In Indonesia the punishment for masturbation is execution by decapitation!
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Joseph Talfero got literally roasted, but was he ever guilty?
One of the grizliest(hope I spelled that correctly… may be grisley… ehh, ya know what I mean) recent time Executions that may have also been a wrongfull conviction? Poor dude had no uck in life nor in death it seems! May 4, 1990. Jesse Joseph Tafero. Electrocution. During the execution it is said that six-inch flames erupted from Jesse Joseph Tafero’s head. 3 jolts of power were required to stop his breathing. So what went wrong you may ask? well now…State officials claimed that the botched execution was caused by what other than… “inadvertent human error” Someone used a synthetic sponge instead of the recommended natural one needed. They attempted to support this theory by sticking a part of a synthetic sponge into a “common household toaster” and observing that it smoldered and caught fire. So Jesse Jo Tolfero basically smoldered to death? The story of Mr. Jesse Joseph Tolfero (parts taken from http://www.law.northwestern.edu)
Jacobs, Tafero, their 10-month-old daughter, Jacobs’ 6-year-old son, and Walter Norman Rhodes, a friend of Tafero’s, were sleeping in a car that was approached by Highway patrolman Phillip Black, along for the ride with Black was a friend, Donald Irwin, a vacationing Canadian constable. The murder and kidnaping After Black learned via radio that Rhodes had a criminal record, gunfire broke out. Black and Irwin, the patrolman and his friend, laid dead and the 2 men, woman and 2 childeren sped off in the patrol car, driven by Rhodes. At a nearby apartment complex, Rhodes stole a car and kidnapped the man in the car. Rhodes later lost control of the car and the wrecked it. Jacobs and Tafero maintained from the beginning that Rhodes had shot the officers, and that they had no choice but to go along with him after the shooting. There were two eyewitnesses to events surrounding the murders, neither contradicted Jacobs’ and Tafero’s version of what happened. Nor was their version contradicted by physical evidence. Both Tafero and Rhodes had gunpowder residue on their hands, a fact that was consistent with Tafero’s claim that Rhodes handed him the gun after shooting the officers. There was no gunpowder residue on Jacobs’ hands. The convictions and sentencing The convictions of Jacobs and Tafero rested primarily on the testimony of Rhodes, who was allowed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, rat on your buddies to save your own ass… done all the time I’m assuming. In Jacobs’ case, the prosecution also presented the testimony of a jailhouse informant, Brenda Isham, who claimed Jacobs had confessed. The trials were surrounded by massive publicity, which was overwhelmingly prejudicial. All prospective jurors acknowledged knowing about the case, and neither jury was sequestered. The jury in the Jacobs case recommended a life sentence, but Judge M. Daniel Futch, Jr. imposed death, as he had done earlier in the Tafero case. Futch, known as “Maximum Dan,” was a former Florida Highway Patrol trooper who kept a miniature replica of an electric chair on his desk. That is one sick ass bastard! The appeals In 1978, the Florida Supreme Court temporarily relinquished jurisdiction of Jacobs’ case, directing Futch to hold a hearing on whether the Broward County State Attorney had improperly withheld exculpatory evidence during pretrial discovery, including reports stating that Rhodes had told a prison guard that he alone shot the officers and that he had given answers during a polygraph test that were inconsistent with his trial testimony (1978). “Maximum Dan” found no merit in Jacobs’ claims, saying that Rhodes’ purported statement to the prison guard had been equivocal and that it was impossible to establish precisely what Rhodes had said during the polygraph examination because there was no verbatim transcript of the questions and answers. The results of the polygraph itself, were not discoverable. As a matter of law, polygraph results. Jacobs’ death sentence vacated In 1981, the Florida Supreme Court agreed that the discovery issues did not warrant a new trial, affirming Jacobs’ conviction. However, the court commuted her sentence to life in prison, holding that Judge Futch or “Mr. Maximum Dan… with the replica Electric chair” had lacked sufficient basis to override the jury’s recommendation of a life sentence. Both Tafero and Jacobs then sought federal writs of habeas corpus. His was denied, but hers won a hearing before a federal magistrate. During that proceeding, Brenda Isham, the jailhouse informant who had helped send Jacobs to death row a decade earlier, admitted that she had committed perjury at the trial and that Jacobs, in fact, had not confessed. Isham said that, before she agreed to testify because detectives had warned her that she might “make an enemy” of the Broward County State Attorney if she refused to testify against Jacobs…. may be a hint of police corruption in Broward county… but I can’t really be sure. Jacobs’ petition for a writ of habeas corpus was still pending when, on May 4, 1990, Tafero was put to death in the Florida electric chair. Officials interrupted the execution three times because flames and smoke shot out of his head. During the first interruption, he continued to move and breathe. Before the execution, filmmaker Micki Dickoff had initiated correspondence with Jacobs. The two had been childhood friends, growing up in Indiana. Dickoff soon became persuaded of Jacobs innocence and obtained affidavits used to supplement the pending habeas corpus petition, which the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit granted in February 1992. A bit to late for poor Jo… however… The following October, the Broward County State Attorney offered to release Jacobs if she would enter a plea in which she did not admit guilt, (isn’t that what they had been saying for a decade now?) Otherwise she faced a re-trial and possibly another death sentence. She took the plea deal and was released, no-brainer there, I guess. Unlike her boyfriend Jo, hers was still intact. Dickoff made a documentary on the case entitled “ In the Blink of an Eye,” which aired as an ABC movie of the week in 1996. Tafero’s botched execution, and several similarly macabre ones, prompted Florida finally to abandon its electric chair in favor of death by lethal injection in 2000. ( and some of those are really worth reading, like the one where the chemicals sprayed onto the witnesses) Although the prosecution continued to maintain that Tafero was guilty, the evidence strongly suggested otherwise. So Sunny or Sonia was: and poor Jesse Jo Tolfero… well he fried in the electric chair and they may have been a bit too late on that one Much of the foregoing summary was prepared by Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Thank you Mr. Warden The following is a list of other people which may have been executed wrongfully: James Adams (Florida)
Comments Posted:
3 Comments posted on "Joseph Talfero got literally roasted, but was he ever guilty?"
stop executions of innocents in the US and death penalty on October 13th, 2007 at 5:01 am #
[…] more of the Death penalty, exonerations, and executions in the US Post a comment […]
Dave Bartlett on December 5th, 2007 at 10:43 am #
Give me a break, your entire list is of people “who may have been executed wrongfully” I could give you a list of innocents who died at the hands of released animals, for instanse, the couple in Washington murdered by Tavares from Mass set free by a LIBERAL judge even though the DOC tried in vain to keep him, knowing he was a ticking time bomb! This is a debate you lose on a grand scale comparing innocents murdered by felons and felons maybe executed wrongfully! How many guards are killed by convicts in prison each year? I’ll bet the number of innocent guards killed in one year surpasses all the name of inmates executed and proven later to be absolutely innocent. Your cause is killing innocents!!
sic on December 11th, 2007 at 3:10 am #
the list says “may have”. that is the point. No one will know for sure, because they are now dead. There are plenty of cases of people being found wrongfully accused most do not get the death penalty and are released, but the ones who did get the death penalty, well its a bit too late for them. A firefighter, police officer, pilot and even convenience store clerk all go to work knowing the risks involved. A man or woman who gets accused of a crime based on lies or circumstance had never bargained for such risk as life. If you believe that evidence has never been fabricated, that politicians, law enforcement and courts find it sometimes easier to get a conviction and please the masses of sheep such as yourself than to keep looking for the truth… than you and people like you are the ones killing innocents because every innocent person in prison or put to death means that the REAL killer is still at large. Yes, an innocent person accused does mean the guilty is still on the loose and commiting more violent acts! Post a comment
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