Florida executes Manuel Valle

Mabuel Valle

A Florida man convicted of killing a police officer during a traffic stop 33 years ago has been executed at the Florida State Prison.

Manuel Valle, 61, was administered a lethal injection and pronounced dead at 7:14 p.m. Wednesday, the governor's office reported. Valle was the 1st Florida inmate to face execution using the state's newly revised mix of lethal drugs, a concoction that faced legal challenges which twice delayed carrying out the death sentence.

Valle fatally shot Coral Gables officer Louis Pena on April 2, 1978, after Pena stopped Valle for a traffic violation while driving a stolen car, according to court records. He also shot fellow officer Gary Spell, who survived and would testify against Valle in court.

Spell testified that when he arrived the day of the shooting, Valle was seated in Pena's patrol car. As Pena was checking the license plate of the car Valle had been driving, Valle walked back to the car, reached inside and then walked back and fired a single shot at Pena, the records indicate. He then fired 2 shots at Spell, who was saved by his bulletproof vest, the records show. Valle fled and was arrested 2 days later.

A 4 p.m. EDT execution was scheduled, but the office of Gov. Rick Scott said when that time elapsed that the execution was being delayed because of an 11th-hour attempt to stop it before the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court announced Wednesday evening it had declined to intervening, allowing the execution to go forward.

Southern prisons had seen a spate of executions in recent days.

On Sept. 21, Georgia executed Troy Davis for the 1989 shooting death of a policeman, despite an international outcry and claims he was innocent. The same day, Texas executed white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer for the 1998 hate crime and dragging death of James Byrd Jr., a black man. A day later, Alabama executed Derrick O. Mason for the shooting death of a store clerk during a 1994 robbery.

Pena's son, also named Louis Pena, stood outside the Florida prison Wednesday afternoon as he awaited word whether the execution would go forward as scheduled. He said that step would mean closure for his father.

"It means finally, my dad's soul is put to rest after 33 years," said Pena, who was 19 when his father died and is now 53 years old.

"He killed a cop in cold blood ... He killed a cop and lived 33 years. This man lived another lifetime after taking a life," Pena added.

Valle was initially sentenced to die in 1981, but the state Supreme Court ordered a new trial that year. He was again convicted and sentenced to die, but the U.S. Supreme Court vacated that death sentence in 1986. Another jury recommended the death sentence anew in 1988.

Since Scott signed Valle's death warrant, the original Aug. 2 execution date has been delayed twice — once by the Florida Supreme Court and then by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Both courts later rejected arguments by Valle's lawyers that the new drug mix would cause him pain, and therefore be cruel and unusual punishment.

The state previously used sodium thiopental to render condemned prisoners unconscious before the 2nd and 3rd drugs, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride, were injected. But sodium thiopental is no longer manufactured in the United States and now Florida and other states are substituting it with pentobarbital, which is marketed under the name Nembutal.

18 people have been executed around the country using pentobarbital as a replacement anesthetic since Oklahoma became the first last year.

Valle's warrant was the 1st Scott has signed as governor. It comes in a year when there have been an unusually high number of police officers killed in Florida. 6 officers have been fatally shot in 2011, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a website that tracks officer deaths nationally. That's already more than each of the last three years and one shy of the seven officers killed by gunfire in 2007.

Valle was calm earlier Wednesday and had met with several relatives before the execution, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said.

Valle becomes the 1st condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Florida and the 70th overall since the state resumed capital punishment in 1979. Only Texas (475), Virginia (109), and Oklahoma (96) have executed more inmates since the death penalty was re-legalized in the US on July 2, 1976.

Valle becomes the 37th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1271st overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Sources: Associated Press & Rick Halperin, Sept. 28, 2011

Cuban convict executed in Florida: prison

A 61-year-old Cuban man convicted of the 1978 murder of a US cop was executed in Florida by lethal injection Wednesday, after the Supreme Court rejected his petitions for a stay, prison authorities said.

The execution of Manuel Valle came just one week after the highly controversial high-profile execution of Troy Davis, who went to his death proclaiming his innocence in the murder of a policeman in the state of Georgia.

"Manuel Valle was executed tonight. The time of death was 7:14 pm," a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections, Jo Ellyn Rackleff, said in a statement.

Valle's family has said they will reclaim the body after an autopsy, which is mandatory under Florida law for any inmate who dies in custody, she said.

Relatives of the victim, 41-year-old police officer Louis Pena, said they felt a "great relief that after 33 years, justice has finally been served for Louis and his family."

"Manuel Valle was tried, convicted and sentenced more than once by juries of his peers and there was absolutely no doubt of his guilt because there was an eyewitness, a policeman," the statement said.

Spain had intervened at the last minute, asking the United States to stop the execution on humanitarian grounds and saying Valle was likely eligible for Spanish nationality. The US and Cuba do not have full diplomatic ties.

Source: Agence France-Presse, Sept. 28, 2011


Supreme Court Judge notes 'cruelty' of  Florida execution

A US Supreme Court justice has described the justifications for last night's execution of Cuban national Manuel Valle in Florida as 'close to non-existent', noting the 'cruelty' inherent in the prisoner's three-decade ordeal.

Citing the 33 years that Mr Valle had spent awaiting execution, Justice Breyer wrote "I have little doubt about the cruelty of so long a period of incarceration under sentence of death," adding that "the commonly accepted justifications for the death penalty are close to non-existent in a case such as this one".

The dissenting judgment was delivered at 6.45pm last night, after Manuel Valle's execution was delayed for two hours to allow the US Supreme Court more time to consider the case. The majority decision was to deny a stay, and Mr Valle was pronounced dead at 7.14pm local time.

Justice Breyer has now become the sole advocate for the Supreme Court setting an outer limit on the time a prisoner can spend on death row before execution. This issue is long since resolved in Commonwealth countries, where the Privy Council has held that after five years facing execution there is a presumption that the death penalty is unacceptably cruel. No US court has yet reached a similar conclusion (though many have rejected it) and thus the last several people executed in Florida had all waited on death row for more than 23 years.

Mr Valle, who has strong family ties to Spain, also endured a raft of other failures by Florida, ranging from denial of a clemency process to a lack of consular notification on his arrest to his ultimate execution with an experimental new drug.

Significantly, Justice Breyer cited the difficulty with death penalty "as currently administered" to both avoid cruelty and also "to assure that the wrong person is not executed" - suggesting, as many did following the Troy Davis case, that the system is inherently dysfunctional.

Reprieve's Director, Clive Stafford Smith said:

“The US death penalty is in an awful mess, because even spending a long time on appeals does not equate with reliability. Too many gross mistakes are made even with many years spent on so-called safeguards, and speeding things up will only make matters worse in that sense. Yet there is no doubt that delay such as that suffered by Manuel Valle is agony. The serious flaws in the death penalty system are in urgent need of attention and Justice Breyer's concerns should serve as a wake-up call for the US Supreme Court.”


Source: Reprieve, Sept. 29, 2011

The last word: covering the execution of Manuel Valle

I stared at Manuel Valle as he lay restrained to a gurney in the execution chamber at Florida State Prison. He shut his eyes and said he didn’t have any last words.

But he did.

After the 1st of 3 deadly drugs was administered, Valle suddenly came to life. His feet shifted. His eyes flashed open. He turned to the warden — and spoke.

The microphone was off. I couldn’t hear him. I worried I had missed the most important part of his execution.

Most journalists who witness lethal injections have never seen or heard the condemned until they appear in the death chamber, minutes before they die.

But I had encountered the 61-year-old Valle in a Miami courtroom two months before his execution. He wore an orange-and-blue prison uniform. He smiled weakly at his family. He referred to the judge as “Your Honor.”

Reporters make a point of keeping a distance from our subjects — especially with executions. Inmates live in faraway prisons. They almost never give interviews. Their relatives rarely want to speak. We write our stories, as a result, with a certain degree of detachment.

For my 1st execution, it would have been easier to remain dispassionate. But I didn’t have that luxury.

Sitting a few feet from Valle when he was alive altered my lens. I felt pity.

Valle committed a fierce, horrendous crime. He killed Coral Gables Police Officer Louis Pena, a father of four, in 1978. Valle shot Pena in the neck. He shot another cop in the back.

Yet when I first saw Valle, more than three decades later, he did not look like a threat. He was a meek and submissive old man who turned to a gaggle of courtroom guards to return to prison instead of sitting through the remainder of the hearing.

“If you guys want to go...” he said, asking for permission.

I followed the complicated turns of Valle’s final legal appeals. I sifted through yellowing newspaper clippings about his first trial. I met two of Pena’s children, so desperate for closure, for justice.

The execution day came — an odd, somber occasion made more tense by a late delay by the U.S. Supreme Court.

When the court stalled the proceedings, 5 reporters and I were already inside the prison in Starke, carrying only our driver’s licenses. 4 hours we waited in a bare canteen, beige and antiseptic. We wrote drafts and doodled using pencils and notepads provided by the department of corrections. We made small talk. We paced.

If it was this difficult to wait locked up for 4 hours for a date with death, I can’t imagine what it would be like to wait for 33 years.

After he was declared dead at 7:14 p.m., Valle’s inaudible last words still haunted me.

I imagined him crying out in pain. Remembering an important message to his family. Apologizing.

In a news conference more than an hour later, I found out the truth. And it was not profound.

A spokeswoman for the corrections department relayed to the press Valle’s words to the warden: Valle asked if he should start counting backwards again.

Asking for permission. This time, like a patient going into surgery.

The warden told him to close his eyes. He did.

They didn’t open again.

Source: Commentary, Patricia Mazzei, Miami Herald, October 10, 2011