last meal

FLORIDA – EXECUTION PAUL HOWELL FEBRUARY 26 6:00 PM EXECTUTED 6:32 PM

february 26, 2014

Authorities say 48-year-old Paul Augustus Howell was pronounced dead at 6:32 p.m. Wednesday after a lethal injection at Florida State Prison

Howell’s last words “I want to thank the Fulford family,” Howell said. “They were pretty compassionate, and I’ll remember that.”

UPDATE  4:30pm

Howell’s last meal was a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, according to a Department of Corrections spokeswoman.

The DOC also says Howell had one friend visit and met with his Catholic spiritual adviser.

He is set to be executed by lethal injection.

The man who built a bomb that killed a Florida Highway Patrol trooper is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection.

Drug trafficker Paul Howell is set to die for the February 1992 murder of Trooper Jimmy Fulford at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Florida State Prison.

Howell rented a car and paid another man to deliver a gift-wrapped box to a woman in Marianna. Along the way, Fulford pulled the man over for speeding on Interstate 10 just east of Tallahassee.

The man gave Fulford a false name and birthdate and was arrested. Howell was called about the rental car and asked if Fulford had permission to be driving it and never warned the dispatcher the bomb was in the trunk.

FLORIDA – EXECUTION JUAN CARLOS CHAVEZ , FEBRUARY 12 at 6 p.m UPDATE EXECUTED 8.17 pm

february 12, 2014

UPDATE: Juan Carlos Chavez was executed at 8:17 p.m., according to the governor’s office.

Juan Carlos Chavez had no last words in death chamber, but apparently wrote out a last statement to be distributed later

UPDATE 6.30 PM

The execution of Juan Carlos Chavez, the South Miami-Dade farmhand who raped and murdered 9-year-old Jimmy Ryce in 1995, was temporarily delayed Wednesday evening because of last-minute legal wrangling.

A spokeswoman for the office of Gov. Rick Scott said the state, as of 6:30 p.m., was still awaiting a final go-ahead from the U.S. Supreme Court.

UPDATE 3.55 pm

For his last meal, Chavez requested ribeye steak; French fries; a fruit mixture of mangoes, bananas and papaya; strawberry ice cream; and mango juice. He ate and drank all of it, according to Department of Corrections spokeswoman Jessica Cary.

Chavez had no visitors Wednesday except for a Catholic spiritual adviser. Cary said his demeanor was calm.

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he case haunted Miami-Dade Police Det. Pat Diaz’s career

For Pat Diaz, retracing the steps of a tragedy is not easy.

“That’s the bus stop,” Diaz says, pointing at a street corner in the area near Homestead known as the Redland.

The former Miami-Dade Police homicide detective led the search for a missing boy named Jimmy Ryce back in 1995.

“When you have a missing 9-year-old, you want to believe, you always have the hope that you’ll find the child,” Diaz said, reminiscing about the case that would haunt his career.

To this day, the street sign at the corner is a memorial to the little boy who never grew up, decorated with flowers and pictures of Jimmy. A man named Juan Carlos Chavez took Jimmy, a case that struck fear into the hearts of parents everywhere. Detective Diaz heard the details when Chavez confessed.

“He tells us he rolls down his window, points the gun at him and says get in the trunk, Jimmy crosses the street and gets in the trunk with him, and basically this is where it happened,” Diaz said, standing at the spot at which Chavez abducted the boy. “Jimmy was probably 250 yards from his house, that’s how close he was to his house.”

Volunteers passed out flyers, joined police in searching the area, and it was all too late. Chavez had already abducted, tortured, and killed Jimmy in his trailer.

“It’s the parent’s worst nightmare,” said Michael Band, a Miami attorney who, in 1995, was the prosecutor on the case.

Band won the first-degree murder conviction and a death sentence for Chavez, who is scheduled to be executed Wednesday.

But it wasn’t easy, Band says. There was tremendous pressure from the community, the trial had to be moved to Orlando to seat an impartial jury, and he had to control his own emotions.

“You don’t remove yourself, you try to be as rational as one can be but you think about things like that, you think, that could’ve been my kid, could’ve been your kid,” Band said.

Chavez was on the way to death row, but the pain only got worse for the victim’s father, Don Ryce: Over the years he lost everyone except his son, Ted Ryce. After Jimmy’s murder, the stress and depression hung over the Ryce family. A heart attack killed Don Ryce’s wife, Claudine Ryce, in 2009. His daughter committed suicide, still despondent over Jimmy’s death.

“If there was ever anyone in the world who deserved to die it’s the man who did that,” Don Ryce said last month, speaking after the governor signed the death warrant for Chavez.

“I think, sadly, the statistics are that predators are not going to be deterred because Juan Carlos Chavez gets executed,” Band said.

That doesn’t mean Band has second thoughts about asking for the death penalty. He agrees that Chavez got what he deserved. Band says the verdict was professionally satisfying, but there’s a hole in his heart when he thinks of Don Ryce.

“He still goes home without Jimmy,” Band said, and the execution won’t change that awful reality. (nbcmiami)

February 11, 2014

  Juan Carlos Chavez                       Jimmy Rice

MIAMI (CBSMiami) — “It’s been a long, long time coming,” said the father of Jimmy Ryce, upon learning that Wednesday, February 12th is the day the man who kidnapped, raped, murdered and dismembered his 9-year-old son, will be put to death.

It was September 11, 1995 when Jimmy Ryce disappeared without a trace when he got off his school bus near his home in The Redland.

Juan Carlos Chavez, 46, was convicted of the heinous crime three years later.

It was a trial that captivated South Florida and the rest of the nation.

Chavez was charged with the crime three months after Jimmy vanished. Chavez confessed but years would pass before he came to trial. The delay tormented Jimmy’s parents.

“There is no constitutional right to delay a trial until the victim’s families die of old age,” said Jimmy’s father Don Ryce in May of 1998.

Chavez did eventually go before a jury in Orlando. The trial was moved there because of intense media scrutiny. The Ryce family came to the trial every day, including Jimmy’s sister Martha.

“And I’m here to represent my family, and Jimmy, because he can’t be here,” said Martha in September of 1998.

Lead prosecutor Catherine Vogel told of Chavez confessing to snatching Jimmy Ryce from the side of the road, raping and shooting him in a remote trailer, and then using a wicked looking bush hook to dismember the boy’s body.

“He took the tool, he chopped the body into about four different pieces,” said Vogel during the 1998 trial.

Chavez sealed the remains with concrete in plastic planters.

For then prosecutor Vogel, now Monroe County’s State Attorney, they are images she will never forget.

“We had to excavate those planters, we had to dig through the concrete to find poor little Jimmy Ryce’s body that had been dismembered,” said Vogel.

Ranch owner Susan Scheinhaus testified how she found Jimmy’s book bag and homework in a travel camper that Chavez lived in which was located on her property where he worked as a farm hand.  But the defense dropped a bombshell.

“The detectives were telling me what I should and should not write,” said Chavez through a translator at the trial.

Chavez recanted his confession and claimed his employer’s son killed Jimmy.

The Ryce’s watched outraged at the defense ploy.

“Their dream is to exchange high fives over Jimmy’s grave, while they set their client loose to rape and murder another child,” said an angry Don Ryce during the trial.

But former homicide detective Felix Jimenez, who is now with the Inspector General’s office, took Chavez’s confession. He said Chavez first told a series of lies including a tale of accidentally running over Jimmy and putting his body in a canal that divers searched for hours before Chavez finally came clean.

“He admitted in detail to everything that he did,” said Jimenez. “His confession was so detailed, that only the killer would know.”

For instance, police didn’t know until Chavez told them that Jimmy was killed in the filthy, falling down trailer.

“When we went there and we looked, and we found Jimmy Ryce’s blood exactly where he said he shot him, then we knew we had gotten to the truth,” said Vogel.

A gun found in Chavez’s camper was an exact ballistics match for the bullet that killed Jimmy.

The jury convicted Chavez on all counts in less than an hour.

“Had he gotten away with it, he would have killed again and again and again,” said Michael Band, the man who prosecuted Chavez. Band is now a private defense attorney.

On November 23, 1998, Chavez was sentenced to death.

Judge Marc Schumacher sentenced Chavez to die in old sparky, the electric chair.  But the appeals dragged on for years.

At a hearing in January 2007, his mother said, “You know, it’s been over eleven years since Jimmy was killed, and he was only nine years old.  So he’s been dead longer than he lived.” Jimmy would have been 21 years old at that hearing.

Governor Rick Scott finally signed the death warrant for Chavez in January.

Claudine Ryce didn’t live to see it. She died from coronary disease, a broken heart, in 2009.

Jimmy’s sister Martha took her own life last year at the age of 35.

When Don Ryce learned of the Chavez’s death warrant last month, he wept. His son Ted is his only remaining family.

“We’ve suffered a terrible loss,” said an emotional Don Ryce. “A loss you don’t wish on anyone.”

Monday, February 10th, Chavez was denied a stay of execution by the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. It’s one of the final appeals left for Juan Carlos Chavez before his scheduled execution on Wednesday evening.  click here opinion.pdf

What Death Row Inmates’ Last Meals Say About Guilt or Innocence

february 9, 2014 (abcnews)

More than any of the bizarre traditions in American history, the “special meal” served to a convicted felon just prior to execution has captured the imagination and curiosity of just about everyone from movie moguls to legal scholars to scientists.

There is a historical suggestion that the meal serves as a means of reconciliation between the murderer and the society that has extracted final revenge, perhaps even making the executioner feel more comfortable in his solitary role.

But a new study offers evidence that the last meal provides a last chance for a person who feels he or she has been unjustly condemned to show innocence.

Researchers Kevin M. Kniffin and Brian Wansink of Cornell University have looked at the last meals requested — or rejected — by 247 persons who were executed in the United States between 2002 and 2006 and found that those who maintained their innocence to the very end were far more likely to reject the meal than prisoners who had accepted their guilt.

“Those who denied guilt were 2.7 times as likely to decline a last meal than people who admitted guilt (29 percent versus 8 percent,)” they conclude in their study, published in the journal Laws.

Prisoners who were “at peace” with their sentence, as the researchers put it, asked for 34 percent more calories than those who insisted they were innocent, and the “innocents” asked for “significantly fewer brand-name food items.”

The researchers see the declination of a last meal as an opportunity for a prisoner who thinks the conviction was wrong to tell the executioner to, well, shove it.

“Last meal requests offer windows into self-perceived or self-proclaimed innocence,” the researchers claim, and thus could provide a sort of court-of-last-resort verdict because if innocent people won’t eat, and guilty people will, perhaps the system ought to pay more attention to the final menu.

They concede in their own study, however, that there are “several limitations to generalizing from our analysis,” since claims of innocence might not be altogether honest reflections of the prisoner’s real opinion, and there is little continuity in how the records are kept from one prison to another, and most (71 percent) of the prisoners who claimed to be innocent still wanted that last meal.

Still, the results are intriguing and offer an additional reason for continued analysis of death row’s “special meals.” Why they are offered, what they mean, and why this started in the first place remains ambiguous.

It is generally thought that the tradition started centuries ago in Europe, when the last meal was seen as a way to deny vengeance on the part of society — so the meal must have been pretty good — and to allow the condemned a bit of peace before the blade dropped. It was also supposed to prevent his ghost from returning.

However, the law of the land in England, at least, as of the 18th century, was solitary confinement, on bread and water, until the end. So go figure. More recently, in the United States at least, the ritual has taken on a broader use, especially in highly publicized cases.

Odell Barnes, a 31-year-old black male, was sentenced to death in 1991 for murdering his lover, Helen Bass, in Texas. The case was based on the testimony of a sole witness who said he saw Barnes fleeing Bass’s home on the night of the stabbing. The evidence was considered so weak that Barnes became a poster child for the anti-execution movement.

Just before his execution, and still claiming innocence, Barnes was asked what he wanted for his last meal. He answered:

“Justice, equality, world peace.”

Sometimes, the requested last menu has seemed more sarcastic than conciliatory.

Timothy McVeigh, the domestic terrorist behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that claimed 168 lives, was executed in 2001 after eating two pints of mint chocolate-chip ice cream.

Controversy over the last meal can linger long after the execution. One of the most famous examples involved Ricky Ray Rector, who shot and killed a police officer in Arkansas and then tried to blow his own brains out. He survived with what amounted to a “frontal lobotomy,” which many claimed left him mentally unfit to stand trial.

He specifically asked for a slice of pecan pie as part of his last meal, but he didn’t eat it, apparently thinking he would enjoy it after the execution. Many still argue that showed he was incompetent and “did not understand his fate,” as one scholar put it.

Ignoring appeals from Pope Benedict XVI and former President Jimmy Carter, as well as thousands of others, Troy Davis was executed in Georgia in 2011 for killing an off-duty police officer. Davis, like others, used his opportunity to request a special meal to make a statement:

“This meal will not be my last,” he said.

One condemned man eliminated the opportunity for others in his situation to ask for any special meal at all.

Lawrence Russell Brewer asked for two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a bowl of fried okra with ketchup, a pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread, a portion of three fajitas, a meat-lover’s pizza, ice cream, peanuts and on and on. When the meal arrived, he declined it, saying he wasn’t hungry.

The stunt so angered Texas authorities that the last-meal tradition was abolished in 2011.

Murderer Gary Gilmore got something that is denied to most inmates: three shots of whiskey. He died by firing squad in Utah in 1977.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann, convicted of kidnapping and killing Charles Lindberg’s baby, may have had more accusers, and defenders, than any other defendant in American history. Many, including Hauptmann, insisted he was innocent, and he went to the chair believing he would be spared. He had been told he would, if he just confessed to the crime.

He didn’t, and he died, after his special, curious meal of celery, olives, chicken, French fries, buttered peas, cherries and cake.

None, however, was better at rubbing salt in the wounds than Adolph Eichmann, the Holocaust mass murderer of World War II. His last meal:

A bottle of Carmel, a dry red wine from Israel.