BY HARRY COVERSON, GUEST WRITER TO THE TIMES
By the time you read this, Loran Cole will probably be dead. His death certificate will list the cause of death as “homicide.” But the agent of that homicide will not be identified. Because Loran Cole will be killed by the state of Florida, claiming to do so in the name of all of us.
The crime that Cole committed was heinous. He and another man kidnapped a brother and sister camping in the Ocala National Forest, raping the woman and torturing the man before killing him. Cole was convicted of a capital crime and the jury unanimously recommended death for his punishment.
On its face, this is simply one more case from a state whose criminal sentencing has historically focused on the heinousness of crimes to the exclusion of all other factors to rationalize killing its offenders. One result has been the glaring racial disparity of those currently on Florida’s Death Row. A 2017 study by the Miami Herald revealed that “African Americans in Florida comprise about 17 percent of the population, according to the 2015 census. But they make up about 39 percent of the Death Row population.”
Loran Cole is a white man, at some level an exception to Florida’s racist punitive practices. But at another level, he holds something in common with a number of inmates in Florida’s penal system: He is a product of the Dozier School for Boys which over its 111-year history would engage in some of the most horrific systematic child abuse ever recorded in America.
My juvenile public defender clients were terrified of being sentenced to Dozier. Marianna was the site of a Civil War battle celebrated each year by Confederate descendants and nine reported lynchings, the last a celebrated event in 1934 on the lawn of the Jackson County Courthouse. Those events, along with the rumors of boys who just disappeared – their families told they had run away – made the stories about Dozier seem plausible.
But in 1985 I was still a true believer in a rehabilitative juvenile justice system. My head denied these stories even as my gut told me that there had to be more than mere legend involved. So I assured my clients that if they just followed the rules and kept their noses clean, they’d be OK.
I was wrong.
The recent publication of USF anthropology professor Erin Kimmerle’s book, We Carry Their Bones, details the excavation of 55 unmarked graves at Dozier. It also includes horrific accounts by survivors of “the White House,” a frame structure on the Dozier campus where boys as young as eight years old were tortured and raped.
As it turns out, my clients had every reason to be afraid.
There’s no small irony in the fact that Dozier was historically called “the training school.” For many who survived Dozier, it had been just that, young boys who arrived with all kinds of rehabilitative needs – educational deficits, psychological problems and histories of neglect – most departing with those needs unmet but with newly acquired criminal skills that would insure they would spend the rest of their lives in the adult system.
Loran Cole was a poster boy for such training. His accounts of his time in the White House where he was raped and tortured are difficult to hear. And Cole proved an apt pupil. These would be the very behaviors he would replicate on that awful day in the Ocala National Forest. But the jury which unanimously decided that the state of Florida would kill him for this crime never heard any of that history. And recent attempts to procure a new trial to allow it to be heard have been rejected at every level of our state courts
I believe there is a reason for that.
Dr. Kimmerle reported ongoing resistance to her investigations from Jackson County and state officials involved in Dozier’s operations. And her discovery of 55 unmarked graves at Dozier suggests this was no accident.
Florida has chosen to bury its mistakes, a process that continues today from laws designed to prevent the beneficiaries of our Jim Crow past from ever being made uncomfortable to our state’s refusal to hold itself fully accountable for the damage that past has inflicted upon its victims. Ironically, just as Governor DeSantis signed a bill providing $20 million in compensation to survivors of Dozier School, effectively admitting its horrific past, he also signed the death warrant for one of its graduates, Loran Cole.
Retributive justice systems require those who harm others to be accountable for their misdeeds. But if such systems are to retain any sense of legitimacy, accountability must include their own misdeeds. That cannot happen when we deny our role in creating those we call monsters and bury our mistakes.
