A FAIR TRIAL? THE EXECUTION OF ANTHONY WAINWRIGHT

Carmen Gayheart was raped and murdered in April 1994 and her assailant,  Anthony Wainwright, was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death on May 30, 1995.

To my mind, there is something wrong with a justice system where Wainwright spent  over 30 years on death row before being executed by lethal injection on June 10, 2025.

A system which allows appeal after appeal, to the Florida Supreme Court, three times,  to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, twice, and to  the U.S. Supreme Court, all with little or no chance of success, cannot be either fair or just.

By comparison, when the United Kingdom enforced the death penalty execution was carried out after the elapse of three clear Sundays after sentence was passed. Appeals could be made to the Court of Appeal, only once, and if that failed to the Home Secretary.

If that was unsuccessful the file was annotated with the words, "The law must take its course", and the execution then went ahead, at the most three weeks after conviction and sentence.

I won't pretend that the United Kingdom's system was perfect, and yes! Miscarriages of justice did occur, which with a protracted stay between sentence and execution may have been prevented, such as the case of Timothy Evans, wrongly hanged for the murder of his daughter in 1950, a murder carried out by his landlord John Christie, which became clear at Christie's own trial three years later.

Had Evans still been on 'death row', although there was such thing in the UK,  then he may well have been pardoned, or at least afforded a re-trial.

Evan allowing for such infrequent cases I still feel that justice should not only be fair, but swift, sparing the condemned the agony of years of living in limbo, denying the relatives of the victims closure ( both Carmen Gayheart's parents died never knowing if her killer faced the ultimate punishment), and saving the state a fortune in both the costs of incarceration and of prolonged and repeated legal proceedings.