Michael Bell, who is scheduled to be put to death today at 6 p.m. for murdering a Jacksonville couple in 1993, was one of the boys sent to the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, a state school that abused its charges so violently that the state was forced to apologize and provide millions in compensation for its survivors.
Bell is one of dozens of former Dozier boys on Florida’s death row, according to a report from The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on criminal justice. At least 34 boys who stayed at Dozier, and another 16 sent to a similar school in Okeechobee, have been sentenced to death. At least 19 more are in prison for murder without death sentences.
Bell has said he was sexually assaulted by guards, who also forced him to fight other students and punished him when he lost, beating him with a leather strap and leaving him shackled for hours in the notorious “White House” where survivors have said they were taken to be tortured and raped.
At an evidentiary hearing in June, Bell’s aunt Paula Goins testified that Bell was “never the same” after his Dozier stay, News4Jax reported.
Bell is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. ET on July 15.
Dozier boy executed in Florida in 2024
Last year, another Dozier boy, Loran Kentsley Cole, was executed in Florida for the murder of John Edwards, 18, and the rape of his sister during a camping trip at Ocala National Forest. His attorneys argued for leniency due to Cole’s “horrific abuse” at Dozier, where he said he was raped by a guard, beaten regularly, and had both of his legs broken after trying to escape.
“Most people who are tormented in childhood do not become murderers, and it can be difficult to know why someone commits violence,” Lenora Lapeter Anton wrote for The Marshal Project. “But research shows that childhood and adolescent abuse does affect brain development and can make people more violent.”
What is the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys?
Within a few years after opening in 1900, the Florida School for Boys, also known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, in Marianna had already developed a reputation for abuse, cruelty, rape, and torture. Repeated reports of death, lawsuits and multiple investigations over the next 100 years failed to bring significant changes.
In 2007, the acting superintendent of the school and another staffer were fired and the state of Florida officially acknowledged the abuse the boys were put through after the White House Boys, a group of about 400 survivors, began speaking out about their experiences. After the school failed a state inspection two years later, a full investigation uncovered more evidence of abuse and a number of unmarked graves. The school and its partner facility in Okeechobee closed permanently in 2011.
A 2012 survey by University of South Florida anthropologists discovered 55 burials on the grounds and documented nearly 100 deaths at the school. Three times as many Black students died and were buried there as White students, the report said. A later survey found a suspected 27 more graves.
The Florida Legislature officially apologized in 2017 to the survivors for the lack of supervision at Dozier that enabled the beatings and rapes they endured and the deaths of their classmates. Two monuments were approved for the site in Marianna and at the State Capitol.
In 2020, novelist Colson Whitehead won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his 2019 novel “The Nickel Boys,” based on the history of the Dozier school. It was later made into an Oscar-nominated movie.
Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed off on $20 million in compensation for the White House Boys who attended the schools between 1940 and 1975.
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 Tampa Bay Times reporters Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore:
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Michael Bell is being executed in Florida today, was among 34 former Dozier school students on death row
Reporting by C. A. Bridges, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Florida Times-Union
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