Tampabay: Behaving just like a killer on death row

Behaving just like a killer on death row

By MARY JO MELONE

The St. Petersburg Times decided last week not to publish the autopsy pictures of Frank Valdes, the convicted killer apparently beaten to death at Florida State Prison last July.

We would have gotten a lot of complaints from the squeamish and the offended, who would have been shocked at Valdes' smashed, misshapen face, his nose and upper lip bulging like two blood sausages, his eyes forever shut, his voice forever silenced.

We did not get photos of Valdes' torso, with all but two of his ribs broken and a foot or shoe print embedded in the skin. We did receive copies of the autopsy body diagrams, where doctors penciled in his injuries, making a furious sketch of the grossest doodles.

And we would have gotten complaints from those who also would have wanted to have published, side by side, the autopsy pictures of the prison guard Valdes helped execute almost 13 years ago, Frederick S. Griffis, in Palm Beach.

This is the crime that put Frank Valdes on death row. Griffis, a former Army ranger, the recipient of both the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, survived three tours of duty in Vietnam only to die two weeks after he became a corrections officer in Glades County. Valdes and another man shot Griffis in the head three times when he threw away the keys to a van carrying a convicted killer whom Valdes and a cohort wanted to set free.

I understand this impulse -- for fairness. It's also a variation on revenge, an impulse civilized people are supposed to restrain. You could call fairness in this case the noble mask of revenge. Demanding and striking a proper balance probably keeps revenge in check.

The death penalty, and this is no repeat of the tired debate over it, is also supposed to be an expression of this desire for balance, this masked revenge. I don't like it, but I understand the passion behind it.

But what I will never understand is how corrections officers could fail to keep their own rage in check and beat the life out of Frank Valdes, no matter how reprehensible a man he may have been. Their alleged act is the absolute breakdown in the balance the prison system is supposed to maintain for the rest of us.

And rage it had to be.

Rage and more.

It was rage embedded in a network of enforced secrecy designed to conceal something -- and now we know what.

This abuse is condoned.

Two prison guards broke the code of silence that has long hindered the investigation into the death of Frank Valdes.

"I'm scared, and I don't want anything to happen to my family," corrections officer Kevin Porter said in tears to FDLE agents during an interview.

The other guard, Charlie Griffis, had to be interviewed three times before he cooperated. He would speak only after he conferred privately with a prison guard captain he trusted and who was not a subject of the investigation.

Griffis -- apparently no relation to the Frederick Griffis killed by Valdes or another corrections officer named Jason Griffis now accused in Valdes' death -- said if he cooperated his career would be over. One of the four officers, now charged with second-degree murder, was a favorite of the warden, he said.

I tell you this not to make you feel sympathy for Frank Valdes. Even now he's a tough one to be moved by. But it is time to feel shame for this system in which jailers themselves can be turned into criminals, capable of slaughtering somebody like Valdes with less dignity than would be accorded a steer.