Latino evangelical leaders are calling on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to stay the execution of Donald David Dillbeck, who was convicted of fatally stabbing a woman after escaping from custody while serving a life sentence for killing a Lee County deputy.Dillbeck’s attorneys have argued that his neurobehavioral disorder—which they say is similar to an intellectual disability and related to alcohol exposure before birth—should exempt him from execution under constitutional law, according to news reports.
Latino Christian leaders, as part of their faith-led effort dubbed “Evangélicos for Justice,” are urging the governor—who signed Dillbeck’s death warrant on January 23—to consider his disability and to offer him clemency. By enacting the death penalty on Dillbeck, they say, the state is undermining “our values and respect for all life.”
Dillbeck, who was convicted in the 1990 murder of Faye Vann in Tallahassee, is scheduled to die February 23 by lethal injection.
“As pastors and Christian leaders, we do believe all life is sacred, the life of victims and their oppressors. We want justice for everyone, which is why we believe that Donald Dillbeck should spend the remainder of his days in prison. We also believe that his life should be spared,” according to a letter on the “Evangélicos for Justice” website addressed to DeSantis.
Among those who signed the letter are Bishop Angel Marcial, president of the Florida Fellowship of Hispanic Councils and Evangelical Institutions; the Rev. Irene Familia, president of the Pastors Association of Volusia County; and the Rev. Ivan García, president of the Fellowship of Evangelical Ministers of Tampa. Signers also included Black clergy leaders, such as Bishop Derrick L. McRae, president of the African American Council of Christian Clergy, and the Rev. Frank Madison Reid III, with the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Agustin Quiles, with the Florida Fellowship of Hispanic Bishops and Evangelical Institutions, is part of the campaign and said Latino evangelicals are denouncing the execution because “we value life, from the womb to the tomb.”
Donald David DillbeckMarcial noted the importance of their Latino evangelical effort advocating for Dillbeck, who is white. Latino evangelicals should use their “prophetic voice” for Dillbeck because “we are committed to life,” Marcial told Religion News Service.
Dillbeck is “in need of an act of mercy” considering his upbringing and diagnosis, Marcial said.
“We believe in life at all levels and in all circumstances,” he added.
To Celeste Fitzgerald, who for years has advocated against the death penalty, seeing Latino and Black leaders rallying behind Dillbeck speaks “to the history of the death penalty.”
The death penalty is not a “punishment of the wealthy,” or the “worst of the worst,” said Fitzgerald, of Florida. It’s a punishment, she said, “we reserve for the poor, for people who are marginalized … for the most broken and traumatized.”
In 2016, 78.5 percent of Americans serving life sentences in federal prison were people of color, according to a 2019 report from the Center for American Progress.
“I think people in the Black and brown communities, they feel that and they’re speaking up more and more,” said Fitzgerald, who served as director of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “You can’t really take the death penalty out of the context of the criminal justice system.”
Evangélicos for Justice also stands in opposition to a pair of bills in the Florida Legislature that aim to strip away the requirement of unanimous jury recommendations before death sentences can be imposed.
Marcial said that, if passed, this legislation would set the state back. “It will hurt a lot of people, especially the humble and the poor” who do not have means to defend themselves, he said.
Evangélicos for Justice joins organizations such as Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, Amnesty International, and the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops in calling for Dillbeck’s stay of execution.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
One of my professors at Duke, Dr. David Steinmetz, once said, quoting his mentor in Germany, that the number one thing a scholar needs is the ability to sit still for a very long time. (Dr. Steinmetz had an appropriately long and guttural German word for this, but I unfortunately cannot remember it.) Specifically, at least in my line of research, the scholar needs to be able to sit still for a very long time in an archive, which is a special kind of art. In case you should ever wish to develop this skill, or if you've ever just wondered how historians compile all those footnotes, a primer:
1. Contact the archivist before you arrive. Archivists are an underappreciated lot. Most of those I've worked with are based in university libraries, tucked away somewhere far from any windows that might permit deadly sun rays to strike fragile manuscripts. They know their collections, they know their policies, and they're generally eager to help any researcher who actually manages to find them, but they need more lead time than your basic librarian.
Sometimes, archival materials are not stored at the archivist's already obscure office, but someplace even more obscure off-campus. Also, archived materials are not usually indexed card-catalog style, much less electronically searchable. Instead, they are organized into folders, stored in flat, rectangular boxes, designed, frankly, more to protect the materials than to make them accessible. If you're lucky, someone on the library staff has prepared a guide to the collection, giving maybe a few sentences on the contents of each box. If you're not so lucky, you need to be really nice to the archivist, because he or she will probably need to fetch lots of boxes out of storage that you might not need at all.
2. Wear a sweater. Think a movie theater is a nice cool place to spend a hot summer day? If you really want to cool off, find an archive. Low temperatures and humidity must be good for preserving paper, because just about every archive I've visited is kept at what feels like 50 degrees. Perhaps one of the perks of working in an archive is never needing to refrigerate your lunch.
3. Prepare to be surprised. Even with a detailed guide, you never know exactly what you'll find in an archive. In Reinhold Niebuhr's papers at the Library of Congress (the gold standard of archives, kept well below freezing), in addition to irate exchanges with the editors of The Christian Century, I found correspondence about his son's bedwetting. The bedwetting was not at all relevant to my research, but the nasty letters to the Century led me to interpret Niebuhr's break with that magazine in a new way. (Briefly, while Niebuhr's politics and theology drifted slowly but significantly away from the Century's liberalism from the late 1920s to the early 1940s, Niebuhr stopped writing for the magazine because he was angry about a string of bad book reviews.) Archival surprises are often the best fruits of a researcher's labors.
On the other hand, scholars must take care not to succumb to what a colleague of mine dubbed the Research Squirrel syndrome. Research squirrels can't resist picking up every nut they find and showing it to their friends. You do not want an office down the hall from a research squirrel, nor do you want to read his or her book. There is simply Too Much Information in even a modest archive to either read or report on all of it. Around the midpoint of an archival visit, I try to switch from broad curiosity to narrow focus. But there's always something that leads me back off the track.
4. Give credit. The acknowledgements in a history book often mention archivists, research assistants, and funding sources. You probably don't read the acknowledgements (I usually don't, either), but those names are there because their help really is the bulk of the iceberg that raises the tip to the surface. Footnotes acknowledge help, too, among their other many functions. If you ever see box and folder numbers there, it's because somebody indexed that box, somebody got it out of storage, the researcher dutifully noted all of this information, and they all want to make it easier for the next person to find that information again, should it ever be needed. Research is often solitary work, but it is a thoroughly collaborative process.
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With that, I'm back to the archives at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, home of nearly 400 boxes of material on The Christian Century, only some of them indexed. I requested 30 boxes trucked into the reading room yesterday, and I managed to look at 7 of them. I have a lot of sitting ahead of me.
Image: Photography by Hannes Grobe, archive of old maps and plates (Schulhistorische Sammlung, Bremerhaven) via Wikimedia Commons.
