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By MARY JO MELONE
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 25, 2000
Iget past the barbed wire, fine and dense as carefully crafted lace. Past the electric gates that magically open, without even a nod from the guards. They insist I remove my shoes and even the belt to my slacks before I pass through the metal detector. They take away my driver's license, and my purse, after they have nosed through the messy, innocent contents.
I am just inside the front of Florida State Prison, near Starke.
I am here to visit Bennie Demps, a convicted three-time killer.
He is entering what are probably his last seven days of sunsets and sunrises.
I am going to see him die.
I am to be a witness at his death by needle, the administration of a lethal injection next Wednesday night at 6, as the rest of Florida sits down to dinner. If his appeals fail, and so far they have, he will be dead 17 days shy of his 50th birthday.
I asked for this, to witness some execution, as the long overdue completion of what I consider a necessary duty for a reporter in a state that is in the killing business. I have even told other reporters, who have filled this job before me and were rattled by it, that I doubt it will bother me. Reporters see the dead. I have seen the dead. Like most people, I have lived through my own losses, too.
Still I can't bring myself to ask him what he thinks of me being a witness to this killing that he believes he doesn't deserve. He's got to know I'll be there. I've already told his wife.
It only hits me later that I was embarrassed to ask.
Ordinary emotions still apply, even with a murderer.
Demps is in a little booth, one of several in a long bare room. We are separated by a glass. He talks through a phone, and I do. Behind him is a door made of metal links. Guards pass by periodically. Now that death approaches, they never leave him.
Desperation could make him do something terrible.
I doubt it. He smiles all the time.
"I'm in the fight of my life. I don't have time to be depressed."
He says he has been framed.
But you could make a case that he has had incredible luck.
He was first convicted in 1971 of the machine gunning of a real estate man and a Connecticut woman looking to retire by an orange grove in Lake County. The woman's husband survived to identify Demps.
A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the death penalty. Demps' sentence was commuted to life.
The death penalty was reinstated four years later. Two months after that, in September 1976, Demps and two other inmates were charged with stabbing another inmate. He was sentenced to death.
But he did not die.
He is on his fourth warrant and a new claim of innocence -- that the state withheld a document in which a corrections investigator identified only one killer, and not Demps.
He has appealed in Circuit Court, the Supreme Court. He has used a lawyer. He has written some motions in his long, slanted handwriting.
He has gotten quite the education from FSPU.
Even though he despises the system -- he calls it "the new slavery" for black men like him -- he talks of prison with some gratitude.
"When I came to prison, I knew nothing about nothing," he says. "But I just didn't sit in that cell. I learned. I studied."
He became a Muslim.
He remained an outlaw. He still lives by this principle:
"I could see someone kill my own mother, and I could not testify against him. Excuse me for saying so, but it's an actual fact."
He leans against the glass toward me. He is still smiling. I am embarrassed again. The state calls him a three-time killer. But he is intelligent, well-spoken, proud and effective. This is why I am embarrassed: Somehow, he has managed to charm me.