The reason for sparing Victor Jones’ life comes down to 15 words: “Now, after stealing his future as a child, the State seeks to execute Mr. Jones.”
That is a cry to Florida’s conscience. It is the crux of a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Jones’ last-ditch appeal to the Florida Supreme Court. It failed on a 5-1 vote Wednesday, so he will die Sept. 30 unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes. But that is highly unlikely.
Jones would be the 13th person Gov. Ron DeSantis has put to death this year, two more than the previous all-time record set by Gov. Spessard Holland in 1942. More executions are scheduled.
Jones would also be at least the 11th former inmate of Florida’s two infamous reform schools for boys to end his life in the execution chamber.
An official apology
The schools were the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys at Marianna and the Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee. They were so notorious for brutality — savage beatings, rapes and unexplained deaths — that the state closed them and officially apologized to the survivors.
It is not fanciful to suggest that children’s futures were stolen in those infernal places.
The Legislature underscored the apology with nearly $20 million to some 900 men who had suffered as children during the worst 35 years of the schools’ existence.
The attorney general’s office, which is conducting the legal fight to kill him, confirmed in writing that Jones, on death row since 1993, was one of the former reform school boys who qualified for reparations. It is not clear whether he has received the money.
The courts, parroting the attorney general, have said in effect that it was immaterial to his sentence what Florida did to him as a child and even if it mattered, he raised it too late.
Why people should care
If it doesn’t matter to the courts, where conscience appears to be extinguished, it should matter to the people of Florida in whose name the killing would be carried out.
It should also matter to DeSantis, who is now on track to execute more people than any Florida governor before him and has not found even one death sentence to commute.
It should matter that in his childhood, Florida incarcerated Jones four times in a system so barbaric that Gov. Claude Kirk, a Republican, after visiting the Marianna school, called it “a training ground for a life of crime” and said: “If one of your kids were kept in such circumstances, you’d be up there with rifles.”
Jones, who had been to Okeechobee four times, was sentenced to adult state prison twice before the 1990 murders of Jacob and Matilda Nestor, a Miami couple who employed him, for which he is on death row.
A report by the Marshall Project and written by Leonora LaPeter Anton of the Tampa Bay Times found that at least 34 boys who were at Dozier and 16 from Okeechobee eventually wound up on Florida’s death row.
Nine are still there. Ten have been executed and five died of other causes. At least 19 others were convicted of murder but not sentenced to death. Collectively, they killed at least 114 people.
Dozier to death row
The totals are inexact because the names of boys who attended the schools are not public until 50 years after they leave.
Some of those already executed would have qualified for the $21,000 reparation payments. Those include William Van Poyck, executed in 2013 for the murder of a West Palm Beach prison guard. Another who would have been eligible was Frank Lee Smith, who died of cancer in 2000 before DNA tests conclusively exonerated him for a Broward rape and murder.
There is no longer any scientific dispute that physical abuse can predispose some children to violent acts as adults. But proving that factor in a specific individual comes down to professional opinions, which differ, rather than to something as tangible as DNA.
The friend-of-the-court brief recites the well-documented evils of the reform schools and relates what happened to Jones at Okeechobee: He was “beaten multiple times with the thick leather strap, witnessed frequent gang rapes of other vulnerable children in so-called ‘blanket parties,’ and to avoid being gang raped himself had to fight off other boys, which resulted in his placement in solitary confinement.”
Many others who were sent to the schools have borne similar witness.
‘It’s unfathomable’
Jones isn’t the first of them who ended up on death row to plead that their experience justifies new sentencing hearings. It was argued unsuccessfully in Michael Bell’s behalf before he was executed July 15.
The Florida Supreme Court has not spared one death row prisoner since DeSantis began stocking the bench with right-wing justices seven years ago.
However, the Jones case has brought out a commendably concerted effort by more conscientious people to highlight the injustice of executing people whom the state had demonstrably abused.
The court brief, written by Tampa attorney Melanie Kalmanson, represents the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Florida Justice Institute, Florida Public Defenders Association, Advancing Real Change, Conservatives Concerned, Witness to Innocence and Troy Rafferty, an attorney who helped secure reparations for the former reform school boys.
“It is unfathomable,” they rightly contend, “that the State can grant reparation to a person for subjecting him to the horrors of the Schools and then, just a short period of time after the State’s apology, inflict upon that person the ultimate punishment of death.”
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
