A recent ret­ro­spec­tive in the Fort Myers Florida Weekly on the state’s death penal­ty traced some of the prob­lems that have arisen since Florida resumed exe­cu­tions in 1979. During the exe­cu­tion of Jesse Tafero in 1990, six-inch flames shot from the prisoner’s head, and three sep­a­rate jolts of elec­tric­i­ty were required to kill him. Prison offi­cials attrib­uted it to ​“inad­ver­tent human error.” In the exe­cu­tion of Pedro Medina in 1997, flames and smoke again spewed out from under the head gear. Ron McAndrew, the war­den at the time, recent­ly remarked, ​“For the next 11 min­utes, instead of elec­tro­cut­ing this man, we burned him to death. We lit­er­al­ly burned him to death.” Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw called such exe­cu­tions ​“bar­bar­ic spec­ta­cles” and said they were ​“acts more befit­ting a vio­lent mur­der­er than a civ­i­lized state.” Florida also has more exon­er­a­tions (24) from death row than any oth­er state. It is the only state that allows a jury to rec­om­mend a death sen­tence by a sim­ple major­i­ty; most states require una­nim­i­ty. The state’s recent pas­sage of the Timely Justice Act, designed to speed up exe­cu­tions, has raised con­cerns that it will reduce death row inmates’ oppor­tu­ni­ties to prove their innocence.

(B. Cornwell, ​“Florida’s flawed Death System,” Ft. Myers Florida Weekly, October 15, 2014). See Botched Executions, Innocence, and History of the Death Penalty.

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