These Execution Photos Are Quite a Site

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have logged onto the Florida Supreme Court’s Web site to look at grisly color photos of the last killer executed in the state’s electric chair.

The photos depict the bloody body and contorted face of Allen Lee “Tiny” Davis, who was put to death in July. The pictures were posted by the high court because they played a key role in a case in which the justices upheld the use of the electric chair.

Some of those who have gone online for a look--particularly Europeans--were appalled. A Frenchman sent a one-word piece of e-mail: “Barbarians.”

“When Europeans think of Florida, they think of Disney World, beaches and fiery electrocutions,” said Michael Radelet, a sociologist at the University of Florida who has researched capital punishment and opposes it.

But many Americans seemed to approve of both the execution and the posting of the pictures.

“The photos on this Web site are WONDERFUL!” a woman from North Redington Beach, Fla., e-mailed the court.

Davis, who weighed about 350 pounds, was executed for the 1982 murders of a pregnant woman and her two young daughters. He suffered a nosebleed just before the current was applied, according to state officials, and blood poured from behind the mask over his face, soaking his white shirt.

A judge ruled that the chair operated correctly and the state Supreme Court upheld that decision, 4 to 3. But Justice Leander Shaw wrote a blistering dissent, charging that Davis was “brutally tortured to death.” He also attached the three photos.

Like all decisions by the state Supreme Court, the Sept. 24 opinion was posted on the court’s Web site, at https://www.firn.edu/supct/deathwarrants.

“It seemed to explode into an international news story and it seems to re-explode every couple of weeks,” court spokesman Craig Waters said Thursday.

The photos were also sent to the U.S. Supreme Court, which on Tuesday agreed to consider the constitutionality of electrocution, temporarily suspending use of the electric chair. It is the first review of the electric chair by the nation’s high court in more than a century.

The public can access the Web page through two servers. The smaller server has crashed several times and sometimes creeps along. The number of hits destroyed the program that counts site visitors.

“It probably is in the millions, but there simply is no way of knowing,” Waters said.

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, which opposes the death penalty, approved of the release of the pictures.

“Some people might find them disgusting,” he said, “but that is what state-sponsored execution by electrocution is.”