John Spenkelink was sentenced to death in Tallahassee, Florida for a homicide committed in February, 1973.  In 1979, he became the first person in the United States involuntarily executed under the post-Furman death penalty statutes.  His crime did not present those factors usually seen in death penalty cases.  On the contrary, the offense for which John Spenkelink was executed -- killing a fellow parolee from prison whom John Spenkelink asserted had sexually assaulted and robbed him -- was not the type of offense which raises the community outcry for the imposition of death as punishment.
 That John Spenkelink became the first post-Furman involuntary execution was not a function of chance; rather, LDF's strategy of litigating systemic attacks on the imposition of the death penalty to the virtual exclusion of viable case-specific issues, targeted him for execution and extinguished any hope that he had for relief in post-conviction proceedings.
 The LDF attorneys representing John Spenkelink persisted in the obsolete "systemic issues" strategy notwithstanding the 1976 United States Supreme Court decisions in Gregg v. Georgia, Proffitt v. Florida, and Jurek v. Texas, upholding the constitutional validity of the so called "guided discretion" statutes for the imposition of the death penalty.  Even after the decision in Spenkelink v. Wainwright and the subsequent execution of John Spenkelink made clear, for anyone who chose to listen, the demise of the LDF strategy, LDF attorneys, throughout the 1980's, adhered to a litigation model based primarily on systemic attacks on the imposition of the death penalty.
 The authors made numerous pleas to LDF to change the strategy.  These pleas fell on deaf ears.
 The particular facts of John Spenkelink's case cried out for the presentation of case-specific issues in his post-conviction proceedings, such as ineffective assistance of trial counsel.  "Prosecutors [generally] pay little attention to murder among convicts . . . .  Here there was a claim of self-defense, that [Spenkelink] had been homosexually raped and his money taken from him . . . [the victim] was older, bigger, stronger, had spent decades in prison and was in violation of parole at the time . . . .  The death penalty is not normally asked for or given in such cases."
 The case was replete with mitigating circumstances:  John Spenkelink was the child of a World War II combat veteran who was psychologically crippled by the war.  The young John Spenkelink idolized his father.  At age 11 John found his father dead on the garage floor, a suicide by asphyxiation.  "The troubled youngster began a career of minor crime.  Prison psychiatrists examining [John] over the years wrote that his criminal behavior was in large part due to the suicide of his father and that he was amenable to treatment."  Spenkelink's court appointed trial attorneys presented no mitigating circumstances to the jury that recommended that John Spenkelink be sentenced to death.
 These court appointed attorneys "lacked sufficient resources to prepare and conduct the defense.  One publicly stated that the case was beyond his competence.  One was absent during part of the jury selection to be with his wife in childbirth."  They failed to raise, and thus procedurally defaulted, several crucial issues at Spenkelink's trial.
 By the legal standards of the late 1970's, the circumstances of John Spenkelink's representation at trial presented viable case-specific issues for post conviction litigation.  However, the LDF post conviction legal strategy in his case focused almost exclusively on a systemic attack on the procedures for imposing the death penalty.  By 1977, when Florida Governor Rueben Askew signed John Spenkelink's initial death warrant and the LDF attorneys initiated habeas corpus proceedings,  the Supreme Court decisions in Profitt, Gregg, and Jurek, upholding the constitutional validity of the "guided discretion" death penalty statutes, were a year old.
 The issues raised by the LDF litigation team on John Spenkelink's behalf read like a laundry list of Furman era constitutional challenges to the imposition of the death penalty in any case:  a) the death penalty is arbitrary, capricious, excessive and disproportionate in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution; b) unreliable procedures existed for determining aggravating circumstances justifying the imposition of the death penalty; c) the death penalty is imposed in a discriminatory manner based on the race of the victim; d) the death penalty is discriminatorily imposed against males and poor persons; e) execution by electrocution constitutes cruel and unusual punishment; f) exclusion of jurors with conscientious scruples against the death penalty in all cases creates a prosecution-prone jury; g) appellate review of death sentences is necessarily subjective and unpredictable.
 Virtually absent from the habeas corpus pleadings was any constitutional issue concerning the specific facts of John Spenkelink's case.  Most egregiously, there was no mention of the glaring deficiencies in the representation provided by the trial attorneys.  John Spenkelink was not portrayed as an individual who was sentenced to death at a trial that failed in its entirety to address the crucial sentencing issues; rather, he became nothing more than a symbol for a nationwide strategy to attack the constitutionality of the death penalty.
 John Spenkelink's status as a symbol was accentuated when he was made the subject of a featured story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine which  introduced him to the nation as the first in line for execution.  
 In the habeas corpus proceedings in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Spenkelink's team of LDF attorneys was denied the opportunity to present evidence to prove their systemic challenges to the death penalty.  They met with an equally hostile audience in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit which found all the systemic issues foreclosed as a matter of law by the Supreme Court decisions in Proffitt v. Florida and Witherspoon v. Illinois.  When Anthony Amsterdam presented the Spenkelink oral argument to the Fifth Circuit, the questioning from the panel rose almost to the level of verbal abuse.  After the oral argument in New Orleans, in an amazing feat of moral courage, Amsterdam made his way to the Magazine Street second floor office of a community anti-death penalty organization, and gave a "chins up, fight on" optimistic view of the legal landscape of death penalty litigation.
 However, in words sounding the death knell for the strategy that had served LDF so well for over a decade, the Fifth Circuit held in Spenkelink's case that:
  with  appropriate standards to guide discretion.  If a state has such a properly drawn statute -- and there can be no doubt [after Proffitt ] that Florida has -- which the state follows in determining which convicted defendants receive the death penalty and which receive life imprisonment, then the arbitrariness and capriciousness condemned in Furman  had been conclusively removed.*          Under the Fifth Circuit's decision, if a state imposes the death sentence following the guidelines of a facially valid statute, "[the] inquiry must end there."
 Notwithstanding the barely dried ink on the Supreme Court decisions in Proffitt, Gregg, and Jurek, the articulated consensus among the LDF capital defense experts was that the Supreme Court would certainly grant certiorari to review the decision of the Fifth Circuit in Spenkelink v. Wainwright.  On March 26, 1979, the Supreme Court denied certiorari with only the dissenting voices of Justices Marshall and Brennan, who believed the death penalty to be unconstitutional under all circumstances.
 Florida Governor Bob Graham signed John Spenkelink's second death warrant and his execution was set for May 23, 1979.  One day before the scheduled execution, a team of attorneys lead by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark took over representing John Spenkelink,  and raised the case specific issue of his ineffective representation at trial in a successive habeas corpus petition.  Fifth Circuit Senior Judge Elbert Tuttle granted a stay of execution; but, by this time the momentum for the nation's first post-Furman involuntary execution was too great.  A hastily assembled panel of the Fifth Circuit, without conforming to the Circuit Court Rules, dissolved the stay of execution.  John Spenkelink was executed on May 25, 1979, his case specific legal issues never heard by any court.
 With its decision in Spenkelink v. Wainwright, the Fifth Circuit -- at that time covering the death belt states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas -- conclusively foreclosed the LDF strategy of broad based attacks on the constitutional validity of the death penalty itself; the Supreme Court, having foreclosed such attacks in its 1976 death penalty decisions, refused to review the Fifth Circuit's actions.  Any realistic, rational person surveying the legal landscape could only conclude that it was time to change strategies.
 Yet, throughout the 1980's, LDF continued to pursue as its primary strategy in the fight against the death penalty, systemic attacks in post-conviction proceedings on the death penalty itself.  LDF continued to instruct lawyers in death penalty litigation -- who looked to LDF for guidance -- to focus primarily on systemic issues and how to obtain post- conviction relief.  While individuals and organizations litigating death penalty cases were starved for money, LDF spent in excess of a million dollars funding studies to prove that the death penalty was systemically imposed in a manner which arbitrarily discriminated based on the race of the victim and that removal of jurors with conscientious scruples against the death penalty in all cases created prosecution prone juries.
 Despite the objective truths verified by the systemic studies, the legal viability of these issues already had been unambiguously foreclosed by the courts.  Certainly, any legal strategy that continued to focus primarily on systemic issues, committing large amounts of extremely limited resources to litigating these issues, was obsolete.
 The LDF lawyers and experts traveled and expended funds like corporate sales people -- while people who were trying to change the focus of the strategy were unable to receive funding for such necessities as gasoline for travel to court.  LDF and its blessed allies consider the limited amount of financial resources available in the private sector to fight the death penalty and thereby controlled the fate of thousands of death eligible persons.  Public sector funding was non-existent for meaningful work.  LDF shared their financial resources only with persons and entities that subscribed to their literally fatal strategies.  That continues to be true today.  Persons who are otherwise courageous, dedicating a huge portion of their lives to working on death penalty cases,  are literally afraid to publicly disagree with LDF because of the consequences to their personal livelihoods and professional reputations.
 LDF's past leadership and guidance in the administration of the death penalty fight established its strategy and tactics as an opiate for the American legal profession to accept as an easy-to-administer strategy rather than adopting a more realistic, difficult-to-administer strategy.   Despite pleas in numerous forums, like flies to sweetcakes, the most brilliant and dedicated of the American legal profession continued to worship the golden casket that LDF displayed.
 In Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, one of Portia's suitors uttered appropriate words while rejecting the golden casket:
 . . . The fool multitude that choose by show,
 Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach,
 Which pries not to the interior, but, like the      martlet,
 Builds in the weather on the outward wall,
 Even in the force and road of casualty
 The "fool multitude" choose words such as "crazies," etc., to hurl at those who advocate for change of the strategy.  A vivid example of misguided direction is the LDF summer conference for death penalty foes which is held each year at Airlie House, Virginia, an expensive plantation setting retreat.  The setting is more than symbolic for a conference that has continued to restrict attendance to a very small number of advocates where the educational enrichment has the tunnel vision of the current LDF strategy.  The conference should be held on the campus of Howard University or in a similar environment that speaks to change and could accommodate the large numbers of advocates that need training.