Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies

Rescued from death row

A Court TV production tonight tells the story of six people wrongly convicted of murder who were eventually cleared. Four of the cases are from Florida.

Delbert Tibbs said he isn't uneasy watching someone else say things that he has said and recounting the tragedy he has lived.

At 65, he knows who he is and where he is going. And he's comfortable with his life story, even as it is played out by actors for people he has never met.

Tibbs is fortunate to be alive at all.

In the 1970s, he was sentenced to death and held on Florida's death row for more than two years before he was freed. His story is part of a Court TV production of the off-Broadway play The Exonerated that premieres tonight, focusing on six former death row inmates who were eventually cleared and set free.

In a tale of botched murder investigations that culls dialogue from real depositions and courtroom testimony, Florida is well-represented. Four of the six Exonerated subjects were convicted in Florida, which has executed 59 inmates since the return of the death penalty in 1976.

Tibbs said assisting playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen with the off-Broadway version, then helping with the Court TV production, is part of his life's work. He and the others lived a nightmare, overcame feelings of powerlessness and anger and loss, and survived. Telling the story is a logical next step, he said.

"It gets the message out. This can happen, and it does happen," Tibbs said in a telephone interview last week. "I was forced to be an activist for abolition because the state of Florida didn't want to let me go. I would have rather gone some place and sat on the mountain and thought about what happened to me, but I was forced to jump right into the abolition movement."

Tibbs was a former seminary student touring the country in 1972. He was passing through Florida when a hitchhiker was killed and the man's female companion raped in Lee County. Two weeks later, although he didn't exactly match the description of the killer, Tibbs was arrested in Mississippi. He was convicted in 1974.

The state Supreme Court ordered a retrial in 1976, ruling that the surviving victim was an unreliable witness, and Tibbs was freed on bail in 1977. Prosecutors dropped the charges in 1982.

Court TV's production is stark, gritty and clearly for adult audiences. The n-word flies in segments dealing with racism, and in telling the story of another wrongly convicted man, Kerry Max Cook of Texas, the film bluntly delivers Cook's account of brutal and frequent prison rape.

The production centers on the actors, often seated in an otherwise dark set. It's all about the spoken word and the emotion.

Watching it is draining, as the stories reflect the characters' bewilderment, anger and sadness.

The story of Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, another former Florida death row inmate, is especially poignant.

Jacobs, played by Susan Sarandon, was 26 in 1976 when a Florida Highway Patrol trooper questioned her, her husband and acquaintance Walter Norman Rhodes Jr. at a Broward County highway rest area.

Rhodes opened fire with a pistol, killing the trooper and a visiting Canadian officer. Rhodes later confessed, but first he cut a deal with detectives and pinned the killings on Jacobs and her husband, Jesse Tafero. It took 16 years for Jacobs to unravel the conviction and emerge from death row. In the meantime, Tafero was executed in the electric chair, an execution widely reported because the chair malfunctioned: Tafero had to be shocked repeatedly, and smoke poured from his head.

Speaking to the camera in The Exonerated epilogue, the real Jacobs, her hair gray, plainly described what she lost while in prison.

"My parents died, my children grew up and my husband was executed," she said. "I want to be a living memorial. While I'm still alive, I'm planting my seeds everywhere I go so that they'll say, "I once heard this woman, and she didn't let them stop her, and she didn't get crushed, and if that little person can do it, then I can do it.' And that's my revenge, my legacy."

Tibbs, played by Delroy Lindo (Malcolm X, Clockers, The Cider House Rules), said he is optimistic about the future. He plans to continue writing and campaigning against the death penalty.

Tibbs said he has seen some cause for optimism. In 2003, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan emptied that state's death row, commuting every sentence to life in prison and calling the capital punishment system there "haunted by the demon of error."

"I've seen changes," Tibbs said. "There's a growing consciousness among the American people that our criminal justice system has glitches in it and those glitches need to be dealt with. I think the play The Exonerated helps people to see that.

"We don't like to think about our shortcomings," Tibbs said. "The Exonerated helps to show that, and that's the beauty and the use of the piece."

- Chase Squires can be reached at 727 893-8739 or squires@sptimes.com

The Exonerated will be shown commercial-free at 9 tonight on Court TV, with encores Saturday and Sunday.