The Botched Execution Of Jesse Tafero
Wikimedia CommonsJesse Tafero was set on fire during his electrocution due to use of a synthetic sponge.
After Jesse Tafero was found guilty of murdering two police officers during a traffic stop in 1976, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair. But the 1990 execution was an absolute disaster. And to make matters worse, another man confessed to the crime after Tafero’s death.
At the time of the fateful traffic stop, Tafero, his wife Sonia Jacobs, the couple’s children, and a man named Walter Rhodes had all been asleep in a car at a rest stop in Florida. At some point during the traffic stop, shots were fired and two police officers were slain on the spot.
As Rhodes initially testified, Tafero had been the one who killed both of the police officers. Both Tafero and Jacobs were sentenced to death for the crime, but Jacobs’ sentence was soon commuted to life in prison (and she would eventually be freed years later). But Tafero suffered a botched execution before the truth about the crime was finally revealed.
Wikimedia CommonsThe “Old Sparky” electric chair at Florida State Prison.
On May 4, 1990, Tafero was strapped to an electric chair, which malfunctioned three times. Before long, Tafero’s head burst into flames that stretched six inches long. The spectacle was so horrifying that it allegedly inspired Stephen King to write a similar execution scene in The Green Mile.
“It takes seven minutes before the prison doctor pronounces him dead, seven minutes of heaving, nodding, flame, and smoke,” one witness reported.
It was only after Tafero’s death that Rhodes confessed that it was he who shot the police officers. The horror of this botched execution led Florida and many other states to start to rethink electrocution as the most “humane” form of capital punishment, paving the way for lethal injection to become the first choice for many execution chambers across the country.
