TALLAHASSEE, FLA. — After almost 18 years on Florida's death row in Raiford, Juan Roberto Melendez spent a restless first night of freedom.
"I couldn't sleep," a bleary-eyed Melendez told reporters during a Friday news conference in Tallahassee. "It's like a state of shock."
Juan Melendez waits outside the Florida Press Center for the end of a news conference in Tallahassee, Fla. Melendez was released from prison Thursday, after spending nearly 18 years on death row.
Melendez, 50, walked out of the Union Correctional Institution Thursday night after Polk County prosecutors decided not to retry him on charges that he killed an Auburndale man almost two decades ago.
A jury convicted him of the crime in 1984, but a team of attorneys and investigators found enough evidence to persuade a circuit judge last month to order a new trial for Melendez. The prosecution, however, acknowledged that it no longer had enough evidence to convict Melendez again as its two main witnesses in the case are either dead or have recanted parts of their testimony.
In the meantime, death penalty opponents are using Melendez's case the 24th death row inmate set free since Florida reinstated capital punishment as a platform to ask Gov. Jeb Bush to call a moratorium on future executions. The next execution, that of Amos King, is scheduled for Jan. 24.
"(Melendez's) is an egregious case and it calls attention, again, to the problem," said Walter Moore, chairman of the Tallahassee Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
The group plans on Jan. 31 to present the governor with petitions against capital punishment following a march from Raiford, which is scheduled to begin on Jan. 21.
A spokeswoman for Bush, however, said there was no proof that Melendez was wrongfully convicted and his reprieve shows the system works.
For the most part, Melendez didn't want to talk about any of that, other than repeating that he had never known the victim, Delbart Baker, or even been to Auburndale, a small town east of Lakeland.
Smiling frequently, the Brooklyn-born former fruit picker said he wanted to enjoy the day, see the stars and eventually join his 73-year-old mother in Puerto Rico.
He waved off questions about how he felt towards prosecutors or prison employees or what he would say to the governor. But splinters of bitterness occasionally poked through.
"The only thing they can do (as compensation) is give me my time back, and that's impossible," Melendez said.
Melendez's hope came in the form of three attorneys who took up his case a couple years ago for the Capital Collateral Regional Council, a state-funded agency that represents death row inmates. They tracked down an original investigator now living in Pennsylvania who talked with Melendez's original attorney, now a Polk County judge. The judge steered the investigator to old notes on the case, which included transcripts of a taped statement by another man, confessing to the murder.
The man, identified as Vernon James, made incriminating statements to state investigators, but the prosecutors never told defense attorneys about them.
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