At 7:07 on a Friday morning in Starke, Florida, the current hit Jesse Tafero for the first time. Flames erupted from the headpiece of the electric chair. Smoke climbed toward the ceiling. Ashes fell onto his shirt while witnesses watched the state send electricity through him again, and then again.[1]
Jesse Tafero’s 1990 execution became infamous after Florida’s electric chair malfunctioned, apparently because an unsuitable new sponge was placed in the headpiece. His conviction for killing two officers remains disputed because driver Walter Rhodes later confessed to the shootings, then retracted that confession.
Fourteen years earlier, on February 20, 1976, Florida Highway Patrol officer Phillip A. Black and Ontario Provincial Police Corporal Donald Irwin approached a parked car at a Broward County rest stop for a routine check.[2] Irwin, a visiting Canadian officer, was Black’s friend.[2]
Inside the car were Tafero, Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs, their two children, ages 9 years and 10 months, and Walter Rhodes.[2] In one account of the case, Black saw a gun in the car, woke the occupants, and had Rhodes and then Tafero get out before both officers were shot.[3] The survivors fled in a police car, kidnapped a man, stole his car, and were arrested after a roadblock.[3]
At trial, Rhodes testified against Tafero and Jacobs. A case summary says Rhodes was the only one who tested positive for gunpowder residue and that his testimony helped him receive a lesser charge.[3] Tafero and Jacobs were convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. Rhodes received a life sentence.[3]
Years later, Rhodes changed his story. He confessed that he had shot the officers, according to accounts of the case.[2][3] Then he changed it again, retracting the confession and saying other inmates had pressured him to make it.[2] The result was not a clean exoneration, but a case that stayed trapped between two versions of the same morning, one in which Tafero was guilty, and one in which Florida executed the wrong man.
Jacobs’ death sentence was eventually commuted to life in prison, but Tafero’s was not.[3] On May 4, 1990, after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his final request for a stay, Tafero was brought to Florida’s electric chair, known as “Ol’ Sparky.”[1] His head had been shaved, his eyes were covered by a black mask, and electrodes were attached to his head and lower right leg.[1]
Tafero used his last words to criticize Florida’s death penalty, calling it “very arbitrary and capricious.”[1] Then the execution began. UPI reported three surges of electricity, the first at 7:07 a.m. and the last at about 7:10. Each time, flames came from the headpiece and smoke rose toward the ceiling. Tafero was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m.[1]
Florida State Prison spokesman Bob Macmaster blamed the fire on a replacement sponge in the headpiece. In Florida executions, he said, electricity passed through a saline-filled sponge placed against the prisoner’s head. The old sponge had been used in 21 executions before it was replaced for Tafero’s execution. “It was not an appropriate sponge,” Macmaster said. “It was the sponge causing the fire.”[1]
Macmaster said prison officials believed Tafero was unconscious from the moment the current struck and that the burning came from the headpiece rather than human tissue.[1] Tafero’s attorney, Mark Olive, called for an outside inquiry and asked Florida’s governor to suspend further death warrants.[1] HISTORY.com later described the execution as a turning point in the debate over electrocution, noting that several states moved away from the electric chair and adopted lethal injection.[4]
The object left at the center of the story was small and ordinary, a sponge meant to carry current cleanly through salt water. Instead, it became the thing witnesses remembered, smoking above a strapped-down man while the clock moved from 7:07 to 7:13.
