Florida may execute innocent man
Dublin Core
Title
Florida may execute innocent man
Subject
Death row
Death row inmates
Description
Joseph "Crazy Joe" Spaziano is an inmate on death row for a murder that he may not have committed.
Source
The Herald
Publisher
HIST 298, University of Mary Washington
Date
1995-06-08
Rights
The materials in this online collection are held by Special Collections, Simpson Library, University of Mary Washington and are available for educational use. For this purpose only, you may reproduce materials without prior permission on the condition that you provide attribution of the source.
Format
1 JPG
300 DPI
Language
English
Coverage
Florida
Text Item Type Metadata
Text
On June 27 Florida intoned to execute Joseph "crazy Joe" Spaziano for a murder that he probably did not commit.
The facts and the chronology are nit much in dispute. On or about Aug. 6, 1973, someone brutally murdered Laura Lynn Harberts of Orlando. On Aug 21 a passer-by found her decomposed body in a trash dump in Seminole County. Harberts probably had been stabbed to death.
Beverly Fink, Harberts's roommate, told police that on Sunday afternoon the 5th, as she was labeling the apartment she was leaving the apartment that they shared, Harberts was on the telephone. "Hold on a minute Joe," she said to her caller. Was she talking to Joe Spaziano? Fink said that the two were acquainted, but barely so; they were not dating.
Almost two years passed. It was not until the summer of 1975 that police arrested Spaziano and charged him with the crime. Most of the police investigation in the period focused on another man entirely. But Spaziano had a bad . He had prior conviction for rape, and he was president of the Outlaws Motorcycle Brotherhood in the Orlando area. There was the suggestive "Hold on a minute, Joe," and Harberts and Spaziano had at least met. In July 1973 he had come by the apartment. Spaziano became the best suspect ah the police could find.
Spaziano’s went to jail in July 1975. He asserted his absolute innocence. The key witness against him was Tony Dilisio, 18, who testified to this effect: that he had once idolized Spaziano as an outlaw biker; that he hope to become a member of the brotherhood himself; that at some point- he could not remember when-Spaziano took him to the Seminole dump and boasted that he had dumped the bodies of two women there. “Man, that’s my style.” 
That was substantially all the evidence that the persecution had to offer. As the prosecutor himself acknowledged, without Dilisio’s testimony, they had no case. The jurors doubted that guilt had been proved. Judge Robert McGregor twice had to order them back to their room to reach a verdict.
The jurors never got the whole story. Two aspects of the trial are especially disturbing:
*The state knew that on the Sunday afternoon question, Harperts and Fink worked This was never disclosed to the jury.
* For some inexplicable reason, Spaziano’s trail Council never brought out that Dilisio’s testimony had been induced under hypnosis. During his first interrogation by police, Dilisio never mention the visit to the dump and vainglorious boast. It was only under hypnosis, coupled with highly suggestive questions, that he much later “remembered” the incident and enlarged upon the incrimination conversation.
(In 1985 the Flordia Supreme Court held that hypnotically induced evidence is unreliable and inadmissible, but the ruling was nit made retroactive).
In any event, Spaziano did not testify, and the jury found him guilty. One juror recalls the the vote was either 10-2 or 9-3 to recommended life inprisionment, but McGregor overruled the jury and sentenced Spaziano to death. The court took note of Spaziano's prior conviction for rape: the crime had especially "heinous, atrocious, and cruel"; No mitigating evidence had been offered. “Crazy Joe,” as the indictment identified him, was a leader of the Outlaw bikers. His brother, in full biker regalia, had attended trial.
The long process of appeals and potion for habeous corpus began. In 1984 the US Supreme Court affirmed conviction, 6-3, with Justices John Paul Stevens, William Brennan, and Thurgood Marsh dissenting. They reasoned that its is cruel and unusual punishment for a judge to overrule a jury and impose a death sentence on his own.
Since then the case been up and down, and in and out, Spaziano, now 51, has been on Death row for 20 years. Professor Michal Mellow of Vermont Law School an authority in the law of capital punishment, came late into the case as Spaziano's appellate counsel. He is convinced "down ti the very marrow of my bones" that his client is innocent. Other investigators have expressed serous doubts of the defendant's guilt.
A Clear case for clemency
Now it is up to Gov. Lawton Chiles and the Cabinet, sitting Board ofExecutive Clemency. Given the totality of the circumstance- the withheld evidence the testimony induced by hypnosis, the jury's recommendation of life- it is hard to imaging e a better case for clemency.
Despite all my wanning conduce in capital punishment, I believe that there are especially atrocious cases, in which guilt has been proved far beyond a reasonable doubt, when the death sentence may be justified.
Crazy Joe's case is different. It response with doubt. I cannot argue Spaziano's invoice as Mello can- I have not read the trail record- but I am satisfied that in this case the stated played dirty pool with the life of a not very likable man.
The facts and the chronology are nit much in dispute. On or about Aug. 6, 1973, someone brutally murdered Laura Lynn Harberts of Orlando. On Aug 21 a passer-by found her decomposed body in a trash dump in Seminole County. Harberts probably had been stabbed to death.
Beverly Fink, Harberts's roommate, told police that on Sunday afternoon the 5th, as she was labeling the apartment she was leaving the apartment that they shared, Harberts was on the telephone. "Hold on a minute Joe," she said to her caller. Was she talking to Joe Spaziano? Fink said that the two were acquainted, but barely so; they were not dating.
Almost two years passed. It was not until the summer of 1975 that police arrested Spaziano and charged him with the crime. Most of the police investigation in the period focused on another man entirely. But Spaziano had a bad . He had prior conviction for rape, and he was president of the Outlaws Motorcycle Brotherhood in the Orlando area. There was the suggestive "Hold on a minute, Joe," and Harberts and Spaziano had at least met. In July 1973 he had come by the apartment. Spaziano became the best suspect ah the police could find.
Spaziano’s went to jail in July 1975. He asserted his absolute innocence. The key witness against him was Tony Dilisio, 18, who testified to this effect: that he had once idolized Spaziano as an outlaw biker; that he hope to become a member of the brotherhood himself; that at some point- he could not remember when-Spaziano took him to the Seminole dump and boasted that he had dumped the bodies of two women there. “Man, that’s my style.” 
That was substantially all the evidence that the persecution had to offer. As the prosecutor himself acknowledged, without Dilisio’s testimony, they had no case. The jurors doubted that guilt had been proved. Judge Robert McGregor twice had to order them back to their room to reach a verdict.
The jurors never got the whole story. Two aspects of the trial are especially disturbing:
*The state knew that on the Sunday afternoon question, Harperts and Fink worked This was never disclosed to the jury.
* For some inexplicable reason, Spaziano’s trail Council never brought out that Dilisio’s testimony had been induced under hypnosis. During his first interrogation by police, Dilisio never mention the visit to the dump and vainglorious boast. It was only under hypnosis, coupled with highly suggestive questions, that he much later “remembered” the incident and enlarged upon the incrimination conversation.
(In 1985 the Flordia Supreme Court held that hypnotically induced evidence is unreliable and inadmissible, but the ruling was nit made retroactive).
In any event, Spaziano did not testify, and the jury found him guilty. One juror recalls the the vote was either 10-2 or 9-3 to recommended life inprisionment, but McGregor overruled the jury and sentenced Spaziano to death. The court took note of Spaziano's prior conviction for rape: the crime had especially "heinous, atrocious, and cruel"; No mitigating evidence had been offered. “Crazy Joe,” as the indictment identified him, was a leader of the Outlaw bikers. His brother, in full biker regalia, had attended trial.
The long process of appeals and potion for habeous corpus began. In 1984 the US Supreme Court affirmed conviction, 6-3, with Justices John Paul Stevens, William Brennan, and Thurgood Marsh dissenting. They reasoned that its is cruel and unusual punishment for a judge to overrule a jury and impose a death sentence on his own.
Since then the case been up and down, and in and out, Spaziano, now 51, has been on Death row for 20 years. Professor Michal Mellow of Vermont Law School an authority in the law of capital punishment, came late into the case as Spaziano's appellate counsel. He is convinced "down ti the very marrow of my bones" that his client is innocent. Other investigators have expressed serous doubts of the defendant's guilt.
A Clear case for clemency
Now it is up to Gov. Lawton Chiles and the Cabinet, sitting Board ofExecutive Clemency. Given the totality of the circumstance- the withheld evidence the testimony induced by hypnosis, the jury's recommendation of life- it is hard to imaging e a better case for clemency.
Despite all my wanning conduce in capital punishment, I believe that there are especially atrocious cases, in which guilt has been proved far beyond a reasonable doubt, when the death sentence may be justified.
Crazy Joe's case is different. It response with doubt. I cannot argue Spaziano's invoice as Mello can- I have not read the trail record- but I am satisfied that in this case the stated played dirty pool with the life of a not very likable man.
Original Format
newspaper
Contributor of the Digital Item
Williams, Megan
Files
Citation
“Florida may execute innocent man,” HIST299, accessed March 12, 2026, https://hist299.umwhistory.org/items/show/160.