'The only fly in a bowl of milk'

Press, 20 February 1988, Page 23

'The only fly in a bowl of milk'

For the sixth' time there has been a stay of execution for Willie Darden ROBERT CHESSHYRE reports from Death Row, Florida.

Willie Darden had been due to die on Wednesday, February 3. It is possible to be that precise because his death was by order of the Governor of Florida. He was to have been taken from the 6ft-by-9ft cell he has occupied since Richard Nixon was in the White House, strapped to a venerable oak chair and subjected to several 2000-volt shocks.

The imminence of his demise was no novelty; on five previous occasions, the Governor had set a date. Once Darden had been measured for his complementary execution and funeral suit he ordered his last meal: oysters and scallops. That time the United States Supreme Court stayed his execution with six hours to spare. This time, with greater consideration for all concerned in this macabre ritual, they stopped it nine days before his date with “Old Sparky.” “In the literature of close brush with death,” wrote an American journalist, “Willie Darden deserves a chapter of his own.”

Darden’s first execution date was set in 1979 and has achieved something that America’s beleaguered capital punishmentabolitionists had begun to fear was impossible. Executions, which had been raising somewhat less public interest than highway crashes, are back in the headlines. Darden’s case, said the “New York Times,” reporting his last reprieve, is now a “cause celebre.”

There are 2000 men, women and juveniles on America’s Death Rows and their numbers are growing by 250 a year — far outpacing the present annual execution rate of about 20-plus. Americans, fed up with appalling crime rates (there are more than 20,000 murders each year), are in a vengeful mood, and no longer greatly concerned with individual cases; 86 per cent of Floridians support the ultimate punishment.

The Supreme Court has been whittling away whole categories of defences, and an orgy of judicial killings look set. Even a quite possible miscarriage of justice like the Mississippi gassing of Edward Johnson featured in a 8.8. C. documentary “14 Days in May” scarcely touched the general public.

It took Darden, older, wiser, more articulate than the vast majority on death row, to puncture this cocoon of national indifference. He writes and receives between 50 to 70 letters a week; appeared on a recent week-end on two of America’s three television networks; and has been championed world-wide by Amnesty International.

Had his latest execution not been stayed, vigils would have taken place outside American embassies across Europe.

The focus of this attention was led manacled into a small orange-painted interview room at the Florida State prison, a threestorey, lime-green complex deep in a scrubby pine forest near the Georgia border. One hundred metres away, down the spine of the prison, 286 other men were locked away on Death Row. The “Sunshine State” leads the nation in death sentences. After the chain around Darden’s waist had been removed he offered a large, handcuffed hand. It was, he said, with the familiarity of a chat-show host, his 300th media interview.

“I am a living witness to the fact that innocent people can be sent'to death row. If it is possible to establish that one innocent man could be executed, that in itself should be enough for this country to outlaw capital punishment,” he said, settling to the practised task of once again reliving the far-off events that put him where he is. He is a big man, now 54, almost bald, grey showing in his two-day growth of beard, and in surprising trim considering he has been allowed to exercise only four hours a week for 14

years. On a gold chain round his neck he wore a golden crucifix studded with a red stone; his left hand bore a large ring and a gold watch, and shiny, imitation crocodile shoes showed beneath his blue prison-issue trousers. “This unique environment has instilled in me a consciousness of death,” he said. His voice has grown loud to compete with the din of Death Row, and when he is impassioned, as he is frequently, he leans forward and stabs the table with his cuffed hand. Like virtually everyone on America’s Death Rows, Darden is poor; like a highly disproportionate number, he is black. His grandfather was the son of a slave.

If what Darden and the large number of people, who now believe he is innocent, say is true, and recently two middleclass white citizens have come forward with evidence that would place Darden some miles from the crime for which he was convicted, he is the most abused and wronged man in America.

If, however, what the prosecutor repeated a few weeks ago in the case is true — he alleged that Darden was guilty of further callous killings for which he was not tried — then Darden is one of the most dangerous men in a

country that is not short of psychopaths. But the simple fact that Darden’s case is still the subject of raging debate 14 years and six stays of execution after he arrived on Death Row is enough in the minds of capital punishment opponents to render the American death penalty “cruel and unusual” and therefore unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.

If Darden is reprieved he will be living evidence that the system which, since the rewriting of death penalty laws in accordance with stringent Supreme Court standards, is supposed to work with predictability and rationality is, in truth, arbitrary and unsatisfactory. Darden executed would be a martyr.

To understand the milieu in which the crime took place, the reader must dismiss from his mind such popular images of Florida as Miami Beach or Disney World. The hinterland of upper and northern Florida is an integral part of the Deep South, more “To Kill a Mockingbird” than Epcot Centre.

Route 92 west out of the State citrus capital of Lakeland towards Tampa is fringed beneath the pine with the mobile homes of poor whites and the mean shacks of even poorer blacks. It is redneck territory; dilapidated pool halls, drive-in cinemas, trailer parks of rotting caravans. Defiantly amidst the squalor, Farmer Jones’s Red Barn Restaurant offers “the finest food in the South.” There is scarcely a decent lick of paint within miles. In September, 1973, an impoverished white couple, Jim and Helen Turman, were eking a living out of a “furniture” store. Police snapshots of the time show piles of sordid second-hand mattresses, chipped tables and rotting floorboards. Just before closing time one wet Saturday evening, when Mrs Turman was alone in the shop, a black man walked in and asked to look round.

He was, he said, refurnishing a rental apartment. He went back to his car, and returned with a gun. As he was demanding the contents of the till — a pathetic SUSIS — Mr Turman entered by the back door.

Despite a warning shout from his wife, Mr Turman was shot precisely between the eyes. As Mrs Turman ran to help her husband, the killer unzipped his trousers, told her to remove her false teeth, and demanded oral sex. “Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy,” she cried. At that moment a young neighbour, Phillip Arnold, came to investigate the noise, and in his turn was shot, though not fatally, three times.

Shortly after the grisly events, Willie Darden on week-end leave from a prison where he was serving 20 years for assault with intent to rape (a charge he has freshly denied) crashed his car into a telegraph pole six kilometres towards Tampa. When the police discovered his identity and record, he was picked up on suspicion. “Willie Darden drove into a set of circumstances he did not precipitate,” said his lawyer at the latest stay of execution.

The following day the police claimed to discover a .38 Smith and Weston, rebored in England during the Second World War, lying in a foot of water 10 metres from the crash site. The firing pattern of the gun fitted the shots fired at the furniture store. There was no forensic evidence to link Darden to the gun or to the store. However, Phillip Ar-

nold, recovering in . hospital, picked Darden’s picture out of six he was shown, and Mrs Turman later identified Darden at a preliminary court hearing.

Both identifications were deeply flawed: the picture Arnold was shown had Darden’s name and arrest date on it (by then the local newspaper had already reported that Darden was being held for the crime), and Mrs Turman was asked to identify him when he was the only black man in the room and was sitting at the defence counsel’s table. “I was,” says Darden today in typically graphic fashion, “the only fly in a bowl of milk.”

Because of pre-trial publicity, the case was moved to the small town of Inverness, a two-hour drive to the north of Lakeland. If it was this trial before an all-white jury that convicted Darden, equally it was what happened at this trial that has kept him alive since. Every one of the many appellate courts that has

reviewed the trial down the years has been deeply unhappy, particularly ■ with inflammatory remarks made by the prosecutor. Those who believe in Darden say the trial was the modern equivalent of a lynching. The day that Mr Turman died, two other citizens of the Lakeland area, a liquor store manager and an estate agent, were shot in similar circumstances.

The public outrage was intense, and the pressure was on the police to make an arrest. Darden’s claim is that a black man on leave from prison was too tempting a suspect for the police to pass up. The prosecutor referred to Darden as a vicious animal and said: “I wish (Mr Turman) had had a shotgun in his hand when he walked in the back door and had blown his (Darden’s) face off. I wish I could see him sitting here with no face, blown away by a shotgun.” The jury to whom these emotive words were uttered were to be responsible not only for deciding Darden’s guilt or innocence, but also in recommending the sentence. It was little wonder, says Darden’s lawyers, that the jury voted 12-0 for the electric chair. When in 1986 the United States Supreme Court most recently upheld Darden’s death sentence

on a 5-4 vote, one of the dissenting judges, Justice Harry Blackman, wrote: “Today’s opinion reveals a court willing to tolerate not only imperfection but a level of fairness and reliability so low that it should make conscientious prosecutors cringe.” The central question became not whether Darden had an imperfect trial but whether it was sufficiently unfair to have resulted in a miscarriage' of justice. Time after time, Darden has lost that decision by one vote.

Sitting outside that Inverness court room 14 years ago was Christine Bass, who would have told the jury that Darden was outside her house waiting for his car to be repaired at 5.30 on the day of the murder. She was never called. For years she has been convinced of Darden’s innocence and has fought publicly despite a series of death threats. Now a clergyman, Rev. Sam Sparks, summoned to give comfort to Mrs Turman, has sworn that the crime had to have been committed before 5.30. If their testimony is accurate, Darden could not have shot Jim Turman, and it is this evidence that the Supreme Court will now examine.

If ever, say Darden’s lawyers, there is a case for clemency, this is it. But in the politics of Florida, it is suicide at the ballot box to be “soft” on crime.

Late last month Darden’s friends and lawyers had given him up for dead. When the Supreme Court reconvenes at the end of this month, it must be Darden’s last shot.

A recent Amnesty report on the death penalty in America has this to say on death by electrocution: “It produces visibly destructive effects, as the body’s internal organs are burned; the prisoner’s flesh often swells and may even catch fire; the prisoner may defecate, urinate or vomit blood.”

Such brutality is not particularly healthy for the state of mind of the general public either.

Robert Harper, Darden’s remarkable lawyer who has kept his client from the electric chair for a decade without receiving one cent, is convinced, as is Darden, that the .38 was planted. “One day someone will come forward with the truth, and that will be the end of the case.”

If that proves so, the question is will Willie Darden still be around to appreciate it? Copyright — London Observer Service.

First date set in 1979

Appearance on television

Prospect of martyrdom

Trial before all-white jury

Public support despite threats

Convinced of gun plant