> Capital punishment: them without the capital
> get the punishment. <
> Executed in electric chair, Florida.
> ~ John Spenkelink, d. May 25, 1979
>
> * * * His crime . . . did not present . . . factors
> usually seen in death penalty cases. His life presented
> many mitigating circumstances, although his attorneys
> did not present them. Why was John Spenkelink
> executed? In his book, "Dead Wrong - A Death Row
> Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment,"
> Attorney Michael Mello quotes a member of the
> Florida legal establishment: "I'll tell you why they
> wanted to kill him. He was white. No one in the South
> wants to kill a black man first. * * * "
For a particularly aggressive example of exactly this sort of thing, though it involved two later proven to have beenframed and innocent convicted defendants but who provided the lying Fla. prosecutors and corrupt judges involved with the "advantage" (if that's the right word) that, though both were Caucasian, their names "sounded" as if they were Black -- see the (somewhat truncated) essay, "The Death Row Brothers" published at the American Philosophical Society's "Publications" web site written by one of the brothers' lawyers (the lead one), Eleanor Jackson Piel, Esq. (in which she is much to modest about what her efforts actually entailed).
www.aps-pub.com/pdf/piel105.pdf
This understatedly true story involved the prosecutors' use of torture of an "informer" to extract "evidence" and the physical switching of corpses and other prosecutorial misconduct, only some of which Mrs. Piel recounts in her article, all relentlessly pursued in an effort to try to obtain basically a "two fer" for the prosecution: a cover-up of their corruption in prosecuting men too poor to have obtained an effective defense while also executing them as a show of "fairness" -- i.e., that the State of Fla. was even-handed because it is willing to put to death two men because they were White at a time when, also in actuality, of course, while thereby also legitimating the use of capital punishment, the overwhelmingly predominant skin color of Death Row inmates ithere was otherwise.
And also illustrating the point first made with this thread's initiating posting, the two were saved, eventually, but only because, in effect, these basically impoverished guys, just through the luck of the draw, managed to attract the attention of an attorney with the economic wherewithal and intellectual/emotional character of stick-to-it-iveness to fight whose commitment and standing with colleagues enabled her to enlist others to help her fight on their behalf. So in the end these two were not executed. But the story all to painfully underscores the correctness both of the Spenkelink quote above and the "lets execute him because he's White (and then exploit that fact)" attitudes of law enforcement officials (and too many judges).