North Coast Xpress - - Aug-Sept 97

JAIL-HOUSE MERCIES IN FORT PIERCE, FLORIDA

An Associated Press story entitled "Tape Shows Jailer Taunted Man Dying of Overdose," was published on February 8, 1997. I must have seen it that day. Then it disappeared. I did not recover it until just now, when it jumped out at me from between some unrelated, irrelevant pages. I paraphrase it now with no further elaboration.

Anderson Tate, a 22-year-old African American man, was arrested in Fort Pierce, Florida, after being pulled over for driving without a valid driver's license or a license plate. He evidently swallowed some cocaine he was carrying to avoid detection. At the St. Lucie County Jail, he was clearly in trouble, moaning, thrashing and chanting prayers for more than three hours, while pleading for help. No help came. Jail employees and deputies ignored his pleas and walked past him. How do we know this? His ordeal was video-taped by a jail surveillance camera. "I don't want to die. I'm burning up. I'm 300 degrees. I've got too much cocaine in my system," Tate said on the tape. One of the deputies taunted Tate, clapping and stomping his feet to the beat of Tate's chants and fanning him with a clipboard when he said he was burning up. Tate went into convulsions and stopped breathing. He died later at a hospital.

They laughed while the video-tape was watching them. Which says something about how little they were worried about public opinion. Should they be sent to prison for murder, as the dead man's sister demanded? They would not survive a day in any joint I know. I have a more satisfying proposal.

Let the videotape be played in every village, town and metropolis. And if the alleged perpetrators are convicted in Federal Court, for violating the constitutional rights of their poor dead brother, let this be their sentence:

Let them be in the audience watching the tape. Then let them be led to a dock on stage, to face the questions and comments of their fellow Americans.

Let them do this night after night, every week of their lives
.
Then, when they die, after lives which have become very long, let this be their memorial:

Here lie some unsung heroes of American Law Enforcement who went laughing to their victim's graves and who will live for ever in ignominy with the Indian killers, the S.S., the Black Shirts, the Ku-Kluxors while God Blessed America.

"Fire-Spitting Electric Chair Isn't Cruel," Judge Says

Last March Mr. Pedro Medina had the ill luck to find himself in Florida's electric chair, a lethal antique which had earned itself the nick-name "Old Sparky." When the switch was pulled, Old Sparky justified its reputation and the luckless spectators watched flames leap from Mr. Medina's head, while "acrid smoke filled the death chamber."

After inflicting that unusual punishment on the spectators, Mr. Medina, in due course died-and Florida's Supreme Court suspended executions in order to allow a thorough court review of the question: Did Old Sparky also inflict cruel and unusual punishment on the condemned?

Comes now Circuit Judge A. C. Soud, who, upon conducting that hearing, definitively concluded that "Medina suffered no conscious pain. This can be said for all inmates who will be executed in Florida's electric chair."

This flew in the face of testimony by a medical college brain expert who testified that there is a "high likelihood that judicial execution by electrocution is excruciatingly and intensely painful."

The judge pronounced his finding with a certainty reminiscent of the pre-scientific ages during which experts as renowned as Aristotle and Ptolemy asserted that an unmoving earth is the center of the universe. Even in the face of evidence produced by Galileo, the Church Fathers concurred, and threatened the world's first experimental scientist with the stake if he did not renounce his heretical counter-view.

Let the record reflect that experts called by the state held, with impressive unanimity, that "the chair kills immediately and without pain." The citizens of Florida can now rest assured that the flames will inflict no pain on "all inmates who will be executed in Florida."

One may hope that the suffering inflicted on spectators will diminish as the spectacle occurs more frequently. In time, they may even come to enjoy it, as did their holiday-making forebears who flocked to public executions in the tens of thousands.

What else was there to do, before television?

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