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STARKE, Fla.—Florida’s third death by lethal injection went awry Wednesday evening and was delayed for 33 minutes as technicians struggled to insert a lethal IV into the veins of a 49-year-old killer.
When curtains between the death chamber and witnesses finally opened, the condemned man, Bennie Demps, who was strapped to a gurney, launched a seven-minute tirade: ``They butchered me back there. I was in a lot of pain. They cut me in the groin, they cut me in the leg. . . . This is not an execution, it is murder.’’ Eyes bulging and voice quavering, he said the medical examiner would find ``a wound on my leg that they sutured back up. I was bleeding profusely.’’
After Demps died, Florida State Prison Warden James Crosby said the delay was caused in part by the wait for final word from the U.S. Supreme Court and in part by the medical procedure. Demps’ attorney, George Schaefer, disputed that, saying the court had notified the warden by 5:30 p.m. Crosby refused to answer questions.
A governor’s office spokesman later said that technicians had inserted one IV properly in Demps’ left arm, but had trouble finding a vein for a required ``alternate’’ IV. The state switched to lethal injection in February after a series of botched electrocutions and amid concern that the Florida Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court might forbid use of the electric chair.
On three occasions in the past 10 years, electrocutions had resulted in smoke, flames or bleeding.
Gov. Jeb Bush had turned aside last-minute pleas from death-penalty opponents, including one Wednesday from Pope John Paul II. Demps had dodged the electric chair for two 1971 killings but died for the stabbing death of a fellow inmate five years later. The ex-Marine died at 6:53 p.m. He was the 47th prisoner to be executed since the state resumed executions in 1979, and the fourth since Bush became governor 18 months ago.
Demps was the first inmate to die in a scheduled evening execution, after prison officials changed the time from 7 a.m. to make it easier on corrections department personnel. Opponents of the death penalty, and Demps himself, claimed that a report on the death of inmate Alfred Sturgis, missing for 22 years, raised serious questions about Demps’ guilt.
Anti-death penalty protesters held rallies in six cities across the state as Demps died. Members of the newly formed South Florida Committee Against the Death Penalty met on the steps of the Miami-Dade Courthouse in downtown Miami.
Late Wednesday, the pope called on Bush to stop the execution. Through his representative in the United States, Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, the pope appealed to the Catholic governor’s ``compassion and magnanimity.’’
But Bush, a convert to Catholicism in 1995, is a vocal supporter of the death penalty and has chided judges who he says are too protective of criminals’ rights. Last week, through his lawyers, Bush faulted the Florida Supreme Court for encouraging ``legal gamesmanship’’ that allows convicted killers to extend appeals, and their lives, for 15 years in some cases.
Opponents say the 21 death sentences that have been overturned on appeal in Florida should be enough to make the state reconsider its death penalty record.
Demps spent more than half his 49 years on Death Row. He was originally sentenced to die for a 1971 double homicide, north of Orlando. Then 20, he and two accomplices accosted a Connecticut couple and an Orlando real estate agent who had seen them cracking open a stolen safe in an orange grove. All three—Celia and Nicholas Puhlick and salesman R.N. Brinkworth—were shot. Only Nicholas Puhlick survived.
But a year after Demps got to Death Row, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. Demps and 96 other condemned inmates had their sentences commuted to life.
Then in September 1976, just two months after the high court upheld Florida’s new death-penalty statute, Demps was accused of holding down Alfred Sturgis, a prison snitch, while another inmate, James Jackson, stabbed him to death.
Said to be implicated by Sturgis’ dying words, Demps was again convicted of murder and sentenced to die. Demps’ lawyers said a memo by a prison inspector, found 22 years after the original trial, contradicted a guard’s testimony that Sturgis had named Demps.
The Florida Supreme Court ruled Monday that the memo didn’t warrant a new trial.