The Man Who Cheated the Electric Chair
On March 24, 1926, Jim Williams was convicted in Palatka for stabbing his wife, Stella, to death when he found her in the company of another man. Judge A.V. Long of the Putnam Circuit Court sentenced him to die by electrocution. Williams, then 25 years old, was a black man in the Jim Crow Era South and, as such, his crime, trial and sentencing did not get much attention beyond a one sentence blurb in the local newspapers. In fact, some accounts did not even mention that it was his wife whom he was convicted of killing, identifying the victim simply as “another negro.” It had been only two years since Florida centralized all executions and set the electric chair at Raiford as the method of death. During that two year period three men were executed, two for murder and one for criminal assault. On May 1, 1926 Florida Governor John W. Martin signed death warrants for Williams and three other convicted men. One man would be executed each week dur...