Guest AuthorThomas Knight, aka Asakari Abudullah Muhammad, is a poster boy for the death penalty. His case is also a classic study in what’s wrong with the death penalty machinery.
By now you might know that once again Knight has cheated death. One of the longest-serving prisoners on Florida’s Death Row, Knight was supposed to die at 6 p.m. Tuesday. But that won’t happen. The Florida Supreme Court blocked his execution. The justices had concerns with the lethal cocktail employed in the death chamber at Starke.
The state has executed 83 convicted murderers since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1972. Knight is one of more than 400 inmates on Death Row. If Florida is going to persist in its appetite for death, the Department of Corrections needs to get it right — constitutionally.
Knight’s latest postponed date with the executioner comes almost 40 years after the double murders that sent him to Death Row in the first place. Ironically, he wasn’t being put to death for those murders but for stabbing to death Corrections Officer Richard Burke on Oct. 12, 1980, while he was on Death Row. Knight was apparently incensed because prison authorities wouldn’t let him see his mother.
I’m not a fan of the death penalty, per se, but the brutality of Knight’s acts calls for in-kind justice. In 1974, Knight, kidnapped his employer, Sydney Gans, and his wife, Lillian, and forced him to go to the bank and withdraw $50,000 while his wife was being held hostage. He then shot both of them in the back of the head.
Two months later, while awaiting trial, Knight escaped from the Dade County Jail. While on the lam, he and another suspect robbed a liquor store in Cordele, Ga., of $641. Knight shot and killed one clerk, William Culpepper, and twice shot and injured his co-worker, A.V. Norton. Those names won’t mean much to most Floridians, but they do to longtime residents of that small South Georgia community. Justice has eluded them all these years. Georgia authorities chose not to prosecute Knight because he was already on Death Row in Florida.
When Knight killed Burke, the corrections officer, then-Gov. Bob Graham had signed a death warrant for him to die March 3, 1981.
Although Knight’s guilt has never been in doubt – not for one second in 39 years — one judge after another found reasons to reverse his death sentences. One judge claimed Knight didn’t get to cross-examine witnesses, while another ruled Knight was denied the right to present character witnesses. However, in a moment of sanity, when restoring Knight’s death sentence in October, justices for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described this case as a perfect example of “the gridlock and inefficiency of death penalty litigation.”
The old man who will eventually feel the poison coursing through his veins is but a mere shadow of the callous punk first convicted decades ago. But judging by the published record, Knight has shown little or no remorse for his actions. He has received much more consideration than he gave his victims. His debt to society is long overdue.
