|
USA - Florida. Curtis Windom, 59, Black, was executed
August 28, 2025: August 28, 2025 - Florida. Curtis Windom, 59, Black, was executed
Florida’s 11th execution this year
Curtis Windom was pronounced dead at 6.17pm local time after a lethal injection at Florida state prison near Starke.
Windom was sentenced to die for the 7 November 1992 killing of Johnnie Lee, Valerie Davis and Mary Lubin in the Orlando area.
Court records show a friend told Windom that day that Lee, who supposedly owed Windom the $2,000, had won $114 at a greyhound racetrack. Windom told the friend that “you’re gonna read about me” and that he planned to kill Lee.
Windom went to a Walmart to buy a .38-caliber revolver and a box of 50 shells, according to court testimony. Not long after that, Windom drove to find Lee, located him and shot him twice in the back from his car, followed by two more shots standing over the victim at close range.
Then Windom ran to Davis’s apartment and fatally shot his girlfriend “with no provocation” in front of a friend who witnessed the murder, court records show. Windom randomly shot and wounded another man before encountering Davis’s mother, Mary Lubin, as she drove to her daughter’s apartment. Lubin was shot twice in her car at a stop sign.
Windom received death sentences for the murders and a 22-year sentence for the attempted murder. Davis was the mother of one of Windom’s children, a daughter who has been campaigning to halt her father’s execution.
“We’ve all been traumatized,” the daughter, Curtisia Windom, told the Orlando Sentinel. “It hurt. It hurt a lot. Life was not easy growing up. But if we could forgive him, I don’t see why people on the street who haven’t been through our pain have a right to say he should die.”
Windom’s lawyers have filed numerous appeals over the years, including a claim that evidence of his mental problems should have been introduced at trial. But the Florida supreme court ruled that was not prejudicial against Windom because prosecutors then would have presented evidence that Windom was a drug dealer and the two women he killed were police informants.
Many of Windom’s appeals have focused on claims that he was represented by an incompetent lawyer when it came to presenting mental health evidence.
Several Catholic organisations in the United States, echoed by Sant'Egidio in Italy and the press close to the Vatican, have come out in favour of Windom, highlighting his mental health issues.
Windom becomes the 11th inmate to be put to death this year in Florida, the 117th overall since Florida resumed capital punishment in 1979, the 30th to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,637th overall since the nation resumed executions in 1977.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/28/florida-execution-curtis-windom
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/world/news/2025-08/one-last-appeal-to-save-a-mans-life-curtis-windom.html (Source: The Guardian, 28/08/2025)
|
