Kathy E <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: A serial killer of women who has admitted to 41 murders faces the electric chair in Florida Monday as the state resumes executions a year after a fire in its death chamber. Gerald Stano, 46, is set for execution at 7 a.m. Monday. Stano admitted killing 41 women in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Florida, though police say the number may be closer to 80. His scheduled execution follows approval for Florida's 75-year-old electric chair, "Old Sparky,'' by the state legislature following the death chamber fire and subsequent legal challenges to its use. He is to be the first of three convicts to be executed over the next week in Florida. Smoke filled the chamber and the adjoining witness room during the execution of Pedro Medina in March 1997, forcing officials to open windows before checking to see if the condemned man was dead. Witnesses said they saw Medina's head catch fire. But the chair was certified to be in working order and executions were ordered to be resumed. Stano was a Daytona Beach short-order cook in the 1970s when he began to lure women into his car with offers of marijuana or tours of plantation ruins and Seminole War battle grounds. Once, when asked how he could kill so often, he said, "You have to pace yourself.'' Despite the confessions, Stano has survived four death warrants and is now on his fifth. Paul Crow, the Daytona Beach police detective who first charged Stano with murder, spent years talking to him about his crimes but remains mystified about the inner workings of a man deemed unadoptable by a state agency when just 13 months old. "Jerry was a bad seed,'' Crow said. Stano is set to die for the 1974 murder of a Port Orange, Florida, teen-ager. He was convicted of the crime in 1983. His execution is set to be followed Tuesday by that of Leo Jones, 47, condemned for the 1981 shooting of a Jacksonville police officer. After the death chamber fire, Jones' attorneys got the state's high court to suspend executions while the chair was tested. Among the details uncovered by Jones' lawsuit was that the workings of the chair were as much a matter of oral tradition as state law. The chair, carved from a single oak tree by inmates at Florida's Union Correctional Institution in 1923, is no high-tech wonder. It has three legs and many leather straps. Some 2,000 volts pass through an electrode attached to a leather skull cap, through a wet sponge, a layer of conducting gel on the prisoner's shaved head and into the brain, causing, the state maintains, instantaneous death. The current passes out of an electrode strapped to the right calf. In Medina's execution last year, the sponge was improperly applied, causing a short circuit and starting the fire. Florida's high court has ruled that even if the chair is not painless, it works well enough to meet constitutional demands. On March 30 Judi Buenoano, 54, is scheduled to die. An Orlando jury convicted her in 1985 of poisoning her husband with arsenic to collect $85,000 in insurance and benefits. Unlike Karla Faye Tucker, executed in Texas in February, there has been no outcry over Buenoano's fate. Like Tucker, she professes to be a born-again Christian and was certified to teach Bible studies while on death row. Buenoano's crimes earned her the nickname Black Widow. After she tried to blow up a boyfriend in Pensacola in 1984, police discovered she had first tried to poison him with arsenic. That led them to investigate the 1971 death of her husband. For 13 years his death certificate said heart attack and pneumonia. Police exhumed his body and found arsenic. They also dug up her son, Michael Goodyear. In 1980, Buenoano told authorities the 19-year-old fell out of their canoe and sank with 50 pounds of metal braces on his legs. That time she collected $125,000 from insurance companies. Again, investigators found high levels of arsenic. Then they found another boyfriend from Colorado, dead and loaded up on arsenic, and yet another insurance policy. The three convicts set to die in Florida over the next week are making last-minute appeals. But they have all survived death multiple death warrants in the past and have exhausted their best arguments, legal experts say. -- Kathy E "I can only please one person a day, today is NOT your day, and tomorrow isn't looking too good for you either" http://members.delphi.com/kathylaw/ Law & Issues Mailing List http://pw1.netcom.com/~kathye/rodeo.html - Cowboy Histories http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2990/law.htm Crime photo's Subscribe/Unsubscribe, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the body of the message enter: subscribe/unsubscribe law-issues
