Inmate died shaking his fist at state of Florida

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 8, 2000

Perhaps Bennie Demps passed some of his last days on Death Row reading poetry.

If he did, Dylan Thomas was surely among the poets he read. For Demps did as Thomas commanded. He did "not go gentle into that good night." Lethal injection is supposed to be a kindly process for the condemned.

It is supposed to be a sanitized death, so those offended by what the state does will be less offended.

And it is supposed to go off like Mussolini's trains, on schedule.

It was none of these things.

The execution was 30 minutes late.

When Demps was given a chance to speak, he declared that he had been butchered.

He said that to find a usable vein, they cut him in the groin, in the leg, that he had bled a lot, that he was in a lot of pain. "I ask that you call for an investigation," he said to his lawyer on the other side of the glass, in the witness room with the rest of us. "This is not an execution. This is a murder. I am an innocent man."

Demps was sentenced in 1976 to death for killing another inmate, Alfred Sturgis -- partly on the victim's dying words. He'd said Demps and another prisoner held him down while still a third stabbed him. What reason would a dying man have to lie?

What reason then?

What reason now?

Twice, Demps spoke in Arabic. He had become a Muslim in prison.

Then the strong voice gave way to a trembling raspiness.

He thanked his mother.

He thanked his wife.

Together they had spent $18,000 in the last year paying lawyers to save him.

The only thing Demps omitted was a mention of the two killings that first got him in prison -- the shootings of two people in Lake County in 1971. His death sentences were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and to the end Demps believed he was framed in the Sturgis case because the state had been cheated of its first chance to kill him.

There was no blood found on Demps after Sturgis died. The only eyewitnesses were other inmates, who could have been easy targets for manipulation by prison officials.

Curiously, the man who defended Demps then is a federal judge now in Alabama.

The prosecutor went on to be a Bradford County circuit judge. He resigned to short circuit an investigation by the Judicial Qualifications Commission. Twice since 1997, he has been suspended by the Supreme Court from practicing law.

These details have been all but lost by the passing of time. Demps was on death row for a quarter century, in prison for more of his life than out.

This is supposed to destroy a man. It did not.

I was sitting in the back row. I saw those eyes, red with tears, facing impending nothingness. That arm, wrapped from fingers to elbow in bandages, where presumably one syringe, somehow successfully inserted, went in. That large body, for Demps had grown muscular in prison, under that sheet. And that voice.

He spoke for six minutes.

Then an increasingly uncomfortable prison warden, James Crosby, waved his hand as if to cut Demps off.

The medicine of death began to flow.

Demps' eyes were shut in a minute. His body went still under the stage-bright lighting of the execution chamber.

I am supposed to tell you watching him die terrified me. It did not. For this was a play where the ending had long ago been written.

It was the opening lines we didn't know, until Demps shocked us -- and the governor, if he has any decency. In dying, he did as Dylan Thomas would have wanted. He raged, raged "against the dying of the light."

And against the state of Florida.

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