Cases

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.

At 8:35 p.m. on May 22, 1962, Continental Airlines Flight 11 — a Boeing 707 registered N70775 — departed O'Hare International Airport in Chicago for Kansas City, Missouri, carrying 37 passengers and 8 crew. At approximately 9:17 p.m., an explosion ripped through the right rear lavatory. The blast severed the aircraft's tail section, sending the rear fuselage and engines detaching from the main body. The aircraft pitched nose-down in uncontrolled gyrations and struck an alfalfa field near Unionville, Putnam County, Missouri, at approximately 9:22 p.m. All 45 people aboard were killed — 44 dead at the scene, one who survived briefly died of internal injuries at Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital in Centerville, Iowa, about ninety minutes later. The perpetrator was Thomas G. Doty, a 34-year-old Kansas City man who had purchased more than $300,000 in life insurance — including policies bought at the airport just before boarding — to provide for his wife and five-year-old daughter. He brought six sticks of dynamite aboard in his briefcase, entered the lavatory, and ignited the device. The scheme was intended to appear as a genuine accident, with his family collecting the insurance payout. The crash was the first confirmed commercial aviation suicide bombing in U.S. history. The FBI investigation identified Doty as the bomber within days based on insurance records, passenger manifests, and the pattern of the explosion in the rear lavatory. The case reshaped commercial aviation security protocols around insurance verification and passenger screening. Captain Fred R. Gray, 50, was among the victims. The memorial installed in Unionville, Missouri in 2010 bears the inscription: "This Continental Flight 11 tragedy occurred in Putnam County on May 22, 1962, and changed America's air travel forever."

Four days after George Floyd died beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, that officer was in handcuffs. On May 29, 2020, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Michael Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He was booked into Ramsey County Adult Detention Center, fingerprinted, photographed — a booking photo that would soon become one of the most reproduced images in American legal history. The charges were filed by Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman in Hennepin County District Court. It was the first time a White police officer in Minnesota had ever been charged in the death of a Black civilian. Chauvin was accused of killing Floyd during an arrest on May 25, 2020. According to the criminal complaint filed in Hennepin County District Court, Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for approximately eight minutes while Floyd lay prone on the pavement at the intersection of Chicago Avenue and 38th Street in Minneapolis, hands cuffed behind his back. Three other officers — Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane — stood nearby as Floyd repeatedly said he could not breathe. He went silent. He went still. The Hennepin County medical examiner's initial autopsy found Floyd's death a homicide. A second autopsy, commissioned by Floyd's family and conducted by Dr. Allecia Wilson at the University of Michigan, independently concluded the same: Floyd died from asphyxiation caused by officers' restraint. The arrest triggered immediate unrest. A nighttime curfew was imposed across the Twin Cities, and 500 members of the Minnesota National Guard were mobilized. The Minneapolis Police Department's Third Precinct station — the same building whose officers had held Floyd pinned to the pavement — was set ablaze. The protests that began at Chicago Avenue and 38th Street spread to more than 140 American cities within a week. Demonstrators filled streets from New York to Los Angeles, Portland to Atlanta, forcing a national reckoning with police violence that had been building for decades and was now, finally, impossible to ignore. Attorneys for Floyd's family, announcing their independent autopsy on the same day as Chauvin's arrest, said the county's findings would be incomplete. They wanted their own answers. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison took over the case two days later on May 31, 2020, bringing in state-level prosecutorial resources and signaling a higher level of investigative commitment. On June 3, a grand jury upgraded Chauvin's charges to second-degree murder — a far more serious offense than the original third-degree murder and manslaughter counts. Federal civil rights charges were later filed against all four officers involved in Floyd's restraint, extending accountability beyond the singular focus on Chauvin. The case moved faster than almost anyone expected. Chauvin was convicted on April 20, 2021 — nearly 11 months after his arrest — on charges of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. He was sentenced to 22 years and six months in prison by Judge Peter Cahill, who cited the abuse of a position of trust as an aggravating factor. The conviction itself drew on extensive video evidence, bystander recordings, and the testimony of medical experts. Three remaining officers — Kueng, Lane, and Thao — faced separate state and federal trials for their roles in the fatal restraint. The broader fallout reshaped policing debates nationwide. Cities across the country reconsidered use-of-force policies, banned certain neck restraints, and increased funding for de-escalation training. Floyd's name joined a long list of Black Americans killed during police encounters that had preceded it — a list that activists had been compiling for years without national attention. His death changed that. The road from a Minneapolis pavement to a prison sentence was measured in months. The road from that pavement to lasting institutional change remains, to this day, unfinished. Chauvin's arrest was the first accountability action in a case that reshaped American law enforcement. It was not the last.