. Joe in the Florida Panhandle. The case was
built on confessions, which Pitts and Lee said were beaten out of them. No
physical evidence linked them to the crime. Joe Townsend, the polygraph operator
who extracted the confessions, later came under fire for coercing confessions
from suspects in other cases.
HOW THEY GOT OUT: Another man — sentenced to life for another
homicide — confessed to the murders. Polygraph operator Warren Holmes reported
the confession to Miami Herald reporter Gene Miller, whose stories helped prompt
a second trial. Again, the jury convicted Pitts and Lee. In 1975, then-Gov.
Reubin Askew pardoned the two. “I am sufficiently convinced that they are
innocent,” Askew said.
WHERE THEY ARE NOW: Lee and Pitts, who met at a moonshine party
at Lee’s house the night of the crime, became like brothers. After moving to
Miami, they found a network of friends and lawyers to help them adjust. “When
you step into a free society, it’s like stepping on a merry-go-round,” says
Lee, whose family left him while he was on death row. He started working for the
state, counseling troubled juveniles, a job he later lost because of his felony
conviction. He was then hired to counsel inmates in Miami-Dade’s jails. Pitts,
who hasn’t seen his two daughters since prison, worked for a while in security
but preferred the outdoors. Now a truck driver, he is married and lives in Miami
Shores. Last year, the Legislature awarded each man $500,000 — the first time
it has ordered restitution for persons wrongly sentenced to death. Both men,
frequent lecturers against the death penalty, say the money won’t buy back the
lost time. “It’s like giving the monkey some peanuts,” Lee scoffs.
THE CRIME: A Lee County jury convicted Tibbs of shooting to
death hitchhiker Terry Milroy, 27, and raping his 16-year-old traveling
companion, Cynthia Nadeau, near Fort Myers. Tibbs, a onetime theology student,
was arrested in Mississippi after Nadeau picked him out of a lineup, despite
discrepancies between him and her original description of the killer. Her
testimony was enough to convict him. Tibbs testified that he was in Daytona
Beach when the crimes occurred. HOW HE GOT OUT: In 1976, the Florida Supreme
Court ordered a retrial, saying the victim was an unreliable witness and
expressing “considerable doubt” that Tibbs was the killer. The case went to
the U.S. Supreme Court, which said that retrying Tibbs would not constitute
double jeopardy. Still, the state decided to drop the charges in 1982, and the
prosecutor who convicted Tibbs later expressed doubts about his guilt. WHERE HE
IS NOW: Tibbs became a cause celebre, attracting supporters such as Joan Baez,
Angela Davis and Pete Seeger, who wrote a ballad entitled Ode to Delbert Tibbs.
Tibbs lives alone in a studio apartment in Chicago, works in a packaging
warehouse and is active in campaigns against the death penalty. “The jobs I’ve
gotten have been out of the benevolence of friends,” he says. “Jobs in
mainstream America I don’t even try for anymore.” Off death row for years,
Tibbs remembers waking up one night after a friend was electrocuted and “feeling
as if someone stabbed me in the rear.” Tibbs has written several poems about
executed buddies and is working on a book. “I should have lost hope,” he
says, “but I didn’t.”
THE CRIME: A Dade County jury convicted Jaramillo, an illegal
Colombian immigrant, for the murders of Gilberto Caicedo and Candellario
Castellanos in their southwest Dade townhouse. Each was shot three times in the
head. Dade Circuit Judge Ellen Morphonios-Gable overruled the jury’s
recommendation of life in prison. The prosecution’s case hinged on Jaramillo’s
fingerprints, which were found on a knife casing, a table and a grocery bag in
the victims’ home. The murder weapon, a machine gun equipped with a silencer,
was never found. At the trial, evidence emerged that tended to incriminate the
victims’ roommate. Jaramillo, 26 at the time of his arrest, testified he had
been in the home earlier that day and helped the victims’ nephew clean out the
garage. He said he used the knife, rope and paper during the cleanup. HOW HE GOT
OUT: In 1982 the Florida Supreme Court freed Jaramillo because of insufficient
evidence. “The proof is not inconsistent with Jaramillo’s reasonable
explanation as to how his fingerprints came to be on these items at the victim’s
home,” the court said. AFTER HE GOT OUT: Jaramillo “literally jumped for joy”
when he learned he would be freed, says his lawyer, Louis Casuso. But the day
Jaramillo left death row, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
arrested him for lying on a form when he bought a .45-caliber pistol from a gun
shop in 1980. In 1983, a federal judge sentenced him to four years in prison.
According to his lawyer, Jaramillo was eventually deported to Colombia, where he
was murdered in Medellin.
THE CRIME: An Escambia County jury convicted Brown of the 1982
shotgun murder of James Dasinger, a gas company delivery man, north of
Pensacola. Wydell D. Rogers, who claimed to be an accomplice, pleaded guilty to
second-degree murder and testified that he and Brown plotted the entire
incident. Circuit Judge Joseph Q. Tarbuck rejected the jury’s recommended life
sentence and imposed the death penalty.
HOW HE GOT OUT: The Florida Supreme Court overturned Brown’s
conviction in 1985, ruling the prosecution erred when it took a pretrial
deposition from a sheriff’s deputy without notifying Brown. At the retrial in
1986, Rogers, the state’s star witness, said he lied at the first trial.
Brown, a tattooed high-school dropout with a 14-page rap sheet, was acquitted.
WHERE HE IS NOW: After a year of freedom, Brown was arrested on
robbery charges, which prosecutors eventually dropped. Hoping to start over,
Brown moved to Detroit and got a job in a nursing home. Soon he was back in
Escambia County and in trouble. “You just don’t walk off death row and pick
up,” says Brown. In February 1990, he squared off with a man wielding a bottle
in a bar and stabbed him with a pocketknife. Brown was arrested and pleaded
guilty. The same judge who sentenced him to death in 1983 sentenced him to 30
years for aggravated battery. Brown, a father of two, says 100 years at Union
Correctional Institution, where he is now, is better than death row. “I tried
to do everything differently,” he says, getting emotional. Still, “I feel
safe here, safer than the street. I could have been killed in a drive-by. If I
hadn’t have been on death row, who knows if I’d be dead or alive?”
THE CRIME: Polk County juries twice convicted Peek, a New York
drifter on probation for burglary, of beating and strangling Erma Carlson, a
65-year-old nurse, in her Winter Haven home. Just before the murder trial, Peek
was convicted and sentenced to life for an unrelated rape. The murder conviction
hinged on Peek’s fingerprint, which was found on the dead woman’s car. Peek
testified that on the night of the murder he never left the Winter Haven halfway
house where he was serving his burglary probation. He said he was at a park the
next day when he saw the unlocked car and opened the door.
HOW HE GOT OUT: Polk Circuit Judge John Dewell overturned the
first conviction in 1983, ruling that a hair analyst gave erroneous testimony.
The Florida Supreme Court overturned his second conviction in 1986 because the
judge inappropriately allowed evidence about the unrelated rape. Acquittal at a
third trial in 1987 brought an end to Peek’s 10-year death row ordeal.
WHERE HE IS NOW: Peek sweeps the prison grounds at Everglades
Correctional Institution, where he is serving a life sentence for rape. In 1993,
his death row marriage to a Tennessee pen pal fell apart. Two years later, Peek,
then 37, exchanged wedding vows with another prison visitor, Helen Hope. A
52-year-old British emigre, she left her homeland, husband and children and
moved to Gainesville to be near Peek. “All he’s got is God and me,” she
says. The parole board recently tacked five years onto Peek’s release date,
now scheduled for 2010. But a decade on death row has taught him to handle
anything. He points to a garbage bin in the prison visiting area. “If you put
a human being in there,” he says, “he’s gonna find a way to survive.”
THE CRIME: Brown and Troy were already in prison when they were
convicted of the 1981 stabbing death of Earl Owens, a fellow inmate at Union
Correctional Institution. Prison officials held the pair in solitary for 17
months before arresting them. Their conviction rested largely on the testimony
of Frank Wise, a fellow inmate who said he saw Brown and Troy leave the homicide
scene.
HOW THEY GOT OUT: In 1987, the Florida Supreme Court reversed
the convictions. The court said prosecutors flubbed the case by not giving
defense lawyers statements of prison interviews with the defendants. On death
row, Brown fell in love with Esther Lichtenfels, a prison visitor who ended up
helping to free the pair. Wearing a legally authorized hidden tape recorder, she
recorded Wise, the prosecution’s key witness, saying he had lied and offering
to tell the truth for $2,000. Prosecutors dismissed the charges against Brown
and Troy.
WHERE THEY ARE NOW: Brown, a Clearwater resident who had been
serving 20 years for a Pinellas County robbery, left prison in 1988. About an
hour later, he married Lichtenfels at the Clay County Courthouse. Troy, serving
a 25-year sentence for murder, left in 1990. Both are back in prison. Troy,
arrested for selling cocaine seven months after his release, is serving time at
Charlotte Correctional Institution. Brown’s life has been a cycle of drugs and
robberies. He went to prison for robbing a bank in Springfield, Mass. Then, in
April, Pinellas sheriff’s deputies arrested him after he allegedly robbed a
bank in Dunedin with a broken broom stick, stole a car and led police on a
high-speed chase. Brown says prosecutors are holding his time on death row
against him. “In their eyes, I was never exonerated,” he says from the
Pinellas County Jail. “There’s enough pain in this stuff to last a lifetime.”
THE CRIME: A DeSoto County jury convicted Richardson, an Arcadia
migrant worker with no criminal record, of poisoning his stepdaughter, Betty
Jean. She died along with five sisters and one brother in 1967 after eating a
lunch laced with a pesticide. Prosecutors said he killed them to collect on
$7,000 in life insurance. Richardson denied it. He said the children’s
babysitter, Betsy Reese, poisoned their last meal of rice and beans with
pesticide.
HOW HE GOT OUT: Washington lawyer Mark Lane, who gained
attention because of his John F. Kennedy conspiracy theory, wrote a book about
the case, Arcadia. Among other things, he said Richardson never bought
insurance. After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment in 1972,
Richardson’s sentence was commuted to life. In 1989, the governor named
then-Dade State Attorney Janet Reno to re-examine the case. She concluded that
prosecutors convicted Richardson with perjured testimony and ignored the
babysitter as a possible suspect. Based on her report, DeSoto Circuit Judge
Clifton Kelly ordered Richardson freed. “The enormity of the crime,” the
judge said, “is matched only by the enormity of the injustice to this man.”
The babysitter died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1992.
WHERE HE IS NOW: Richardson, who learned to read and write in
prison and was ordained a minister, became an instant celebrity. Hollywood
producers talked about a movie deal, and comedian Dick Gregory offered him a
$100,000-a-year job at a nutrition clinic. The job didn’t pan out, the movie
hasn’t materialized and Richardson suffered a series of setbacks. The less
than $20,000 he got for the rights to his story was gone after four or five
years. His heart problems — which he attributes to prison food, poor medical
care and constant stress — worsened. He and his wife, who stuck by him
throughout his imprisonment, were divorced. And most of the $150,000 Richardson
got in an out-of-court settlement with DeSoto County went to his lawyers.
Richardson, who spent too much of his life in prison to be entitled to Social
Security, now lives at the ranch of his cardiologist in Wichita, Kan., and does
light work to pay for room and board. His lasting memory of death row is the
sound of keys rattling. “When I hear a bunch of keys shaking, I think they are
coming to get me and put me in the electric chair,” he says. “I’m trying
to get over it, but it’s something a man can never forget.”
THE CRIME: An Orange County jury convicted Cox, a onetime Army
Ranger, of the 1978 beating death of Sharon Zellers, 19, a Walt Disney World
clerk. The case was weak, and Cox was not charged until eight years after the
murder. Cox and his family were staying at a motel in Orlando where the victim’s
body was found. He had a cut on his tongue, and hair and blood samples found
near the victim were compatible with his. Cox testified he bit through his
tongue during a fight.
HOW HE GOT OUT: The Florida Supreme Court reversed Cox’s
conviction, ruling that, at best, the evidence created “only a suspicion” of
guilt. The court ordered his acquittal and release.
WHERE HE IS NOW: For Cox, there was no celebration. He was
immediately taken into custody to complete a prison sentence in California for
an unrelated 1985 kidnapping. Then he returned to his boyhood home of
Springfield, Mo., where he came under suspicion — but was never charged — in
the 1992 disappearance of a mother and two teenage girls. Texas police also
questioned him about an abduction in Plano. In 1995, Cox was arrested for
holding a gun on a 12-year-old girl during a robbery in Decatur, Texas. He is
serving a life sentence for that robbery and is not eligible for parole until
2025. He declines to comment.
THE CRIME: A Polk County jury convicted Golden, a onetime high
school teacher, of drowning his wife, Ardelle, in a lake near the family’s
home in Winter Haven. Her body was found floating near a boat dock, just a few
feet from a partially submerged Pontiac Grand Am that her husband had rented.
The medical examiner ruled the death an accident and said there were no signs of
foul play. But the jury believed the prosecutor’s version — that Golden,
facing debts of more than $200,000, pushed his wife off the boat dock and then
drove the car into the lake to make the drowning look accidental. He hoped to
collect on more than $350,000 in life insurance policies taken out in the year
before her death, prosecutors said.
HOW HE GOT OUT: The Florida Supreme Court overturned the
conviction and ordered Golden’s release, saying the prosecution failed to
prove Ardelle Golden’s death was anything but an accident. It may have
occurred after she drove down the unmarked, unlit boat dock at night.
WHERE HE IS NOW: Golden lived for a while with his oldest son,
Darin, then with son Chip, who was 13 when his father was arrested. Chip noticed
his father had changed. “He was more easily agitated,” Chip says. “He had
a worse temper. He had a hard time adjusting to the idea that you got to get a
job ... got to pay bills.” Unable to stay in one place, Golden moved to Texas,
where he was arrested in 1996 for molesting two girls, ages 8 and 9. Then in
April he pleaded guilty in neighboring Denton County to a new charge of
indecency with a child. His lawyer, John Giofreddi, says the death of Golden’s
wife, coupled with “the trauma of death row,” contributed to his
transformation into a “regressed pedophile.” Golden pleaded guilty and began
a 15-year prison term in May.
THE CRIME: A Broward County jury convicted Hayes, a groom at the
Pompano Harness Track, of the 1990 rape and strangling death of fellow groom
Pamela Albertson. Prosecutors introduced DNA evidence that they said linked him
to the homicide. Hayes’ lawyers presented expert testimony suggesting the DNA
results were contaminated.
HOW HE GOT OUT: The Florida Supreme Court ordered a new trial
because of faulty DNA analysis. “The record contains evidence suggesting that
Hayes committed the homicide,” the court said, but it “also contains
objective physical evidence suggesting that someone other than Hayes was
responsible.” At a retrial, Hayes’ lawyers showed that hairs used to convict
him the first time most likely came from a white person. Hayes, who is black,
was acquitted.
WHERE HE IS NOW: Hayes, who is nicknamed “Mississippi,” left
prison with a plastic bag of socks and sneakers but no money. His lawyer paid
for a bus ticket to his hometown of Canton, Miss., where he moved in with his
grandmother. Hayes tried to get a job as a janitor but was rejected because of
the seven-year gap on his resume. Eventually, the town hired him to drive dump
trucks and clean sewers. Hayes also helps care for horses at an amusement park
owned by his uncle. Recently, he married Georgia Brown, 22, a nursing home
employee. “I’m trying to build my life back up,” says Hayes, a
two-pack-a-day smoker. He says he gets angry easily and has mood swings and
nightmares. “I might get 30 minutes of sleep every hour every night,” he
says. “I don’t know who’s gonna come down the hallway.”
THE CRIME: A Seminole County jury convicted Spaziano, an Outlaws
motorcycle gang member from Rochester, N.Y., of the 1973 murder of Laura
Harberts, an Orlando hospital clerk. The verdict hinged on the testimony of a
teenage drug user, Anthony DiLisio, who remembered key facts about the murder
only after he was hypnotized. Circuit Judge Robert McGregor overrode the jury’s
recommendation and sentenced Spaziano to death.
HOW HE GOT OUT: Spaziano, who got the nickname “Crazy Joe”
after a truck ran over his head, survived five death warrants. In 1995, 16 days
before his scheduled execution, the state’s star witness recanted his
testimony, which prompted an order for a new trial. On the eve of the retrial,
in November 1998, Spaziano pleaded no contest to second-degree murder while
swearing he did not kill Laura Harberts. Under the plea agreement, he did not
have to admit guilt, was sentenced to time served and released from death row.
WHERE HE IS NOW: Spaziano is in prison, serving a life sentence
for the 1974 rape of a 16-year-old Orlando girl. He says he is innocent and is
appealing. For Spaziano, the decision to accept the plea deal in the murder case
was “stark reality. . . . I have come within days of being electrocuted . . .
never knowing when I would be put to death by electrocution,” he wrote in an
affidavit. “I do not want my daughter and three grandchildren to live under
the threat and fear (and) . . . experience the hurt and damage of my death in
the electric chair.” These days, Spaziano moves around without handcuffs at
Florida State Prison, joking with robbers, rapists and killers in the general
population. Some cheer and call his name. Still, Spaziano feels low sometimes.
“I’m tired of everybody,” he said recently. “I want people to go away.”
Joseph Green Brown (Shabaka WaQlimi)
'Yes, I’m angry. . . . Yes, I’m bitter. I’m frustrated'
By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG © St. Petersburg Times, published July
4, 1999
"You got to realize," says Joseph Green Brown, now
known to almost everyone as Shabaka, "you put a man in a cage and treat him
like a dog, talk to him like a dog, feed him like a dog . . . there’s gonna
come a time he wants to bite like a dog."
For Shabaka, that time came 16 years ago when technicians in
Florida’s death house made him listen as they tested the electric chair in
which they were about to kill him.
Twice a day, he heard the lightning-like noise from his death
watch cell, 30 feet away. When a prison tailor came to measure him for his
burial suit, he was put back into his cell kicking and screaming. He refused to
order the traditional last meal.
The long wait for his death date, the thought of his grieving
mother, the senses and sounds of more than 12 years on death row — they rub
Shabaka, now 49, almost as raw today as they did on Oct. 17, 1983, when he came
within 15 hours of execution.
"Yes, I’m angry," says Shabaka, who will never
forget the stench that hung over the cellblock after an execution. There were 16
executions while he was at Florida State Prison, and he could have been No. 17.
"Yes, I’m bitter. I’m frustrated. The state of Florida didn’t give me
nothing. They didn’t give me an apology. When they released me, they didn’t
even give me bus fare home."
Twelve years later, Shabaka -- Swahili for uncompromising --
puts his outrage to work trying to solve the problems of poor people. At a
Washington, D.C., drop-in center, he feeds homeless drug addicts, counsels
alcoholics and helps people with mental problems.
Shabaka supplements his income working at a drive-in convenience
store and lecturing on capital punishment. His ordeal makes him a cause celebre
on the anti-death-penalty circuit.
"It can be stressful," he says of post-prison life.
"But it’s rewarding."
In 1974, a Hillsborough County jury convicted him of raping and
murdering Earlene Treva Barksdale, a clothing store owner and wife of a
prominent Tampa lawyer. The case hinged on Ronald Floyd, a man who held a grudge
against Shabaka because Shabaka once turned him in for a robbery. The jury also
got to see a purported smoking gun — a .38-caliber handgun that prosecutor
Robert Bonanno said was the murder weapon.
An FBI ballistics expert said the handgun could not possibly
have fired the fatal bullet -- a witness the jury never heard from -- and
several months later, Floyd admitted that he lied.
Florida courts granted no relief, however, and in the fall of
1983, Gov. Bob Graham signed a death warrant. Shabaka’s mother suffered a
stroke.
Death watch cells are larger but more narrow than cells on death
row, and guards are positioned outside to hand the condemned their belongings,
turn on their TVs and make sure they don’t commit suicide. Shabaka says he
felt like a "walled animal."
He was within 15 hours of death when a federal judge in Tampa
issued a stay. Two and a half years later, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals overturned the conviction, ruling the prosecution knowingly allowed
false testimony from the states’s star witness. One year later, Shabaka was
released after the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office decided not to retry
him.
Despite the appellate court’s stinging rebuke, Bonanno, now a
Hillsborough circuit judge, remains convinced Shabaka is guilty. "He’s
very fortunate," Bonanno says. "He should have been executed."
Shabaka says he has not forgotten -- or forgiven -- Bonanno,
Graham or the "sick guards" he suspects were taking bets on whether he
would get a stay.
There "ain’t no worse place" than death row, he
says. "America ain’t no civilized place."
After so many years trying to keep Florida from strapping him in
a chair, Shabaka feels uneasy when he puts on a seat belt. When he walks into a
room and closes the door, he reopens it to make sure it isn’t locked.
It’s too painful for Shabaka to talk about friends he lost
while on death row, or those he might have gained. He frequently changes his
telephone number because of harassment. He doesn’t want to be photographed,
declines to let reporters into his home and reveals nothing about the woman he
married after his release.
In prison, Shabaka became a jailhouse lawyer so he could,
belatedly, defend himself. Today, as he looks down the road for new challenges,
he only half-mockingly suggests he might become a death row lawyer.
His biggest victory to date? "I’m alive. . . . That’s
good enough for me."
Sonia Jacobs
'I had nothing . . . The world I left no longer existed'
By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG © St. Petersburg Times, published July
4, 1999
When Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs went to prison for murder in
1976, her son was 9. Her daughter, 10 months old, was still nursing.
When she was freed in 1992, her son was married with a child of
his own and her daughter was a 16-year-old stranger.
"Getting back family is the hardest part," says
Jacobs, now 51, who teaches yoga and lives in Los Angeles. "They live with
embarrassment for so long: You say you didn't (commit the murder), but everyone
says you did."
Fresh out of prison, Jacobs made her first non-collect telephone
call in 16 years to son Eric, and then headed to North Carolina to see him, his
wife and their 4-year-old daughter.
"Grandma, were you lost?" the girl asked when they
met.
"Yes," Jacobs replied. "I was."
The reunion with her daughter didn't go as smoothly. Jacobs
found her at a high school in Maine, but Tina kept her distance.
The wounds began to heal a few months later. Tina accepted her
mother's invitation to attend an anti-death-penalty rally in Pittsburgh. The
crowd applauded Jacobs, then cheered non-stop when Tina was introduced. Mother
and daughter hugged. Eventually, they began living together, got their first
drivers' licenses and climbed mountains. By then, Jacobs and her children had
grown accustomed to overcoming obstacles.
In 1976, they were all in the back seat of a green Camaro when
Jacobs was arrested with her boyfriend, an ex-con named Jesse Tafero, and his
prison pal, Walter Rhodes. They were charged with murdering Florida Highway
Patrol Trooper Phillip Black and a visiting Canadian policeman named Donald
Irwin a few minutes earlier at an Interstate 95 rest stop.
Rhodes was the only one who tested positive for gunpowder
residue. But after he agreed to testify against Jacobs and Tafero, he got a life
sentence. They were sentenced to die.
Jacobs spent the next five years in solitary confinement, her
vocal cords becoming atrophied because of non-use and denied even her photos of
Eric, a son by her first marriage, and Tina, her baby by Tafero. She meditated
and practiced yoga. "I figured if people could survive the concentration
camps, then surely I could survive this," she says.
In 1981, the Florida Supreme Court commuted Jacobs' sentence to
life in prison after her lawyers uncovered a polygraph test suggesting that
Rhodes, the prosecution's chief witness, might have lied. The next year, Rhodes
recanted, saying he -- not Jacobs or Tafero -- pulled the trigger. (He later
changed his story again and again.) The case grew even more wobbly when a
jailhouse snitch said she, too, had lied against Jacobs at trial.
Tafero was not so lucky. He remained on death row while his
appeals slipped away. In May 1990, he was executed.
By then, a childhood friend of Jacobs, filmmaker Micki Dickoff,
had become interested in her case. Using court transcripts, affidavits and old
newspaper stories, Dickoff found discrepancies in testimony and put together a
color-coded brief for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It was enough to
overturn Jacobs' conviction. Rather than risk an acquittal at retrial, the
Broward State Attorney's Office offered a plea to second-degree murder in which
Jacobs, then 45, did not have to admit guilt. On Oct. 9, 1992, she was released.
She remembers seeing the sun and the moon as she left the
Broward County Courthouse.
"I felt like an alien at first," Jacobs says, adding
that in prison at least she had stature. "Outside, I had nothing: no money,
no place to go. The world I left no longer existed."
For a time, Jacobs had flashbacks and a recurring dream:
"I'm madly dashing up and down the corridors trying to find my cell. I
couldn't and I was gonna get in trouble. . . . So I ran to the lobby -- it
looked like a hotel lobby -- and I asked the desk to call and say I was really
here, but I just couldn't find my cell."
The nightmares have ended. The bad feelings come and go.
Whenever things get too bad, Jacobs takes long walks along the beach, runs her
fingers through the sand and listens to the ocean. "I let the sea take me
away," she says.
She lives with her daughter and the mutt she laughingly calls
her "grand-dog-ter," and runs a growing yoga business in Los Angeles.
She dabbles in filmmaking with Dickoff and in her spare time writes a memoir of
death row and life after. She also keeps in touch with old prison friends --
"a little group from the lost planet."
"We're all a little reclusive," Jacobs says of death
row survivors. "We all struggle a little to find a life and fit in."
Earnest Lee Miller and William Riley Jent
'We'd rather have died than to stay in that place for something
we didn't do'
By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG © St. Petersburg Times, published July
4, 1999
Off death row for 11 years, Earnest Lee Miller, the tall and
quiet one, and William Riley Jent, his short and happy-go-lucky half-brother,
have taken different paths to build something from the ashes.
Miller, 43, is a roofer in his native Dayton, Ohio. He embraces
the past, sharing his eight-year ordeal with new neighbors and new family.
Jent, 48, a ranch owner in Arizona, keeps it hidden. He lives
incognito, refusing to discuss the past.
In separate trials, Pasco County juries convicted Jent and
Miller of raping and bludgeoning to death a woman known only as
"Tammy" in 1979. She was later identified as Linda Gale Bradshaw, 20.
The case was built largely on the testimony of witnesses who said that after a
party near Dade City, the two men bashed the woman's head with a stick, raped
her and set fire to her as she struggled to get up.
Jent and Miller came within 16 hours of execution in 1983, and
Miller says they were "ready to go. . . . We'd rather have died than to
stay in that place for something we didn't do."
A federal judge issued a stay. Two of the three supposed
witnesses to the killing had recanted their testimony. And defense lawyers had
uncovered evidence that the victim's boyfriend, who moved away after the murder,
started dating another woman whose burned body was found in a field. He was
never charged.
In 1987, a federal district court threw out the convictions.
Prosecutors had withheld evidence and acted with a "callous and deliberate
disregard of the fundamental principles of truth and fairness," the court
said.
In January 1988, then-State Attorney James T. Russell allowed
Jent and Miller to go free on time served -- in exchange for guilty pleas to
second-degree murder.
Miller says he isn't sorry he took the deal. "I can't own a
gun," he says. "But I was free, I'm free, after 81/2 years of
torment."
Neither man's re-entry was smooth. Both were angry. A year after
going free, Jent, once a tattooed member of a motorcycle gang, was arrested in
Ohio on a misdemeanor marijuana charge.
Miller, a former Marine, says he died a little when his ex-wife
wouldn't let him see his two children. He'd stand inside a friend's house three
doors down and watch them through a window.
In 1991, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office paid the pair $65,000
to settle a wrongful-arrest lawsuit. Most of the money went toward lawyers' fees
and expenses incurred by the victim's father, who testified that he didn't think
Miller and Jent committed the murder. "The $14,000 I got bought me a nice
Harley-Davidson," Miller says.
Eventually, Jent moved to Arizona, where his wife, Patricia,
boosted his spirits and helped him find God. She put all of their assets in her
name and persuaded him to sweep the memories under the rug. Together they
closely guard the secret of his past.
"We have a good life," says Patricia. "We don't
want to relive this. Nobody knows about Bill's past. We don't talk about it.
We've turned it over to the Lord."
Miller, meanwhile, started to put his life back together when he
met his wife, Tamara Farmer, in Dayton seven years ago. A divorcee with four
children, she says "it took a lot of love and a lot of work" to
"break down the walls" of Miller's tough exterior. "He looked
scary," she says. "He didn't trust anyone. He never laughed."
The couple owns a '99 Ford Explorer and a four-bedroom house in
a middle-class neighborhood of Dayton. Tamara's four children and Earnest's
nephew live with them, along with a Rottweiler and two small dogs. The two
children lost to him while on death row are planning to visit soon.
Miller says he is haunted by suspicion. It doesn't happen often,
but "when I get pulled over for a ticket, I automatically stick my hands
out and put them on the car or keep them some place where the police can see
them. It's something I never did before and now I have to do."
Miller and Jent sometimes talk by telephone, though they rarely
discuss death row or compare notes about how it affects their thinking and
living.
They have a lot in common: After years of being locked in cages,
both work by themselves outdoors. After years of lost love and relationships,
both have found supportive wives. And after years of fearing life and death on
death row, both sometimes bolt awake in the middle of the night.
A few weeks ago, Miller was a pallbearer at a funeral for his
wife's grandfather. She says he was nervous about being inside in the church
with a crowd. "He wanted out of there," she says, "but he stayed
for me."
Juan Ramos
By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG © St. Petersburg Times, published July
4, 1999
Twelve years after he left Florida's death row, Juan Florencio
Ramos still paces like a prisoner locked in a tiny cell.
From the porch of his mother's house near Miami, he gazes at
strange cars. He puffs on Marlboros. And when he climbs into his red Trans Am,
he hits the gas and races down the street as if the guards are coming to drag
him back to prison.
Ramos, a 41-year-old truck driver, is a member of a small but
growing club that prosecutors don't like to talk about. From his wallet, he
pulls out a pre-prison photograph of a fresh-faced young man with a hard body
and smiling eyes. Now that body is scarred from prison fights, those eyes
sometimes glazed in anger. "That person," he says, choking back tears,
"is not me."
Experts say wrongful death sentences are built on similar
circumstances: police who use coerced confessions or questionable eyewitness
identifications; prosecutors who exploit false testimony or inaccurate
scientific evidence; jurors who are tainted by prejudice; judges who are out for
headlines; and suspects who are easy marks -- because of their race, criminal
background or inability to afford a good lawyer.
Only five of Florida's wrongly condemned have received
compensation from the state, and they say the money can't replace what they
lost.
There's an irony in the stories of death row survivors: It took
a death sentence to free them. If they had received a life sentence, they
probably never would have gotten out.
Michael L. Radelet, a University of Florida sociology professor
who documents wrongful executions, says death row survivors are the lucky ones
because only through good fortune and careful scrutiny of their cases were they
vindicated before a fatal error. "As long as we have the death
penalty," Radelet says, "innocent people will be executed."
With more capital punishment cases and shrinking legal
resources, the danger of wrongful convictions and wrongful executions is
"getting worse," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death
Penalty Information Center in Washington.
Most prosecutors, judges and Florida officials won't admit an
innocent person has ever been executed here or convicted in error. But Gerald
Kogan, who recently retired after 11 years on the Florida Supreme Court, told
the Associated Press in December that he wasn't convinced of guilt in "two
or three" of the 25 state executions while he was on the court.
"There are several cases where I had grave doubts as to the
guilt of a particular person, (and) other cases where I just felt they were
treated unfairly in the system," Kogan said.
Kogan, a former prosecutor, refuses to elaborate on which cases
he had in mind. "I've said what I'm going to say on that. I don't want to
talk about that any more."
Gov. Jeb Bush, who has signed death warrants to send two
convicted killers to the electric chair this week, declined to comment for this
story. In meetings, Bush has voiced concern about people on death row who may be
innocent, according to Carol Licko, his general counsel.
She says the governor signed the warrants only after a careful
review of the cases to eliminate any possibility of a wrongful execution.
Life on death row
Each of the cells is 6 feet wide, 9 feet long and 91/2 feet
high, with concrete walls on three sides and steel bars in front that look out
over a 3-foot-wide catwalk. Each cell has a steel toilet, a steel sink, a steel
footlocker and a steel bunk with a mattress 4 inches thick. Each cell also is
equipped with a 13-inch black-and-white television.
Meals, mail and Bibles are passed to the condemned through a
slot in the bars
Inmates can't see into other cells, but they can look down the
corridor by angling a piece of a mirror. They communicate with one another by
talking down the corridor -- called "getting on the bars" -- or
yelling through a vent or the plumbing pipes. Or throwing a long stick with a
note attached to the person in the next cell.
Twice a week, they are let out for a two-hour trip to an
exercise yard. Three times a week, they are escorted to the shower stall, where
the water runs for five minutes. Occasionally, guards jerk open a cell door to
search an inmate's belongings or body for drugs or shanks (crude, homemade
knives).
Death row survivors remember the numbing cold in winter, the
hellish heat in summer and the non-stop din of hundreds of voices and noises,
relieved only by an eerie quiet on execution days.
Alone with nothing but time, they did almost anything to keep
their minds occupied.
They counted every dent in the walls, every crevice on the
floor. They learned the heavy footsteps of their favorite nighttime guard. They
prayed for life and sometimes hoped for death.
They slept and wrote poetry, usually at night when there was
less noise. They read and argued about things such as whether to go to the
execution chamber kicking and screaming or "like a man."
Anthony Peek, who survived a decade on the row, paced so much --
five steps back and forth -- that his knees are weak. Dave Keaton, released from
death row 26 years ago, could catch a glimpse of the afternoon sun if he stood
at the right angle. Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, who for a time was the only
woman in the country on death row, painted by dipping strands of her hair in
beet juice.
One rule of survival: be buddies with everyone but close friends
with no one. That's because it hurts too much when a friend is executed.
Anthony Brown, who watched and listened 12 times as guards
prepared for executions, tears up when he remembers his final hours with Marvin
Francois. Francois, 39, was executed in 1985 for killing six people during a
robbery of a Miami drug house.
"We wanted to send him out on a high," says Brown, 43,
recounting how they shared a cigarette and fantasized it was a joint. "It
took a little out of me when they killed him. I'd grown real attached to
him."
No matter how they passed the time, they had one thing in
common: a date with death in Florida's electric chair.
Too painful to forget
"No matter how hard he screams," Ramos says, "no
one hears him.
Ramos grew up in Cuba, served three years in the Cuban military
and came to Florida in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Within a year, he was married,
living in Cocoa and making $11 an hour in a steel factory.
His new world collapsed in June 1982 when police arrested him
for raping, beating, strangling and stabbing Sue Cobb, 27, an acquaintance who
lived a block away. No physical evidence linked Ramos to the homicide, but there
was seemingly damning evidence provided by a police dog named Harass II.
After sniffing an empty pack of Ramos' cigarettes, the dog was
put in a room with five knives and five blouses. Harass stopped at blouse No. 5,
the victim's bloody blouse, then licked knife No. 3, the bloodstained knife that
had been embedded in her chest.
These were the only knife and blouse with blood on them -- which
seemed to prove only that Harass was attracted to blood. But that was enough for
a Seminole County jury to convict Ramos, who spoke little English, and for a
judge to overrule its recommendation of life and sentence him to death.
Norman Wolfinger, who was Ramos' public defender and now is
state attorney for Seminole and Brevard counties, cited another factor in what
he called "the weakest murder case I've ever seen" -- racism.
"Absolutely no attempt was made from Day One to pin the murder on anyone
but the sap, the Cuban," Wolfinger said at the time. Isolated from the
world, Ramos remained defiant in his cell on death row. "I thought about my
last meal," he says. "I was gonna tell them, "Just feed me the
same s---. It's disgusting of you to offer me the best food when I'm gonna puke
it back in your face.' "
Before he talked to the Times, Ramos, who learned English on
death row, had never spoken about his ordeal to the media. His 61-year-old
mother, Ena Garcia, tells him not to talk now. "You know it upsets
you," she says in Spanish. "Why start trouble?"
But Ramos needs to talk, and for six hours, at times angry, at
times tearful, he pours out details of his five years of wrongful imprisonment:
beatings, a stabbing, paralytic asthma attacks and an attempted gang rape.
Once, he tried to commit suicide by making a noose with a
bedsheet, tying it to the bars and sticking his head inside the loop. Another
time, he fought with a guard and was sent to solitary, now known as
"X-wing." The cell doors in "X-wing" are solid steel. To see
out, Ramos scrunched his face against a half-inch crack between the steel door
and the concrete wall.
And in his regular cell, he steeled himself for "Old
Sparky," once shocking himself with the hot wire of his TV. "I wanted
to know what it felt like to get cooked," he says.
While Ramos tried to keep a grip on his sanity, his lawyers
fought for his life in the courts. In October 1985, they got a boost when the TV
newsmagazine 20/20 exposed the unreliability of scent-tracking dogs, including
Harass II, the German shepherd that put Ramos behind bars. The dogs and their
trainer, 20/20 reported, had several times identified suspects who probably were
innocent.
In August 1986, the Florida Supreme Court reversed Ramos'
conviction, ruling that the dog-scent evidence was completely untested. At a
retrial, Ramos was acquitted, and on April 24, 1987, he drove to his new home in
Miami.
He enjoyed long showers and time with his wife, Danette, whom he
leaned on to guide him. But he felt "like a time bomb." He had a hard
time relating to people, especially women. "They talked only about
superficial things," he says. "How can they really understand what
it's like to be on death row?"
Ramos went into therapy, but four years ago his marriage fell
apart. He moved in with his mother, claiming a mobile home on the property in
south Miami-Dade County. He planted avocado, mango and sugar-cane trees, and now
cares for four dogs, a cat and 20 roosters that wander around behind the locked
front gate.
Every night, Ramos comes home to a hug from his mother and the
smell of her cooking. Every morning, she delivers him cafe Cubano in a thimble
cup.
Ramos says he feels less numb now, "much calmer." The
only time the adrenaline really pumps is when he's tooling around in his red
Trans Am or hauling steel in a semitrailer truck. As a truck driver, no one
looks over his shoulder or watches what he's doing.
Still, he feels like a prisoner sometimes -- able to face up to
death but worried he can't face up to life.
"I came here (to America) for a better life," he says.
"In Cuba, I'd be dead. I was found innocent here, but it didn't wipe
anything away. You're free, but free for what? The best, best years of my life
are gone. . . . I carry this with me until the day I die."
Bradley Scott
'We don't look back'
By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG © St. Petersburg Times, published July
4, 1999
When Bradley Scott returned home after 31/2 years on death row,
his clothes were in the closet just as he had left them. But there was a
stranger in the house -- his son Jonathan, who had just celebrated his 5th
birthday.
"I was scared of him," says Jonathan, now 13.
Jonathan was 2 days old when his father was arrested for an
8-year-old murder despite a seemingly strong alibi. Someone had killed Linda
Pikuritz, 12, and left her burned corpse in a field in Port Charlotte. Scott, a
lawn-sprinkler installer, was a convenient suspect: He had done time for
slapping a hitchhiker who refused his sexual advances after a night of beer.
Scott, now 48, contended he had been in Sarasota, 50 miles away,
the night of the murder, and even bought a suede jacket there. But records to
support his alibi were lost over the years, and he was convicted and sentenced
to death in 1988.
Looking back, Scott says he had something that many on death row
don't have -- a family to cling to. "A lot of guys on death row have no
one, nothing," he says. "I used to take my family for granted, but no
more. Without them, I'd be dead."
Scott's arrest, conviction and absence were a huge strain on his
wife, daughter and son. His wife, April, went on welfare. Seeing no end in sight
and feeling pushed to the limit by seven-hour treks to Florida State Prison,
patdowns and diaper searches, she decided to "grow up." She completed
a degree in criminal justice and began a career as a professional investigator.
"It's embarrassing," says April Scott, the daughter of
Christian missionaries. "Even if a person is innocent, you have to justify
yourself. People say, "Of course, she's gonna say that; that's his wife.'
"
On death row, Scott spent his days drawing with crayons and
writing cheerful letters home. Christmastime was especially lonely, and he
occasionally thought of suicide.
One of his grimmest memories is the time he was shackled to a
chair in the tiny infirmary cell so a dentist could pull 24 teeth -- 14 one day,
10 the next. "Why," he wondered, "are they giving me new teeth
when they want to kill me?"
In May 1991, to his surprise, the Florida Supreme Court not only
overturned his conviction, but also ordered him acquitted.
His alibi, which authorities had accepted at the time of the
murder, could no longer be corroborated when he went to trial almost 10 years
later, the court found. Witnesses had died; other evidence favorable to Scott
had been lost. "Suspicions cannot be the basis for a criminal
conviction," the court said.
Suddenly, Scott, 40, was free. When he came out of prison in
1991, he had only a brown grocery bag with two pairs of underwear.
He also had his family.
With the help of April's parents, Scott hit the ground running.
The day after his release, he was at work as a property manager and beginning to
rebuild shattered relationships. He shared household chores with April --
cooking, cleaning, driving the children to appointments. "Movies, pizza,
canoeing -- we do everything all together," he says.
Scott eventually landed two better-paying jobs, as a limo driver
and an independent contractor for a courier firm. A few years ago, the Scotts
bought their "dream house" in Palm Beach County, a three-bedroom ranch
with french doors and a swimming pool. They also added two dogs -- a Yorkshire
terrier for Jonathan and a Bichon Frice for Stormy, now 15.
These days, Scott cruises the Internet with Jonathan and watches
closely over Stormy as she approaches "dating mode."
Death row still haunts them. April Scott, who worries what her
bosses think, doesn't want it known where she works. Scott can't bear to watch
movies with scenes of prison life. And questions about the five-year gap on his
resume won't go away. "What are you going to say? I've been on death row,
but I didn't do it?"
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death
Penalty
800-973-6548
http://www.fadp.org
PMB 335
2603 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hwy
Gainesville, FL 32609
(800) 973-6548
fadp@fadp.org
