The legacy of north Florida’s infamous Dozier school continues even after its doors closed for the last time in 2011.
Executed killer Michael Bell, for instance, was put to death July 15 at the Florida State Prison for the 1993 murder of two people outside a Jacksonville bar.
But he is also among at least 34 men who once served time at the now-shuttered Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna – and whose life ended in Florida’s death chamber in Raiford. Untold numbers “were subjected to mental, physical or sexual abuse perpetrated by school personnel,” a state legislative report said.
Bell’s execution came amid a new report finding former students of two state-run reform schools, Dozier and the Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee, have killed at least 114 people. It’s from The Marshall Project, is a nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization focused on criminal justice.
The project’s analysis by Leonora LaPeter Anton, who briefly was a Tallahassee Democrat reporter in the 1990s, finds that 50 former students of the two schools make up 19% of the death row inmates. Others are serving life sentences for capital offenses.
Neuroscientists and adolescent psychiatrists told the Marshall Project the kind of trauma some of the boys endured at Dozier and Okeechobee affects brain development and produces violent people. And among opponents to capital punishment, the findings raise ethical questions about the state executing people abused and traumatized as children while in state custody.
“It is remarkably hypocritical, isn’t it,” said Maria DeLiberato, the executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Dozier operated for 111 years with reports of abuse emerging as early as 1903. The school became notorious for cruelty and abuse before it closed in 2011. Anthropologists would find 55 unreported, and unmarked graves at the site in 2012.
The Okeechobee school open in 1955 to handle over crowding at Dozier. At its peak, the school housed more than 500 students. No one has ever been convicted of any crime for the abuse that occurred.
The testimony of more than 400 men sent to the Dozier School in the 1950s and 1960s inspired the novel and 2024 film, “The Nickel Boys” by Colson Whitehead.
Florida formally apologized for Dozier abuses
The state of Florida issued a rare public apology in 2017 for the beatings, torture, and rapes that boys suffered while confined in state custody. And last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law awarding $20 million to those physically and sexually abused at Dozier and Okeechobee.
“On one hand, Florida recognizes the harm they caused these men and authorize compensation, but then turns around and executes them,” DeLiberato said.
The teens sent to Dozier and Okeechobee had been convicted of crimes such as theft, truancy and running away from home. Others were orphans and abandoned youth.
According to the Marshall Project’s analysis, at least 25 (36%) of the Dozier/Okeechobee students convicted of homicide had killed someone shortly after being released and were 18 or younger.
Artha Gillis is an assistant professor at UCLA and a forensic psychiatrist studying a group of 147,000 youth. He told Anton that Dozier “taught the boys to be more violent at a time when their brains were malleable.”
And George Woods, a medical doctor specializing in neuropsychiatry who has testified in appeals of death row inmates, said Dozier had beat the humanity out of some of its students: “Dozier helped make these boys killers,” Woods told the Marshall Project.
Attorneys for former Dozier student Loran Cole, executed last year, attempted to use the abuse he suffered there in an appeal for his life. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected their argument.
Given the latest research establishing a correlation between the Dozier and Okeechobee schools and death rows, DeLiberato said the death sentences for the former students should be reconsidered.
“The Dozier kids should absolutely be given the opportunity to have their sentences commuted to life without parole,” she said. “In a lot of these cases, they had bad lawyers and never had the opportunity to raise these issues.”
Which Florida death row inmates were at Dozier?
Of the former Dozier boys who have been sentenced to death in Florida, 10 are still on death row, nine have been executed and five died of other causes, The Marshall Project said, although there could be more since names of the boys were not made public until 50 years after they left.Here are some of them, from accounts by The Marshall Project and a 2009 report by the Tampa Bay Times:
C.A. Bridges contributed. James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jcall@tallahassee.com and is on X as @CallTallahassee.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: A tragic legacy: Dozens of Florida reform school kids wound up on state’s death row
Reporting by James Call, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Tallahassee Democrat
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