Freed from death row, speaker decries capital punishment - - Top Stories - Colorado Springs Gazette, CO

Freed from death row, speaker decries capital punishment - - Top Stories - Colorado Springs Gazette, CO
Of all the horrors on Florida’s Death Row, one stood out: The terrifying noise of the electric chair firing up, twice a day like clockwork.

“You got to sit there and listen to that chair being tested, knowing that it was being tested in your honor,” said Shabaka WaQlimi, 62, who came within 15 hours of being executed at a state prison in Starke, Fla.

Today, WaQlimi is a free man.

After nearly 15 years on Death Row, WaQlimi’s convictions on rape and murder were set aside in 1987, after a judge determined that prosecutors blocked testimony that undercut the evidence against him.

At one point, his trip to the electric chair was postponed with less than a day to spare because a different judge found that his appeals hadn’t been exhausted in the Florida state courts, he said.

WaQlimi — or Joseph Green Brown, as he was known when he was convicted — recounted his experiences Saturday at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People conference in Colorado Springs.

With a business suit and close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair, he could have been confused with any other speaker at a weekend hotel convention. Instead, an audience of 30 listened in rapt attention while he spoke of the torture of knowing his death was planned “down to the second.”

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