John Spenkelink was born March 29, 1949 in Le Mars, Iowa. He escaped from a California prison in 1972, where he was serving a sentence for armed robbery. On February 4, 1973, the 24-year-old Spenkelink picked up 24-year-old Joseph Szymankiewicz as a hitchhiker and checked into a hotel in Tallahassee, Florida. The two had apparently been engaged in a robbery spree together.
After a heated argument at the hotel, Spenkelink left to heat a meal, returned, and shot Szymankiewicz in the back and beat him with a hatchet. Szymankiewicz died. At trial, Spenkelink claimed he acted in self-defense — asserting that Szymankiewicz had stolen his money, forced him to play Russian roulette at gunpoint, and sexually assaulted him. The prosecution disputed this account, presenting evidence that an eyewitness said both men were involved in the shooting. The jury convicted Spenkelink of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death. The self-defense claim was rejected.
Spenkelink did not waive his appeals. He pursued every available legal avenue over the following years, maintaining his innocence throughout. Governor Bob Graham, under intense pressure from national civil rights organizations, religious groups, and anti-death penalty activists, declined to intervene. On the morning of May 25, 1979, Spenkelink was executed by electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke, Florida. He was 30 years old. His final statement reportedly expressed hope that his death would help bring an end to the death penalty.
Spenkelink was the first person executed in the United States against his will after the Supreme Court's 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment. Earlier post-reinstatement executions involved men who had waived their appeals. Spenkelink's case became a flashpoint for the national death penalty debate — exposing regional divides, accelerating advocacy on both sides, and foreshadowing the racial and socioeconomic disparities that would come to define American capital punishment in the decades that followed.
His case is cited by death penalty scholars and abolitionists as the opening moment of the modern American execution era — not because of the crime itself, but because of what his involuntary death represented: the state taking a life over the individual's final objections.
Florida death row prisoner executed in 1979 for the murder of Joseph Szymankiewicz during a robbery spree. The execution was the first involuntary execution in the United States after the 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment.