Gary Alvord, the Florida prison inmate who lived on death row longer than anyone else in America, has died of natural causes.
The 66-year-old murderer died Sunday at Union Correctional Institution, nearly 40 years after he strangled to death three women in Tampa.
Ultimately it was a brain tumor, not the electric chair or a lethal injection needle, that claimed Alvord's life, his attorneys said. In recent years, he had also battled lung cancer.
"Gary is a product of a sick system," said attorney Bill Sheppard of Jacksonville, who represented Alvord for most of the four decades he was on death row. "He was a living example of why we should not have a death penalty."
Gov. Bob Graham twice signed death warrants for Alvord, in 1981 and 1984. But the execution never happened. The reason: Alvord was too crazy to be killed.
Born in Michigan in 1947, Alvord was plagued by delusions and disordered thoughts that doctors attributed to paranoid schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder. The law forbids the execution of anyone with such a mental condition.
In the late 1970s when Florida leaders were working to resume executions, Alvord was among half a dozen inmates considered. But his mental condition led psychiatrists to conclude that he did not understand his punishment.
In 1984, he was sent to a state hospital in Chattahoochee to be restored to competence. But doctors there refused to treat him, citing the ethical dilemma of making a patient well just so that he could be killed. He was quietly returned to death row in 1987 and remained there ever since. His final appeal expired in 1998.
Source: Tampa Bay Times, May 21, 2013
