On July 15 Michael Bernard Bell, 54, became the eighth death row inmate to be executed in Florida this year, and the 26th killed overall in the U.S. This already surpasses the 25 executions nationwide for all of last year. There are currently 269 prisoners on Florida’s death row, more than 100 of whom have been there for over 30 years.
Florida has put to death more people than any other state this year, followed by Texas, South Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
Bell, an African American, was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison. He was found guilty of killing two people in a car he thought belonged to a man who had fatally shot his brother in 1993. In fact, the killer had sold the car.
Bell’s last words at his execution were, “Thank you for not letting me spend the rest of my life in prison.” Conditions in Florida prisons are notoriously poor. “Molding food, improper portions, sauna like temperatures in the cells” with no air conditioning make prisoners’ lives “unbearable,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported in 2023.
When Bell was 15 he was sentenced to be put in the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. This state reform school was opened in 1900 for boys with minor offenses, such as petty theft, truancy or running away from home, as well as those orphaned or abandoned. Bell was accused of stealing a car.
Families of youth placed in Dozier have brought forward reports of beatings, whippings, torture, solitary confinement, shackling, hog-tying, rapes and murder by the school’s staff. In 2012 anthropologists at the University of South Florida discovered 55 burial sites on the Dozier grounds and documented nearly 100 deaths. Twenty-seven more graves were found later.
Bell “said he was sexually assaulted by guards, who also forced him to fight other students and punished him when he lost,” USA Today reported on the day of his execution. They “beat him with a leather strap and left him shackled for hours in the notorious ‘White House’ where survivors have said they were taken to be tortured and raped.”
The Marshall Project interviewed Bell, who described his experience at Dozier as “torture.” In addition to the sadistic treatment there, living conditions were horrific, with no heating in winter and buckets used as toilets.
“Michael has never been the same since that Dozier school,” Bell’s aunt, Paula Goins, testified at his trial. “That boy came back home damaged.”
Dozier was closed in 2011. As of last year, more than 800 youths who had been sent there, and their families, had applied for restitution from the state. Former inmates between 1940 and 1975 were awarded $20 million in compensation. Nickel Boys, a book by Colson Whitehead describing what students faced there, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020. It was turned into a movie and was nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards.
Unconstitutional death penalty
In 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Florida’s capital sentencing statute was unconstitutional. At the time only a simple majority of jurors could recommend a death sentence, a decision that was placed in the hands of the judge. The court held that the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees the right to trial by jury, “requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.”
But it did not rule that juries must vote unanimously to impose the death sentence. And in 2023 the Florida Legislature passed a new law saying that the votes of only eight of 12 jurors are needed to condemn a prisoner to death. Only one other state, Alabama, allows executions without a unanimous jury verdict.
The next inmate set to be executed in Florida is Edward Zakrzewski, on July 31. He filed an appeal July 16, explaining the jury that convicted him of three murders voted for the death penalty 7-5 in two of the cases and deadlocked at 6-6 in the third. In 1995 a judge decided to impose the death penalty.
“If a jury returned those votes today, Mr. Zakrzewski would be ineligible for a death sentence,” his attorneys pointed out. A Pew Research Center poll in March found “a significant decline” in support for the death penalty, with 30% opposed to it altogether compared to 18% in 1996.