FL- Last Lake County inmate to be executed - in 1959 - didn't kill anyone

9-23-2008 Florida:

Richard Henyard could be next, if his execution for the killings of 2 Eustis girls in 1993 is carried out as scheduled today.

TAVARES - The last inmate from Lake County to be executed by the state of Florida didn't kill anyone.

Sam Wiley Odom was 20 on Aug. 28, 1959, when he was strapped into the state's electric chair for raping a 63-year-old woman and electrocuted in front of a small audience that included Lake County Sheriff Willis V. McCall.

Richard Henyard, 34, of Eustis will join Odom on the state's list of executed prisoners today if he dies by lethal injection, as scheduled, for the 1993 murders of two Lake County girls, Jamilya Lewis, 7, and her sister, Jasmine Lewis, 3.

The cases of Henyard and Odom bear little similarity beyond their geography.

Henyard spent more than 14 years on death row; Odom just one.

Henyard's case is chronicled in boxes and boxes of documents that detail his arrest, prosecution and the numerous appeals of his conviction and death sentence. Odom's prosecution and execution nearly a half-century ago are archived on a sparse, two dozen frames of microfilm in the Lake County Clerk of Courts' records warehouse.

It was plainly a different era, the 1950s in the Deep South, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

"The law would prevent his execution today," Dieter said of Odom, who grew up in Okahumpka, a rural outpost near Leesburg.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that the death penalty could not be imposed in the rape of an adult, calling the penalty disproportionate to the crime and outlawing it as cruel and unusual. In a 5-4 decision in June, the nation's high court also struck down a Louisiana law that allowed the state to impose the death penalty on a rapist if the victim was a child.

Only a few states still have capital-punishment options for such anachronistic crimes as treason and train-wrecking, but most are considered antiquated and are not used by prosectors.

From 1924 to 1964, Florida executed 196 prisoners, including 42 who were sentenced to death for rape. All but three of the convicted rapists condemned to die were black, including Odom and James Davis, who was 16 and the youngest inmate executed by the state, according to a database on the Florida Department of Corrections' Web site.

Florida held no executions from 1964 to 1979.

Odom reportedly confessed to the rape, which occurred at knifepoint in a home in an orange grove on April 1, 1958. He told the editor of the old Mount Dora Topic: "I had been drinking wine and 'shine [moonshine] and it was the 'shine that told me to do it. And I did. I was foolish and I know it."

But his trial, which took place about a month after the crime, was tainted, his lawyer argued in an unsuccessful appeal to the Florida Supreme Court.

The state attorney pointed out in closing statements to the all-white jury that Odom had not taken the witness stand to deny the crime, an argument that would be grounds for a mistrial today.

He was identified by the victim -- after authorities had shot him.

Jurors deliberated just eight minutes before reaching a verdict that sent him to the electric chair. ..News Source.. by Stephen Hudak