Willie Darden

Willie Jasper Darden Jr. (June 4, 1933 – March 15, 1988) was an American man who was executed in Florida for murder during the course of a robbery. Darden's case was notable because of the 14 years that he spent on death row between his death sentence and his execution, which, at the time, was longer than the time any other inmate in the United States had spent on death row prior to their execution. He was also notable for the number of protests and amount of controversy and attention that his case attracted worldwide, as well as the unusually large number of death warrants that he lived through prior to his execution.

Early life Willie Darden was born in Greene County, North Carolina on June 4, 1933. His family lived in poverty as Darden grew up. His father was an auto-mechanic, and his great-grandfather had been an enslaved man who was also born in Greene County. Darden's mother was 15 years old at the time of his birth, and two years after he was born, she died while giving birth to another child. Because of his family's poverty, Darden could not attend school regularly and instead worked in the farms, eventually dropping out of school after completing the eighth grade.

When Darden was a teenager, he started breaking the law, starting after he was caught stealing from a mailbox. Upon his first violation of the law at the age of 16, Darden was sent to a juvenile detention facility. After being discharged, Darden had trouble finding work and was eventually rearrested for cashing a bad check. He received a 4-year sentence in prison for the bad check. Until the murder in 1973, Darden was repeatedly in and out of prison for a variety of crimes, including assault, forgery, theft, and attempted rape. At the time of the murder, Darden was on furlough from prison while serving 20 years in a Florida prison for attempting to rape a 70-year-old woman in 1968.

Crime and trial On September8, 1973, at a time police estimated to be between 6:00 and 6:30p.m., there was a robbery of a Carl's Furniture Store, located in Lakeland, Florida. During the robbery, 54-year-old James Carl Turman and his 16-year-old neighbor Phillip Arnold were shot. Arnold survived the shooting, but Turman died. The robber also attempted to rape Turman's wife prior to shooting and murdering Turman. The state had intentionally excluded black people from serving on the jury, a practice that was later declared unconstitutional in 1986, and a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Harry Blackmun, would later declare that the jury selection in Darden's case was improper and violated his constitutional rights. Additionally, according to trial records, the prosecutor in Darden's trial, C. Ray McDaniel, made racially charged remarks, including quoting the defense counsel in calling Darden an "animal" that needed to be "chained up" and expressing a desire to see Darden "sitting here with no face, blown away by a shotgun." Two months before his execution, Darden appeared on an episode of 20/20 on ABC and an episode of West 57th on CBS.

At the time of his execution, Darden had been on death row for 14years, longer than any other condemned inmate in the United States at the time. He had also lived through six separate death warrants, including the one that scheduled his execution for May23, 1979. Another death warrant scheduled Darden's execution for September2, 1985, and even though the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his request for a stay of execution that evening, they later agreed to grant Darden a petition for writ of certiorari six hours before he was scheduled to be electrocuted.