At Issue: Crime and Punishment

Florida ends the nation's moratorium on executions

The Venetian blinds in the tiny brown chamber at the Florida State Prison opened at 10:11 a.m., giving the 32 witnesses their first glimpse through the glass partition at the condemned man. He was strapped tightly into the stout oak chair, a black gag across his mouth. Suddenly a black hood dropped over his face, and six attendants stepped back. The executioner, his identity a secret and his face also shrouded in black, flipped a red switch, sending 2,250 volts of electricity through the man's body, then two more surges. At 10:18 a.m., a doctor pronounced him dead, and the Venetian blinds closed.

So ended last week the life of John Spenkelink, 30, a wiry drifter and habitual criminal, after a frenzied week of final appeals, to the Florida Supreme Court, to the Federal Appeals Court and to the U.S. Supreme Court. He had won two brief stays, then lost them both because of pleas by Florida officials who were determined to put him to death.

Finally, he had kissed his mother and girlfriend goodbye, taken Communion and delivered to Episcopal Priest Thomas Feamster a cryptic epitaph: "Man is what he chooses to be. He chooses that for himself."

Spenkelink was the first person involuntarily executed in the U.S. since 1967,* and the reactions were immediate. Outside Spenkelink's cell, the 130 other condemned men on Florida's death row shouted and pounded on cell bars. Some 70 demonstrators gathered in the warm spring sun on a field near the prison, chanting "Death row must go" and singing "We shall overcome."

Spenkelink's death intensified the national debate that has long raged over whether capital punishment deters crime and should be retained or is a cruel and unfair form of revenge that ought to be abolished. Sociologists have never definitively answered the question, but the views of the American public, aroused by violent crime, seem clear: polls show that nearly two-thirds of the people favor capital punishment. Accordingly, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 against the arbitrary way in which capital punishment was imposed, 34 states have rewritten their death penalty laws to conform with the court's guidelines. State courts have imposed death sentences on about 500 people, nearly half of them black men and all but one of them convicted of murder. Opponents of capital punishment fear that Spenkelink's death, ending an unofficial moratorium, may lead to a wave of executions. Most of them will be in the Deep South, which has traditionally led the nation in imposing that penalty.

It was thus with a sense of urgency that many of the leading opponents of capital punishment assembled in Florida last week to stage a last-minute campaign for the hapless Spenkelink. Henry Schwarzschild of the American Civil Liberties Union warned of a "constitutional, legal and political disaster that will shock and appall the rest of the world." Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a late addition to Spenkelink's defense team, called the occasion "a tragic moment in American history" and gibed, "If you work at city hall you get voluntary manslaughter," a caustic reference to the lenient verdict against Dan White, the slayer of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk (see box).

The final act of the Florida drama began in Tallahassee at 6:46 a.m. on Friday, May 18, when Governor Robert Graham signed two black-bordered death warrants. One was for Willie Jasper Darden, 45, a professional robber who had been convicted of murdering a furniture store owner in Lakeland, Fla., in 1973. Darden's lawyers soon won an indefinite stay of execution so that a federal judge could consider their argument that the prosecutor prejudiced the jury at Darden's trial by saying that the defendant "shouldn't be out of his cell unless he has a leash on him."

The second warrant was for John Arthur Spenkelink, a moody loner who had been in and out of jail since childhood. Spenkelink's troubles began early; at twelve he discovered the body of his alcoholic father, who had committed suicide in the front seat of his truck in Buena Park, Calif. Two years later, Spenkelink was arrested for the first time, for driving a stolen car. There followed arrests for disturbing the peace, for burglary and for armed robbery. Stints in reform schools were to no avail. When he married briefly at 18, his probation officer could find only two positive things to say about him: he had not been in trouble before his teens and he had been "a wonderful paper boy."

In 1972, while Spenkelink was serving a five-year sentence for armed robbery, he walked away from the minimum-security Slack Canyon Conservation Camp near Big Sur. Driving through Nebraska, he picked up a hitchhiker, Joe Szymankiewicz, 43, an Ohio parole violator who had spent 16 years behind bars for forgery, burglary, theft and other crimes. For several weeks they roamed the country, ending up on Feb. 3, 1973, in Room 4 of the Ponce de Leon Motel in Tallahassee. Next morning, a maid discovered Szymankiewicz dead in bed. He had been bludgeoned and shot twice.

At his trial that fall, the slightly built Spenkelink admitted having killed his companion but insisted that he had acted in self-defense: the muscular, 230-lb. Szymankiewicz, said the defendant, had stolen $8,000 from him, forced him at gunpoint to perform fellatio and made him play Russian roulette. But the wounds were all from behind, and the jury took only 3 1/2 hours to convict Spenkelink of murder and sentence him to death. His lawyers filed 22 appeals, claiming that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, that it is unfairly applied more often to murderers of whites than of blacks and that the jury was improperly selected. Judges called some of the arguments "frivolous" and "shams" and rejected them all. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court four times and was four times rejected.

Living in prison for six years under constant threat of death wonderfully concentrated Spenkelink's mind. He spent hours reading the Bible and such works as the mystic prophecies of Edgar Cayce.

He drew cartoons with religious messages and once sent his mother a picture of a red, white and blue electric chair captioned, "Spirit of '76." He wrote letters for illiterate inmates and designed stationery for others, decorating the letterheads with hands clasped in prayer. "If I ever get out of here," he said at one point, "I'll do God's work." He occupied much of each day answering his mail, inscribing envelopes with the message: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MEANS THOSE WITHOUT CAPITAL GET THE PUNISHMENT. Twice a week he was visited by a girlfriend, divorcee Carla Key, 43.

His defenders insisted that Spenkelink had been rehabilitated. "If you want to execute a bad kid, then this is the case," his chief attorney, David Kendall, told the clemency board in April.

"But he has evolved, he has changed."

The clemency appeal was turned down.

Spenkelink begged the Governor to meet with him. Said the condemned man:

"I know the changes I've made since being here. I want him to know who he is killing--the real person, not some idea he has in his head about me." Said Spenkelink's anguished mother Lois, 67, of the Governor: "He doesn't even know my son. How can he kill my son, my only son?"

But Graham, looking haggard, stayed in Tallahassee, avoiding anti-death penalty protesters who blocked his outer office at the state capitol and who kept vigil at the front gate of his mansion, chanting "Bloody Bob! Bloody Bob!" Graham supports capital punishment as a deterrent, maintaining that it is "not inconsistent with Christian values." Said he, while signing the death warrants:

"There are other values of life involved here, including the value of the lives that were taken."

With only a few hours left, Spenkelink's lawyers made their final appeals.

Three lawyers, including Clark, argued before Federal Judge Elbert Tuttle that the court-appointed lawyers who defended Spenkelink at his trial were ineffective. In Washington, Lawyer Joel Berger went from Justice to Justice. Finally, Thurgood Marshall ordered that the execution be stayed. Almost simultaneously, Judge Tuttle did too.

Next morning, the full Supreme Court briefly considered Spenkelink's appeal and voted 7 to 2 to turn it down. In New Orleans, a panel of three federal judges deliberated into the night, then rejected it too. Spenkelink's lawyers appealed once more to the Supreme Court in Washington. At 9:50 a.m. on Friday, only ten minutes before the scheduled execution, the court refused again, by 6 to 2. Almost immediately, Spenkelink, his arms heavily manacled, was led into the death chamber next door.

*The last to die that year was Luis Jose Monge, who was gassed in Colorado for murdering his pregnant wife and three children. In 1977, Murderer Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah, but he scorned all appeals and went willingly before the firing squad, saying just before his death, "Let's do it."

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