Of all the horrors on Florida’s Death Row, one stood out: The terrifying noise of the electric chair firing up, twice a day like clockwork.
“You got to sit there and listen to that chair being tested, knowing that it was being tested in your honor,” said Shabaka WaQlimi, 62, who came within 15 hours of being executed at a state prison in Starke, Fla.
Today, WaQlimi is a free man.
After nearly 15 years on Death Row, WaQlimi’s convictions on rape and murder were set aside in 1987, after a judge determined that prosecutors blocked testimony that undercut the evidence against him.
At one point, his trip to the electric chair was postponed with less than a day to spare because a different judge found that his appeals hadn’t been exhausted in the Florida state courts, he said.
WaQlimi — or Joseph Green Brown, as he was known when he was convicted — recounted his experiences Saturday at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People conference in Colorado Springs.
With a business suit and close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, he could have been confused with any other speaker at a weekend hotel convention. Instead, an audience of 30 listened in rapt attention while he spoke of the torture of knowing his death was planned “down to the second.”
When he was close to execution, he told the crowd, a tailor came to take his measurements, so that his burial suit could be prepared.
In 1979, when it looked like his protests of innocence would follow him to the grave, his brother died in a Florida hospital near the state prison, after prison officials refused his attempts to donate a kidney.
And when his long fight to prove his innocence began to gain ground, he focused on reclaiming family members who had shunned him: “It took 10 years for me and my daughter to connect,” he said.
Saturday’s talk was sponsored by Coloradans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (CADP), as part of an effort to put a human face on the 138 Death Row inmates who have been exonerated after wrongful convictions.
WaQlimi, of Charlotte, N.C., will be making four presentations in Colorado this week, some of them with Juan Melendez, a fellow Florida Death Row inmate who was also cleared of wrongdoing.
Three people are awaiting the death penalty in Colorado.
“We need to continue to educate the public until it’s looking like we’re at the point where we can actually get a repeal through the Colorado Legislature,” said CADP Executive Director Lisa Cisneros.
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