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Note to
wanna-be killers: October is not the month to plead for help.
The wheels of justice once again turned as convicted killer Alvin Wayne Crane was put to death in Texas on Tuesday, Oct. 12. Crane, the 190th person to be executed in the state since the death penalty was restored in 1982, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, begging out a last minute sympathy extension on his execution. The last minute plea to the Supreme Court was rejected shortly after 2 p.m. on Oct. 12. UPI moved the story at 2:28 p.m. Eastern Time that the appeal had been unsuccessful. Crane was dead less than five hours later, becoming the 26th person executed in the state this year.
It was back in 1987 was involved in a domestic dispute. The Ochiltree County Sheriff's Department, located in the Texas Panhandle, dispatched Deputy Melvin Drum, then 41, to the scene. During his visit, however, Drum was shot with a shotgun. Crane was found guilty of slaying the deputy. One week before, however, just several hundred miles to the east, another killer claimed his place among the infamous posthumously. Allen Lee ("Tiny") Davis, a man for whom the nickname Tiny was a parody, was executed in Florida's electric chair several weeks ago. This past Monday, however, he took a starring role for the state, causing an Internet server for the state's Supreme Court to crash, in fact.
The Florida Supreme Court's Web site crashed repeatedly Wednesday, Oct. 6 because of thousands of hits from people who want to look at photographs of a dead man in the state's electric chair. Davis, who got a case of what officials dubbed "the
screamies" just before being executed, bled on himself during the execution. First reports in the media made it sound as though blood from Davis was everywhere, including covering his body.
The morbid, curious, and twisted, including this newsy just had to go to the Florida servers and look at the pictures. When I got to the site, I found the pictures displayed were nowhere near as graphic or morbid as I had prepared myself to see. <for the morbidly curious, age 18 and over only by my standards, visit, if you must:>
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The Florida Supreme Court has heard arguments over the use of the electric chair as a form of punishment (read: death penalty) and has upheld the use in the state. The lone dissenter, Judge Leander Shaw, posted the three pictures of Davis on the site after listening to arguments.
The site's URL, published in newspapers around the world after the court's picture posting, had been taking a real beating, so it's periodically crashing, court officials said. One official said the state's highest court received more than 300 e-mail messages to date about the site from around the world, most in favor of the state's death penalty.
Writing in an email to the court, Sylvia Galea wrote, "I live in Australia and I am interested in the death penalty and wish we had it here for murder." E-mail correspondent Mark Proulx of Florida wrote: "I applaud the Web site. Thanks for putting together the beginning, middle and end to the process."
There is a mirror site of the court's main site, based at a Florida university that has fared in terms of stability. The reason: its address was not published as widely as the original site. No changes are in store for the court's site at present, but once the number of daily hits drop, the court may upgrade both its hardware and software. The pictures show blood dripping from nose onto Davis's white dress shirt, and have become a focus of appeals by two other Florida inmates condemned to die in the same chair later this month.
Terry Melvin Simms, scheduled to die Oct. 26, and Anthony Bryan, scheduled for Oct. 27, both say the photographs are causing them additional pain. Is Internet access part of your privileges when you get a state prison address? Or is it customary to give death row inmates Internet access when they hit death row? Maybe they want to rush the process?
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"Death
Penalty: Rejection for One, Infamy Another"
