Florida
likes to execute people. Since
centralizing judicial execution in 1923, the State of
Florida has executed more than 300 convicted
criminals. Prior to that, when
executions were carried out by individual counties, documentation is scarce.
While
Florida ranks sixth overall in
state-sanctioned executions historically, it holds a solid fourth place since 1976,
behind only Texas, Oklahoma,
and Virginia,
a period during which some states have slowed or outlawed executions altogether.
Capital punishment worldwide has a long history that extends
back thousands of years. In Florida, there is
evidence of Native American tribes executing members for various offenses. As early as the 1500s, French explorers
documented the beheading of Timucua sentinels for the crime of falling asleep
at their posts. It could have been worse
for them, as boiling was another method of execution used by the natives.
When the Spanish arrived in 1565, they brought the Spanish
legal system with them. As the
government was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, punishment was often
weighed against the accused person’s chance of redemption. There were very few executions under Spanish
rule; those who committed serious crimes and were judged unredeemable were
disposed of via hanging or firing squad.
The one group that did not receive divine mercy was pirates, who were
executed in a particularly excruciating manner using an instrument called a
garrote. These scoundrels would have a
rope tied around their neck with a wooden handle attached at the back. The handle would be slowly rotated,
tightening the rope and squeezing the life out of the condemned.
When Florida
was under British control, from 1763 through 1784, the number of executions
increased sharply. The British were
believers in the strict rule of law, and instituted public hangings not only as
punishment but as a deterrent to others who might be inclined to commit
crime. Unlike the Spanish before them,
who were required to consult with religious authorities, British colonial governors
had the sole discretion to impose a death sentence.
The Second Spanish Period, which began in 1784, saw Florida return to the
Spanish legal system and attitude towards capital punishment. Again, there were very few executions, and
not only because of religious considerations.
The imposition of the death penalty in the capital of St.
Augustine needed the approval of the Audiencia, the central Spanish government in Havana, which regularly overturned the local
sentence due to the need for men to fill its military ranks. The one crime for which the death penalty was
hardly ever overturned was military desertion.
As Spain’s
control over Florida
waned in the early nineteenth century and much of the territory was essentially
lawless, justice, including execution, was dispensed at a local level.
One brutal example of this occurred on Amelia Island. Luis-Michel Aury was a French privateer
(essentially a state-sponsored pirate) who took control of Amelia Island
for a two-month period before being driven away by American forces. He left behind a son, Luc Simone Aury, who
was nothing but trouble and was accused of a number of crimes including rape,
robbery, and murder. Aury was being held
in jail, scheduled to be hanged the next morning. To deny his captors the satisfaction of
executing him, Aury slit his own throat in a suicide attempt. Aury was discovered still alive, prompting
the summoning of a local doctor to stitch his wound. The next morning, Aury was led to the
gallows. A rope was placed around his
neck as the gathered crowd cheered.
However, when the trap door was opened, the weight of his body ripped
apart the neck wound, nearly decapitating him and spewing blood all over the
crowd. The horrified spectators fled in
a panic, trampling many underfoot.
This Article is Reprinted with Permission from the Book
Florida Felons: Stories from the History of Raiford Prison
Following Spain’s
ceding Florida to the United States in 1819, executions
(almost all by hanging) were still carried out by counties, with the sheriff
acting as executioner. It would remain
that way for the next one hundred years until a centralized government and
state penal system began to develop, culminating in Florida placing all executions under state
control in 1923.
Without a consistent standard the use of the death penalty
was ripe for abuse. This abuse was
evident in the years surrounding the Civil War, particularly regarding the
arbitrary application of the death penalty and the horrific treatment of Black
individuals. Before the war, almost all Black
people in Florida
were enslaved and could be killed on the whim of their masters. During the war, escaped slaves were often
executed as an example to others who sought freedom. Following the war, however, ineffective law
enforcement, together with mob rule, resulted in hundreds of extrajudicial executions,
also known as lynchings.
According to the NAACP, between the 1880s and 1930s, more
than 200 Black men were lynched in Florida,
the highest rate among the southern states.
In fact, an estimated one in every 1,250 Black people living in Florida during this time
died with a noose around their neck.
Most of the victims were already in jail when the mob demanded that they
be turned over for execution. Although
some sheriffs stood up against the mob, most put up just a show of resistance
or none at all. The end result was always
the same: a Black man hanging from a rope.
In the early 20th century, Florida’s legal framework became more
standardized and centralized. In 1913
the Florida State Prison Farm opened in the town of Raiford.
Over time the Prison Farm expanded and was converted to a traditional
prison. In 1923 Florida placed all executions under state
control. The same law mandated that
executions be carried out by electrocution rather than hanging.
The electric chair was invented in 1881 by a Buffalo, New York,
dentist named Alfred Southwick after he read stories about a man being electrocuted
when he touched an industrial generator.
He designed a chair (which, not surprisingly, looked much like a
dentist’s chair) with leather straps and electrical wires. His design was refined by the two competing
electric companies of the time, one owned by Thomas Edison and the other by
George Westinghouse. The bitter,
intense, and very public competition pitted Edison's Direct Current design
against Westinghouse's Alternating Current design; to demonstrate their
concepts, each carried out a series of public experiments by electrocuting
hundreds of animals, including dogs, cats, pigs, and even horses.
Eventually, Westinghouse’s version of the electric chair won
out and was soon put into use. New York State was the first state to use the
electric chair when, on August 6, 1890, it executed William Kemmler, a man with
a mental disability convicted of killing his wife with an axe. According to accounts at the time, Kemmler
asked corrections officers, “Don’t let
them experiment on me more than they ought to.” It did not go as planned; the first 17-second
charge of current did not kill him, so a second one was administered that lasted
for two minutes. The room filled with
smoke and the smell of burning flesh.
Horrified witnesses fainted and vomited.
Kemmler was dead, the electric chair having done its job.
The electric chair soon became the preferred method of
execution in several other states, of which Florida was the fourteenth.
Florida
constructed its electric chair and installed it at Raiford in 1922, in
anticipation of the 1923 law that placed all executions under state control and
mandated electrocution. According to prison
officials, it was made in the prison’s wood shop by inmates using wood from an
oak tree on the property. Other accounts
claim it was built at Cook’s Cabinet Shop in Jacksonville.
It was a solidly built three-legged chair with heavy leather straps, a
helmet-like head electrode, and wires to connect to the condemned’s legs. The first person the chair was used on was
Frank Johnson, who was executed on October 7, 1924, after he was convicted of
murdering a railroad engineer during a robbery.
Even though the electric chair was Florida’s official means of execution, there
was one case that led to one last judicial hanging in the state. In 1925 Charles Brown was sentenced to death
for the January 1923 murder of a taxi driver in Volusia County. His execution in the electric chair was
slated for January 1927 but was halted at the last minute because of an
appeal. That appeal was not successful, but
another one that claimed his sentence should be vacated because the electric
chair was not the legal means of execution when the crime was committed, was
viewed more favorably. A judge sent the
case back to Volusia
County for re-sentencing. The successful appeal did not lead to the
result that Brown was hoping for.
Charles Brown was shipped back to Volusia County,
where a judge promptly sentenced him to death by hanging and set the date for
April 18, 1927. The county constructed a
gallows behind the courthouse. On the
day of the execution, a large crowd gathered to witness the spectacle, knowing
that it was probably their last opportunity to see a hanging. Schools let out
early, businesses closed, and roads were shut down around the courthouse to
accommodate the mass of spectators. The
condemned was led to the gallows amid the cheers and jeers of those in attendance. At 10:06 a.m., the county sheriff pulled the
lever sending Brown to his death. The
family of the taxi driver who Brown murdered was given the noose as a memento
of the occasion.
This Article is Reprinted with Permission from the Book
Florida Felons: Stories from the History of Raiford Prison
Over the next several decades Florida executed 196 people in the electric
chair. Locals, mirroring a nickname used
in many other states, called it “Old Sparky.”
In 1961, Florida State Prison was constructed and became the new home of
the electric chair. Florida paused executions in 1964, as did
most states, when judicial challenges were raised. The United States Supreme Court struck down
the death penalty in 1972, halting executions nationwide, and the sentences of Florida’s 92 remaining
death row inmates were commuted to life without parole.
Following the Supreme Court decision Florida, along with several other states, rewrote
their death penalty statutes in an attempt to address the issues that led to
the prohibition. They were successful in
this endeavor and in 1976 the court reversed itself. Old Sparky was back in business.
John Spenkelink was the first person executed in Florida after capital
punishment was reinstated. Spenkelink,
24 years old at the time, had escaped from a California prison in 1972, where he was
serving a life sentence for armed robbery.
He made his way to Florida, picked up a
hitchhiker, and the two checked into a Tallahassee
motel. According to Spenkelink’s
testimony, the other man tried to force him to have sex, so he took off. But according to prosecutors, Spenkelink
waited for the man to fall asleep and then shot him in the head and assaulted
him with an axe.
Spenkelink was picked up a few days later in California on an armed robbery charge and was extradited
back to Florida
to stand trial. He was offered a plea
deal that would have given him life in prison but he rejected it. At trial he was convicted of first degree
murder and sentenced to death.
Spenkelink filed several appeals of his sentence, claiming that his
attorney was incompetent and he was convicted only because he could not afford
a better lawyer. His appeals failed and
his execution was carried out on May 25, 1979.
His last words were, “Capital
punishment. Them without the capital get the punishment.”
Old Sparky remained in operation for the next 20 years. The original chair, built in 1922, was
getting old. Cracks could be seen in the
seat. The legs were getting a little
wobbly. Some wires were getting
frayed. The head electrode had not been
replaced in some time. Even though it
was deteriorating, Old Sparky still did its job and was kept in service.
A botched execution in 1990 pushed the old chair into the
limelight. Jesse Tafero was to be
executed for the murder of two police officers during a 1976 traffic stop. As jailers were preparing the electric chair
for his execution, they noticed that the sponge, which was to be wet and placed
on the condemned’s head to conduct electricity, was wearing out. A deputy was dispatched to a local store to
purchase a new sponge but mistakenly bought the wrong type. They needed a natural sponge, but he bought a
synthetic one. When Tafero was strapped
into the chair and the switch was thrown, his entire head burst into flames
over a foot high. Tafero moaned but
could not scream because of the gag in his mouth. The initial jolt did not kill him, so they
had to shock him two more times. The
torturous event went on for 20 minutes until he was finally pronounced dead.
The news of Tafero’s execution became fodder for the already
existing national debate over the use of the electric chair. During the 1980s, several states had switched
to lethal injection as the preferred method of execution. Florida
carried on with electrocution, still using the old worn-out chair. They finally built a new one, of the same
design but sturdier, in 1999 to accommodate the execution of Allen Lee “Tiny” Davis out of concern that
it would collapse under the weight of the 350-pound convicted triple-murderer. By then, the original Old Sparky had been
used in the execution of 235 people.
Even with the new chair, the electrocution of Tiny Davis was
grisly. Witnesses claimed that Davis was still alive for
several minutes even after the current was turned off. His head was jolted backward revealing his
bloodied nose under the mask. Blood ran
down his front and covered nearly his entire body. Execution photos were circulated widely, and
public pressure finally convinced Florida
to replace the electric chair with death by lethal injection.
Despite Florida
using injection as its default execution method, condemned prisoners are still given
the option of electrocution if they choose.
Electrocution has only been requested by one inmate, Wayne Charles Doty,
who was sentenced to death in 2013 after killing a fellow inmate while serving
a life sentence for murder. Doty is
still on death row, so it is unclear whether his request will eventually be
honored. To date, more than 60 people in
Florida have
been executed by lethal injection.
In the book "Florida Felons: Stories from the History of Raiford Prison", you'll be introduced to several
individuals who have faced execution in Florida.
These stories highlight the varied circumstances that can lead a person to
death row: from those convicted of heinous crimes, including the murder of law
enforcement officers or multiple victims, to others whose fates were
intertwined with obsessive personal relationships. You'll also encounter cases
that defy simple categorization, such as an inmate who tragically killed a
fellow prisoner while serving a life sentence, individuals who sought to escape
their impending doom, and even a unique instance where a condemned man was
spared at the very last moment, due to a dispute among his executioners. Taken
together, these accounts underscore the complex human narratives behind Florida's history of
capital punishment.
In total, Florida
has executed over 300 people in the past 100 years, and it continues to do so
today. The youngest were two people each
16 years of age. The oldest was 72. Florida
continues to broaden the range of crimes for which a person can be executed,
recently passing laws that allow the death penalty for people convicted of
human trafficking and mandating it for those who commit capital crimes while in
the country illegally. It is also one of
the few states that does not require unanimous agreement of a jury to impose a
death sentence. Florida’s history of execution, and its
unwavering support for capital punishment, shows no sign of diminishing in the
foreseeable future.
This Article is Reprinted with Permission from the Book
Florida Felons: Stories from the History of Raiford Prison
