In the classic novel A Tale of Two Cities,
Charles Dickens begins his fictional story with the words: “It was the
best of times and the worst of times,” and those words could apply as
equally to that first year I spent on Florida’s Death Row. I suppose it
would be a bit of a stretch to suggest that my first year as a
condemned man was the best of times by any measure. But everything is
relative and what I soon discovered after coming to The Row is that even
in the worst of times it is the importance of holding on to hope not
only when you have reason to, but even more importantly, when that
reason is taken from you.
Charles Dickens wrote his story around
the French Revolution, which I doubt many would have thought of as the
best of times. It was a dark day in history, when death came to many,
and yet for those who survived, it brought hope. And it wasn’t that
much different on The Row. That first year the stench of death was
always around us, yet in the very midst of the darkness and despair,
there was hope and it was that hope that gave each of us the strength to
survive another day.
I came to The Row in early 1984, at a
time in which Florida only too proudly claimed the record not only for
the largest number of people condemned to death, but, the most executed.
This is the dark side of the Sunshine
State. Its zeal to kill is only exceeded by its indifference towards
sending the innocent to Death Row. When the U.S. Supreme Court
overturned the death penalty in the 1972 landmark decision of Furman vs. Georgia
by a marginal vote, the Court allowed the states to rewrite their death
penalty statutes with the misplaced presumption that if the states
would establish statutory provisions that “genuinely narrowed” the class
of individuals eligible for the death penalty through the adoption of
aggravating and mitigating circumstances applicable to each case, then
the imposition of the death penalty would not be unconstitutionally
arbitrary.
Florida was the first state to quickly
adopt new laws that complied with the Supreme Court’s criteria before
most other death penalty states could adopt new laws of their own. By
1973, Florida was already sending men to their new Death Row – as I
write this today (February 2013) one man a few cells down from me (Gary
Alvord) has now been here on Florida’s death row for 40 years as of this
year. (Admin note: Gary Alvord died of natural causes after this essay
was submitted).
But adopting new death penalty statutes
was not enough. In the years before I came, Florida quickly became the
poster child for state-sanctioned death, with its Death Row growing by
dozens every year. And the politicians running for elected office
shamelessly exploited the public’s unquenchable thirst for vengeance,
fanatically promising to put those condemned to a quick death.
By the time I came along, Florida was
intoxicated by its politically driven blood lust and as I joined the
ranks of the condemned, the cold machinery of death had already been
cranked up and killing the condemned became a statewide obsession.
John Spenkelink was the first one to be
involuntarily executed after the new death penalty was re-instated.
Although some might argue that Gary Gilmore (in Utah), upon which the
book and then movie The Executioner’s Song was the first one after
Furman v Georgia, Gilmore was a “voluntary” execution – he effectively
used the death penalty to commit suicide and made no meaningful attempt
to challenge his death sentence.
Florida was determined to be the first
state to carry out an execution upon someone who was not willing to
voluntarily die, and in May 1979 they succeeded in putting John
Spenkelink to death. Texas wouldn’t carry out its first post-Furman
execution for a number of years after that, and by the early 1980’s a
diabolically perverse competition arose between the states to see who
could kill the most condemned prisoners – and at least in those early
years, Florida easily won.
Florida carried out its next execution
in November 1983 when they put Robert Sullivan to death. Within just a
few more months, Florida killed Anthony Antone in January 1984, ignoring
the fact that Antone did not commit any act of murder himself, and
evidence that he did not participate in the act of murder – the
co-defendant who was convicted of that killing actually was sentenced to
life.
I came to The Row that last week of
March 1984 and quickly learned of the ritual of death. In the first
year following my arrival, Florida executed nine men. Florida was
perversely proud of “Ole Sparky,” its handmade electric chair, and each
execution brought on a spectacle not unlike that of a circus – a
contemporary lynching in the old town square, with the crowds gathered
outside the prison, openly cheering, drowning out the smaller segregated
group of those who opposed the state taking a life. And the media
would come from around the state to cover the event.
Inside the prison, this ritual brought
on another layer of despair, as the prison officials seemed to go to
great lengths to make sure that each of us knew they were killing one of
us.
For reasons I cannot be sure of, the
State of Florida was not allowed to use the public power source to
electrocute its condemned. I have been told that the electric company
would not allow it, but I’ve also been told that it was a “security
precaution. The state didn’t want to risk not being able to carry out
an intended execution if someone simply cut the power off. Where the
truth actually lies, only they know. But what I do know is that each
time Florida carried out an execution, they would crank up the huge
generator just outside the prison office near the wing of the prison
where executions took place, and the whole prison would be taken off the
public electrical source, and temporarily switched over to generator
power.
Within a few weeks of my arrival to
Death Row, Florida focused its attention on Arthur Goode, scheduled to
be executed on April 5, 1984. I didn’t know Goode, as he had already
been moved to Q-Wing Death Watch a few weeks before I came to The Row,
but this was the first execution actually carried out since I arrived,
so that first experience remains branded upon me.
Back then the executions were carried
out around sunrise of the scheduled day, but the ritual would begin long
before they got around to actually killing the condemned man. Although
we typically would be fed breakfast (in our cells) early every day, on
execution days it would come at least an hour earlier, often as early as
5:00 a.m. as they had to first feed us then collect the food trays and
get them back to the kitchen up front before they locked down the whole
prison during the execution itself.
Feeding us before they carried out the
execution also made sure we didn’t try to sleep through it. Because it
would still be dark outside, each of us would have our own cell light on
at the time, which back then was a crude single incandescent light bulb
hanging down by two wired from the ceiling of the cell.
At some point between passing out the
breakfast trays and picking them back up, all the lights would
momentarily go off, leaving us in darkness. In the distance we could
hear that generator come to life and then the cell lights would flicker
just a bit before coming back on. We knew what this meant as other than
the periodical test of the generator during the afternoon a few times a
month, when they switched over to generator power in the early morning
hours we knew that it meant whoever was on death watch did not get a
last minute’s stay of execution and they were now preparing to put him
to death.
We would not be allowed to escape our
own involuntary participation in this ritual of death, and most of us on
The Row would turn on our small black and white TV’s, tuning in the
Jacksonville stations to watch the live coverage from outside the
prison, each hoping that a last minute stay of execution would come and
each of us would continue to watch in collective silence until the TV
would show someone emerging from the rear of Q-Wing and waving a white
towel, which meant that they had carried out the execution. That was the
pre-arranged signal.
Barely a month after Arthur Goode was
put to death, Florida killed Aubrey Adams and it was this second
execution since my arrival that had an even greater impact, not only on
me, but on others around me. The execution of Adams was a reality check
for many of us who held on to the hope that our own wrongful
convictions would be corrected, and truth and justice would be allowed
to prevail.
It’s one thing to execute someone who
has confessed to a heinous murder, but it’s another thing entirely to
put someone to death who may very well be innocent. Out there in the
real world this is a never-ending source of intellectual debate, but in
here it really hits home as for those of us who have maintained our
innocence and have only our hope to cling to. The execution of someone
who has substantial evidence of actual innocence undermines our own
ability to keep that hope alive, and it drives home a truth that each of
us try desperately to avoid…the politics of death that drive each
execution do not care whether you’re innocent or not, and only the
hopelessly naïve would think that each man put to death was guilty. Our
judicial process is not that perfect and inherently lacks the moral
character or professional integrity to admit to its own mistakes.
The execution of Aubrey Adams
illustrated this truth and for the first time it caused me to question
“the system.” Until that time, I remained blinded by my own disillusion,
telling myself that our legal system would correct its own mistakes,
and as a society we would never allow an innocent person to be put to
death for a crime they didn’t commit. Looking back, I can now only
smile at just how incredibly green I was, as the execution of Aubrey
Adams and others that followed forced me to accept the reality that they
will put the innocent to death, and even worse, as a society we really
don’t even care.
A month after Aubrey Adams, Florida put
Carl Shriner to death, and the month following that they killed David
Washington. It seemed that each month since I came to The Row they
killed another one, and that dark cloud of death hung heavy over us
condemned. But then that cycle was broken – no executions were carried
out in August of 1984 and it seemed that the Courts were becoming
increasingly concerned about the lack of adequate legal representation
made available to those facing imminent execution.
But such an inconvenience as the lack of
qualified lawyers to represent the condemned would not be enough to
deter Florida’s ritualistic lynchings, and although nobody died in
August 1984, Florida made up for this lapse by killing both Earnest
Dobbert and James Dupree Henry in September of 1984.
That dark blanket of death hung heavy
and it seemed that if they were not actually killing one of us on the
next wing over, they were counting down to that next execution. But
this pace of executions could not be sustained as Florida continued to
refuse to establish any meaningful process for the timely appointment of
qualified lawyers, instead relying upon a small group of committed
volunteers who labored continuously to find lawyers willing to represent
the condemned – and few, very few, were willing.
By the latter half of 1984 the Florida
Supreme Court finally began to take a stand against the arbitrary and
dysfunctional system of recruiting volunteer lawyers only at the last
minute and began to issue stays of execution to send a long overdue
message that unless Florida established a means in which to provide
competent legal representation to the condemned before their death
warrant was signed, the Court would not allow executions to proceed and
this unconscionable machinery of death would grind to a halt.
Almost immediately, the pace of
executions dropped by at least half. In early November of 1984 Florida
put Timothy Palmes (who we knew as “Milkman”) to death, then it wasn’t
until the end of January of 1985 that the next was killed.
That execution of James Raulerson hit
especially close to home for me, as from the time I came to The Row.
J.D., as I knew him, was my cell neighbor. He was the first person I
actually knew on The Row that had been killed. J.D. had been convicted
of robbery and the murder of a police officer in Jacksonville, although
there was no intent to kill anyone. Like the majority of cases in which
the death penalty is imposed, J.D. was convicted under Florida’s felony
murder law, which allowed a person to be convicted of capital murder
for the death of anyone if it was the result of the commission of
another crime…no intent to kill is necessary.
In J.D. Raulerson’s case, he and his
cousin had decided to rob a restaurant and were still inside when the
police came and surrounded the place. A gunfight ensued and a police
officer was killed. J.D. consistently insisted that he never shot at
the police, and that the officer died by “friendly fire” – another cop’s
bullet hit him in the heat of combat.
But it didn’t matter. Under Florida law
someone died during the robbery – and J.D.’s own cousin was shot and
killed during that gunfight, and that made J.D. legally culpable for
both the death of the police officer and his own cousin’s death – even
though there was no question that the police had shot his cousin. When
it came time for the State of Florida to execute J.D. on that cold
winter morning of January 30, 1985, hundreds of police officers gathered
outside the prison gleefully cheering on his death while wearing custom
made t-shirts that said “burn, baby, burn.”
That was the first time that I saw just
how low we can go as a society, and why, despite pretense, we really
have not evolved beyond that image of the old west lynch mobs. That’s
just what it was that day, only it wasn’t ignorant villagers intoxicated
by their blood-lust and joyfully cheering on the death of another human
being; it was those representing law enforcement that created this
circus atmosphere.
Within that first year that I was on The
Row, Florida put nine men to death. But for each one they executed, at
least two more men came to The Row, and the ranks of the condemned
continued to grow. It didn’t take long before I was no longer one of
the new guys and became part of the greater whole.
By 1985 the pace of executions dropped
dramatically as politicians struggled to find a solution to the problem
of the condemned having no reliable means of securing legal
representation. Florida was determined to lead the country in
executions, and soon it was the politicians themselves advocating for
the first-ever state funded agency established exclusively to provide
post-conviction legal representation to the condemned. The argument in
favor of establishing this proposed agency was simple; by providing
state-funded lawyers, the Courts would allow executions to continue.
With this cloud of death hanging over
all of us, it was only too easy to abandon all hope and accept our fate.
But even there in that shadow of death, there was reason to hold on.
The particular tier I was housed on that first year housed a total of
16 condemned prisoners, as although each tier had 17 cells at that time,
an “inmate runner” occupied the first cell on each death row tier. It
was his job to pass out meals, then collect the food trays, and
distribute cleaning supplies each day.
Of the nine men put to death that first
year, I only personally know one, and during that same period of time on
my floor alone there were five men who would walk off death row and
back into the real world.
That’s what hope is all about: finding
reason to sustain the strength within. Although each execution brought
home the reality that I was condemned to die and death was a very real
possibility, I found my own strength sustained by the hope that came
when another man won his freedom.
It’s easy to assume that every person
sentenced to death has to be guilty, but our legal system is plagued
with the imperfections inherent to all men. In Florida’s over-zealous
push to lead the country in bringing back the death penalty, the legal
system itself became corrupted by prosecutors who openly competed with
each other to convict and condemn as many as they could, and by any
means necessary. It didn’t take long before Florida lead the country
(at times) in both the number of men and women sentenced to death, and
in number of executions. And with this political corruption of the
process came another distinction. To this day Florida continues to lead
the country in the number of wrongfully convicted (innocent) men and
women sentenced to death.
Not long after I came to Death Row, the
Courts began to vacate a number of these wrongful convictions. Although
it would still take a few more years before they would walk free, on
that tier I was housed on that first year, one out of every three men I
housed among would be exonerated and released from prison. My neighbor,
Louie Virango won a new trial and pled out to a lesser charge that
resulted in him being set free. Joseph Green Brown was exonerated by
new evidence after coming within hours of execution, and Juan Ramos
walked out of a courtroom in Miami after it was revealed that the bite
mark evidence used to convict and condemn him for a crime he
consistently pled innocence of was not what the state had led the jury
to believe it was.
A few cells down the other way towards
the back of that tier were Larry Troy and Bama Brown, convicted and
condemned to death for allegedly killing another prisoner at The Rock
(Union Correctional Institution). Their convictions were based
primarily upon the testimony of another inmate, and there was evidence
to suggest that inmate actually committed the murder. Years after
sending them to The Row, this inmate tried to extort money from the
girlfriend of one of the condemned men – if she would pay him thousands
of dollars, he would tell the truth.
Instead of being manipulated, she went
to the state police and told them of the attempt to extort her. They
worked with her to secretly take communications between her and the
prisoner, then arrested him for perjury in a capital case and attempted
extortion. Soon after, both Larry Troy and Bama Brown were exonerated
of the murder they were wrongfully convicted of and condemned to death
for.
Many more would be put to death, and
many more would walk free, and I struggled constantly to find that
balance between the reality that was Death Row and that hope that
sustained my strength. It was more than just a tug-o’-war between
opposing sides. No matter which way I might be pulled at a particular
moment, even when I clung desperately to that elusive wisp of hope
brought about by relief another man won, I still awoke each morning in
my own concrete cage and each night I struggled to sleep through the
never-ending nightmare that was my own condemnation.
Michael Lambrix 482053
Union Correctional Institute
7819 NW 228th Street (P3226)
