A row of solitary confinement cells.
ill Farrant is trying to accomplish something most would consider impossible.
As the University of Cape Town molecular biologist explained during a presentation at the TEDGlobal>Geneva conference last month, Farrant is currently working on harnessing the potential of a group of some 135 rare “resurrection plant” species that are able to lose practically all of their water without dying, making them extremely drought-resistant.
This is a timely concern in South Africa, which is currently in the midst of its worst drought in over a century. The extreme conditions mean that more than half the country's 50 million people are facing hunger due to the persistent drought conditions’ impact on the harvest of maize and other staple crops.
"Pretty amazing, huh?" Farrant questioned her TED audience after showing dramatic time-lapse videos of three seemingly dead plants greening and coming back to life. (At the 6:15 mark in the video below.)
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Florida Governor Jeb Bush in 2006, his last year in office. Associated Press
Bush Email Archive
In a recent interview with The Huffington Post, Bush recalled breakfast meetings with Catholic bishops at which the issue would come up. “The last thing they always talked about – after feeding the poor, and dealing with homelessness, and giving parents school choice, and protecting the lives of unborn babies – was the death penalty,” he said. “It is a tenet of my faith and there was a conflict there."
In July of his first year in office, Bush oversaw his first execution.
Allen Lee "Tiny" Davis had been convicted of brutally killing a pregnant woman and her two daughters. He spent 17 years on death row, exhausting appeals and receiving stays from two earlier dates with the electric chair. During his entire time on death row, Davis' weight concerned officials. As his execution neared, it became an urgent matter. The electric chair had a 350-pound limit. Davis came in at 349. The prison put him on a diet and spent $706 for red oak lumber to build a new chair that was wider and less rickety. The electrical current remained the same.
On the day of his execution, July 8, 1999, an arthritic, 344-pound Davis had to be wheeled to the chair by his guards.
At approximately 7:01 a.m., leather belts were strapped around his arms, chest and legs and a 5-inch-wide leather strap was placed across his mouth, forcing his nose upward. A mask was then lowered over his face.
Witnesses said that at this point Davis began issuing muffled screams or moans. When the switch was flipped, blood started to drip from under the mask, over his chin and neck, forming an 8-by-12 inch puddle on his white button-down shirt. Then-state Sen. Ginny Brown-Waite (R) claimed to see the shape of a cross in the blood – a sign of God forgiving Davis for his sins. Brown-Waite, who was in the room, recalled the execution as "pretty gruesome,” but just.
Davis' muffled screams quieted. But he still appeared to be breathing. After the electrical current was switched off, his chest rose and fell 10 times.
“It took a few moments, seconds really, to realize what was going on, that this was not the normal, quiet, efficient execution that the state wanted portray,” said veteran Tampa reporter John Sugg, who also witnessed the execution in person. “He wasn’t dead. You could hear him. I heard him.”
By 7:15 a.m., Davis has been declared dead. His body was covered in burns – on his head, his groin, and behind his right knee. Photos taken shortly after showed his face had turned purple, likely the result of partial asphyxiation.
GRAPHIC PHOTO
(Tap to Reveal)
Bush was unapologetic. In the days after the execution, he insisted, as prison officials would too, that the bleeding started before the electricity, and he pleaded that sympathy be directed toward Davis’ victims. The controversy, he said, was “an argument over a nosebleed.”
Following the Davis execution, another death row inmate challenged the state's use of the electric chair. In September 1999, the Florida Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that the chair was legal. In a scathing dissent, Justice Leander Shaw wrote that Davis was “brutally tortured to death by the citizens of Florida” and described the state’s record of bungled executions as “acts more befitting a violent murderer than a civilized state.” To make his point, he included photos of Davis’ body in his dissent.
"Execution by electrocution – with its attendant smoke and flames and blood and screams – is a spectacle whose time has passed," Shaw wrote.
The sorry state of the death penalty in Florida was on the mind of Stephen Hanlon, then the partner in charge of Holland & Knight’s pro-bono department, when he spotted Bush in the law firm’s Tallahassee office shortly before Bush took office. He knew what he needed to do. He dug out his copy of Von Drehle’s book and handed it to Bush.
The book detailed what Hanlon knew all too well: Florida struggled to find and fund qualified lawyers to defend the condemned and qualified judges to oversee the trials. The judicial system, as Von Drehle wrote, was “a slapdash machine designed in confusion, built of spare parts and baling wire.”
Between 1973 and 1995, the Florida Supreme Court reversed 49 percent of the state’s death sentences after analyzing trial transcripts and finding errors, a 2000 Columbia University study found. That count didn't include inmates who were freed based on new evidence, faulty witness testimony, or coerced confessions. Florida led the country in death-row exonerations during this period.
Hanlon had worked death penalty cases and knew how overburdened appellate lawyers were. He needed Bush to know that the system was hitting a crisis point. “This is the brain surgery of our profession,” he said, “and we were throwing people at it who just had no idea what they were doing."
At some point early in his first year in office, Bush returned to Hanlon’s office with the Von Drehle book full of passages underlined in red ink. In their conversation, Bush acknowledged that there were problems with defense lawyers and questions about whether the death penalty even deterred crime, according to Hanlon.
“My general impression was this was a very smart guy,” Hanlon said. “He was very much into policy. He knew there were very serious problems.”
"I didn't expect a fellow student from Stanford to be so violent. I've never seen anyone turn that violent, even in a drunken state."
— Ashley
But Bush and his staff didn’t see a broken system. They saw instead an activist Florida Supreme Court that gummed up the appeals process and needlessly prevented executions from taking place. Writing for the conservative Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies newsletter in August 1999, Reginald Brown, Bush’s then-deputy general counsel, lamented the high percentage of death sentences the court reversed – at that point, 79 percent.
“Jeb believed in the death penalty and wanted to enforce it,” Brown told HuffPost. “He thought that the Florida Supreme Court was trying to do a pocket veto of the law.”
In October 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take up a case from Florida asking whether the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Two months later, Bush called a special session of the state legislature and pushed a bill that designated lethal injection as the main method of carrying out executions while leaving the chair as an option. The bill quickly passed through the legislature. The threat of a U.S. Supreme Court decision gutting Florida's death penalty was averted.
During the same special session, Bush called for legislation to severely limit the ability of death row inmates to appeal their sentences. He and his allies promised that the bill, known as the Death Penalty Reform Act of 2000, would reduce the average time between sentence and execution from 14 years to five years or less. "What I hope is that we become like Texas: Bring in the witnesses, put them on a gurney, and let’s rock and roll," Bradford Thomas, Bush's top adviser on the death penalty, chest-thumped to the St. Petersburg Times. (Bush would later appoint Thomas as an appellate judge.)
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, left, addresses members of the House Republican caucus on death penalty legislation during a special session in 2000.
Associated Press
Raquel Rodriguez, Bush's former general counsel, told HuffPost that the governor "felt the system was being abused and that those delays were an abuse of the system and a disservice to the victims, who were forced to live for years and years knowing that the person who killed their loved one was still sitting in prison even though they had been sentenced to death."
But members of the state legislature's black caucus objected strenuously, even inviting Freddie Pitts, one of the state's most famous exonerees, to testify. Pitts and another man, Wilbert Lee, had been wrongly convicted of the murder of two gas station attendants in 1963 after police beat them into confessing to the crime. Pitts recalled to HuffPost that the sheriff at the time bragged, “This will be two n*****s that won’t be in that March to Washington.”
Pitts said he and Lee were pressured to plead guilty. An all-white jury sentenced them to death. The entire proceeding took less than a day. They remained behind bars even after a white man confessed to the murders. They would not be exonerated until 1975.
A quarter-century later, Pitts addressed the Florida House of Representatives. Republicans had allowed him only one minute to speak, he said. He explained that had Bush’s law been in effect when he was on death row, he would be dead. Then he walked off the floor.
“It was dead silence for a good minute, maybe longer,” Pitts remembered.
It wasn't enough. The bill passed by a single vote after the second-ranking House Democrat defected to back the measure.
Bush heralded the bill as “a historic piece of legislation” that would be "respectful of family members and victims" and “bring a semblance of justice to this very complicated issue.”
Others were shocked. “It just doesn’t make any sense for a guy who was that bright,” Hanlon said. “The one word I would use is inexplicable. That wasn’t the Jeb Bush I thought I knew.”
The Florida Supreme Court had another word for the legislation: unconstitutional. A few months after the governor signed the bill into law, the court ruled that it violated the state constitution’s separation-of-powers clause and the rights of defendants to due process and equal protection. The court voided most of the new statute, but warned that the capital punishment system's problems would endure unless the state provided proper funding "for competent counsel during trial, appellate, and postconviction proceedings."
Bush was unbowed. Bush was unbowed. In his short time in office, he had already seen a botched execution and legal setbacks with the state Supreme Court rebuke, yet he pressed forward. “The problem isn't the means of execution," he wrote in one email. "It is the delays created by a system of excessive appeals.”
As Bush attempted to hasten death row appeals, he sought to calm critics by setting up a task force to analyze whether race played a factor in the state’s capital cases. For those familiar with the death penalty in Florida, it was entirely redundant.
“You didn’t need a task force to know looking at the simple numbers that the race of the victim played a major role, especially in Florida,” said state Sen. Chris Smith (D). “The dirty little secret in politics is the task force was only set up to muddy the waters."
Ultimately, Bush’s task force recommended that the issue of race be studied further. Neither the governor nor the legislature established an initiative or set aside funding to examine the issue again. Instead, executions in Florida continued without pause.
On June 7, 2000, Bennie Demps, a racial justice advocate within the prison system, was put to death by lethal injection. Demps had been convicted of killing a fellow prisoner. He never stopped professing his innocence, claiming he had been set up by corrupt officials. Before his execution took place, Pope John Paul II sent a letter to Bush seeking clemency. The governor declined to grant it.
The execution went awry shortly after it began. Technicians struggled for more than a half-hour to find a vein. When the curtains in the chamber finally opened, Demps screamed out that what was about to transpire was nothing more than a "low-tech lynching."
In a narrative of events he wrote after the fact, George Schaefer, one of Demps' attorneys, recalled the anxiety building in the witness gallery during the delay and remembered hearing “some strange drum beats or perhaps even music while waiting.” That anxiety turned to shock once Demps appeared and delivered his last words. Schaefer wrote that his client “went on to ask that I request an investigation of what had just happened to him. He said that the officials had cut into his groin and into his leg and that he had bled profusely. He said that it was very important that his body be examined because it would show where there were sutures. He mentioned he had been ‘butchered.’”
Schaefer had nightmares for a month after the execution, he said. He eventually moved to San Diego, where he currently works as a lawyer for the city handling civil litigation. “It was very traumatic for me,” he said.
At the governor's office, there was a different reaction. Asked for his thoughts after the Demps execution, Bush replied that the procedure was done "according to the textbook."
"There was no botched nature to it at all."
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Opener: Getty Images/Shutterstock
The Flint Water Plant.
Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
At the heart of Farrant’s research is figuring out what environmental and cellular signals allow genes present in the resurrection plants – which are mainly found on the African continent, but also in Brazil – to switch on and continue to survive even when facing stress such as drought conditions.
The same genes are present in all modern crops, Farrant explained in her TED talk, so the process could be mimicked through biotechnology in other crops like maize, a staple food in South Africa.
“I do this to make people aware of how important plants are,” she told The Huffington Post. “We really need to think about how we need to, in a quick space of time, make plants to help us survive future climate impacts. We’ve got to think big and out of the box.”
This Jan. 7, 2016 photo shows the almost dried-up local dam in Senekal, South Africa where taps and water sources have run dry. Denis Farrell/AP
Of course, Farrant’s work is relevant to other parts of the world also facing drought conditions, as well. But she is focusing her work on making her homeland for food secure with a small-scale solution geared toward subsistence farmers at this time.
Farrant has an ultimate goal of developing three extremely drought-tolerant plants by the time she retires in 10 years. Her only obstacle? Money. South Africa’s rand has dropped dramatically in value, making the grants that support her research shrink along with it.
Still, she is optimistic her idea could catch on. Her work was also featured by the BBC’s “The Genius Behind” series last month and additional funding sources are pending.
“I’m offering a potential solution,” Farrant explained. “It’s not the most productive solution, but it will help people get food in Africa. To take this food into the world scale will take big finances and people in places like the U.S. to help us.”
Opener: Getty Images