Electric chair debate started before Jones

By Bill Foley
Columnist

Neurologists, pathologists, electrical engineers and other second-guessers as to how it feels to be killed in the Florida electric chair appeared before Circuit Judge A.C. Soud to help the majesty of the law determine if it is cruel and unusual punishment to electrocute Leo Jones, convicted of shooting a Jacksonville policeman to death in the back of the head from ambush 16 years ago.

The proceedings were occasioned by flame extruding from the face mask of Pedro Medina, the slayer of an elementary school teacher, in March. Lawyers for the state and for Death Row inmates argued essentially whether execution hurts, the philosophical assumption being that it is bad if it does.

It is not a new argument.

Florida's electric chair was less than 7 years old when Jim Williams walked away under the aegis of cruel and unusual punishment. Williams, Putnam County wife-killer, may have been the only man to have escaped Old Sparky after actually warming it with his physical presence.

It was not a malfunction of the electric chair that spared Jim Williams. It was a malfunction of the man who was supposed to push the button, whoever that was.

Let us bear in mind that the Florida of 1930 was not marked by the political correctness of today. In a half-dozen years, 26 men had sat in the Florida chair and the apparatus had worked just fine, given the purpose for which it was intended. Williams was the 27th and when he was strapped in, he and all others concerned expected Old Sparky to proceed as usual.

Two Putnam County deputy sheriffs had gone to Raiford for the execution. Prison Superintendent J.S. Blitch signaled all was ready and told the deputies to pull the switch. For reasons lost to history, the deputies refused.

The reasons apparently were not benign. The first deputy said it was the second deputy's job, and the second deputy said it was the first deputy's job. Blitch started arguing with both the deputies, stating that he, Blitch, was the guy who was supposed to determine which deputy was supposed to do it and the deputies told Blitch whatever it was that Putnam County deputies told people with whom they disagreed to do in 1930.

Williams sat strapped in the chair during the entire to-do, the black hood over his face, expecting any minute for somebody - either of the deputies, the superintendent or the couple of dozen other people standing around - to throw the switch.

Eventually, Blitch called the whole thing off, and Williams wobbled from the chair.

The superintendent sought the counsel of his peers, and everyone agreed one of the deputies should have pulled the switch. Jacksonville Journal reporter Ed Pinney said Blitch did not want to proceed after the altercation, fearing that a flawed execution would, indeed, be murder.

Blitch took the case to Gov. John W. Martin, former Jacksonville mayor.

Martin asked how long Williams had sat in the electric chair, strapped in to ride the lightning, the hood of doom over his head, listening to the two Putnam County deputies and the Raiford superintendent argue over who was going to pull the switch, sending him to eternity.

Fifteen minutes, said the superintendent.

Too long, said the governor.

He commuted the sentence to life in prison.

Pinney said Williams would not sit in a chair, any chair, for weeks afterward.

Less fortunate was John Frazier, central figure in an execution fiasco two decades later.

Frazier was convicted of killing a woman in a rape attempt in Union County. He was scheduled to be the third man to die in a triple execution the morning of June 1, 1959.

The first two executions went as scheduled. When the current hit Frazier, one of the electrodes on his head jolted sideways. ''An electrician, wearing insulated gloves, calmly stepped to the chair and held the electrode in place until the current was turned off,'' The Associated Press reported.

Times-Union senior writer Bill Foley can be reached on the Internet at

tulib@tu.infi.net.