More considerable than the act itself was where it occurred (North Florida) and the rootless, friendless character of its author - a “white nigger”. In the larger reality not circumscribed by legal briefs, the defendant wasn’t exactly Charles Manson. The Clark County (Ind.) Prosecutor’s site has some legal briefs in addition to media reports on the case.) (The fact that Spenkelink committed the crime for pecuniary gain - that is, to get back his own money - also militated against him. In the new Court-mandated balancing act between “aggravating” and “mitigating” factors whose intent was to harmonize unfair application of the death penalty, this evident premeditation is what doomed Spenkelink.
But the killing itself was clearly not a moment of passion or immediate self-defense: Spenkelink had left their shared hotel room, returned with a gun, and shot his man in the back. Spenkelink claimed that Szymankiewicz had stolen his money, forced him to play Russian roulette, and sexually assaulted him, all of which seemed within the vicious character attested of the victim. Florida officials fought just as stubbornly to kill him.Īn itinerant parolee, he had in 1973 shot a fellow drifter named Joseph J. For six years, a span which seemed long then but would today rate on the speedy side, Spenkelink resisted death with every tool at his disposal. Gary Gilmore had earned trivia-question notoriety as the first put to death under the new regime two years before, but Gilmore was always an outlier, a bizarrely active exponent of his own death who greased the skids for himself. Now, the new architecture was in place and the decade-long hiatus in actual executions was drawing to a close.
#Florida man april 25 1979 series
since 1967.Ī series of court decisions in the 1970’s had scrapped the country’s old death penalty institutions and obliged legislators to restructure the process. On this date in 1979, John Spenkelink was electrocuted in Florida - the first man executed involuntarily in the U.S.
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