Justices uphold death sentence, despite killer's notoriety as a poet

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published August 31, 2007

TALLAHASSEE - Convicted killer Stephen Todd Booker has become an accomplished and nationally published poet since going on death row almost 30 years ago, but Thursday the Florida Supreme Court said that's no reason to spare his life.

Booker, who will turn 54 Saturday, raped and fatally stabbed 94-year-old Lorine Demoss Harmon in her Gainesville apartment on Nov. 9, 1977. After his murder conviction the following year, Booker began writing poetry on topics ranging from life in his native Brooklyn, N.Y., to his romance with a Japanese woman while he was a soldier stationed in Okinawa.

His work has been published in the Kenyon Review, Seneca Review and other respected literary publications.

In 1994, the Wesleyan University Press published a book of his poems, which won an endorsement from poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize.

The high court's 7-0 ruling upholding Booker's death sentence disappointed Southern Methodist University English professor Willard Spiegleman. He is one of six poetry experts who testified for Booker when he was resentenced after a federal court in 1991 reversed his initial death sentence.

"If a case can be made for a prisoner rehabilitating himself through study, then Stephen Todd Booker would certainly qualify for that," Spiegleman said. "It seems to me to be a case of pure vengeance. He's no threat to society."

Booker's lawyer, Harry Brody, said he plans to ask the Supreme Court to rehear the case or appeal to the federal courts.

Booker challenged his death sentence but not his guilt. The only other sentencing option is life in prison.

"When I got to death row, I couldn't blame it on society," Booker said in a 2004 interview with the New York Times. "I knew I'd put myself in prison."

He raised a variety of issues, including a claim his death would violate the First Amendment right of the public to read his work.

He also contended his former lawyer was ineffective because he failed to call three additional witnesses, all experts on the poet Ezra Pound. They would have compared him to Pound, who "had been freed from a death sentence," Booker argued.

The Supreme Court wrote in its unsigned opinion that calling more witnesses would have added little to the case.

[Last modified August 31, 2007, 00:21:10]