Death row exonerees, advocates meet to discuss ending death penalty

TAMPA — He went to jail Ronnie Bridgeman, a frightened 17-year-old with no previous record and no thoughts on what it would mean to spend a lifetime in prison or to be dealt a death sentence.

He left Kwame Kamau Ajamu, a 45-year-old man wrongly imprisoned, months from being executed.

Ajamu, of Cleveland, told his story Saturday before a crowd at a Tampa hotel hoping to end the death penalty.

Ajamu, now 59, spent much of his 28 years in prison reading, and it showed. He faced a room of shared experiences: at least 20 other death row exonerees who lived his plight and the advocates who helped them find freedom.

He had no notes, no written speech, but his voice was booming. “Capital punishment, the death penalty, wrongful incarceration ... it’s a manifestation of all the evil that exists within humans.”

The room was packed with members and supporters of Witness to Innocence, the country’s only group for people who have survived death row to share their stories.

Florida, in many ways, is a perfect place for the group’s annual meeting.

The state has the second largest death row in the nation, according to Mark Elliott, the director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. It also has the highest number of innocent people sentenced to death who were later exonerated.

And attendees at the conference Saturday signed a giant card to thank Orange County State Attorney Aramis Ayala for choosing not to seek the death penalty in any of her cases.

While advocates of the death penalty see it as a deserving punishment for the most hideous and violent of crimes, others see it as an inhumane practice. And those like Ajamu, who were wrongly sentenced to death, see too much risk in a system that almost ended their lives. The wrongly convicted can’t fight from their grave.

It was a 13-year-old boy’s testimony that sealed the fates of Ajamu, his brother Wiley Birdgeman and friend Ricky Jackson. There was no physical evidence, just a boy’s statements at three separate trials. Still, the three young men were convicted of killing a man during a robbery with acid and a handgun.

Ajamu’s execution date was scheduled; it was to be in early October 1978, just before his 20th birthday.

“I had really come kind of close I guess,” he told the Tampa Bay Times.

The death penalty was eradicated in Ohio in August 1978 — two months before his execution date.

He worked hard for the next 25 years with the goal to make parole and figure out how to free his friend and brother, who struggled with mental health issues.

He was the perfect prisoner, and he made parole in 2003, a decade after his mother died.

It took 11 more years for a judge to clear his name and free his brother and friend from prison. That 13-year-old boy, now a grown man, eventually recanted his statements. He never saw the slaying, he said.

Said Russell Neufeld, a civil-rights and death penalty lawyer from New York, Ajamu makes real what some see as an abstract question. He was a teenager forced to look death in the face because of shoddy police work and a system that allowed capital punishment.