Killer Whose Case Drew Activists’ Aid Is Executed

Convicted murderer Willie Jasper Darden went to his death Tuesday proclaiming his innocence and thanking people around the world, from Andrei D. Sakharov to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who aided his 14-year battle to escape the electric chair.

The widow of the man Darden was convicted of shooting said his execution on an unprecedented seventh death warrant offered her hope for peace of mind.

“I think it’s long overdue,” Helen Turman Baum said minutes after the execution at the Florida State Prison. “He did it to himself. I’m just thinking right now I want some peace of mind . . . it’s been a long time and I’m glad it’s finally over.”

Found Wife Being Robbed

Baum has remarried since her husband, James C. Turman, was killed on Sept. 8, 1973, after Turman walked into their Lakeland furniture store and found his wife being robbed of $15.

Darden, 54, had attracted international attention from death penalty opponents and people who believed that his conviction was racially tainted. Darden was black and Turman was white.

Among 1,600 telephone calls Monday, the majority protesting the execution, was one from Jackson, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Nobel Peace Prize winner Sakharov, actress Margot Kidder, rock star Peter Gabriel, Amnesty International and other human rights and religious groups also called for a halt to Darden’s execution.

Gov. Bob Martinez was unmoved by those opposed to the execution. “I think justice was served today,” he said. “This was not someone out of a choir. He was a career criminal. This was a man who had a career of violent crimes.”

‘I Am Not Guilty’

Darden had told about 30 witnesses in the death chamber: “I was not guilty for the charge for which I was arrested, and this morning I tell you I am not guilty of the charge for which I am about to be executed.”

It was the 18th execution in Florida and the 96th in the nation since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that states could again invoke capital punishment.

Earlier Tuesday, Wayne Robert Felde, 38, who claimed that post-Vietnam War stress drove him to murder a police officer in 1978, was executed in Louisiana’s electric chair. It was the first time two inmates were executed on the same day in the United States since Aug. 28, when executions were carried out in Florida, Alabama and Utah.