On the morning of July 17, 1974, Sydney Gans drove to the paper bag company he ran in Miami and pulled into his designated parking space. A man who had started working for him about ten days earlier was waiting with an automatic rifle. The man was Thomas Knight, 23, who was on parole when Gans hired him. Before the day was over, Sydney Gans and his wife, Lillian, were dead in their own car in a wooded area of southwest Miami-Dade County, and Knight was lying in the mud nearby with the rifle and $50,000 buried beneath him.
Knight spent the next 39 years on Florida's death row. He escaped once, was a suspect in a killing in Georgia while he was free, changed his name to Askari Abdullah Muhammad after converting to Islam in prison, and in 1980 stabbed a corrections officer named Richard Burke to death on the death row wing of Florida State Prison. His case went to the Florida Supreme Court again and again and twice to the federal appeals court in Atlanta. Florida executed him on January 7, 2014, for killing Burke.
Thomas Knight was born on February 4, 1951, according to the Florida Commission on Capital Cases. The fullest account of his early life is in the Florida Supreme Court's 1998 opinion on his resentencing, which summarized the testimony of family members and others called by his defense. He was the second oldest of nine children in a family with a history of mental illness and neurological problems. Witnesses described poverty, hunger and beatings during his childhood in Fort Pierce, on Florida's Atlantic coast. His father drank and stopped providing for the family in 1960. That year, when Knight was nine, he either saw or was told about his father's rape of his sister Mary Ann.
He was first arrested at nine, for theft, and was sent to the Florida School for Boys. At fifteen he went to state prison on a burglary conviction. At nineteen he was committed to Northeast Florida State Hospital, where doctors diagnosed drug and poison intoxication, excessive drinking and a paranoid personality. The trial judge who first sentenced him in 1975 found that he had "a history of prior criminal activity," that he was 23 at the time of the crime, and that he was "of at least average intelligence and experience as an adult."
Sydney Gans was 64. He ran a successful paper bag company in Miami, owned the Miami Beach Flamingos, a minor league baseball team, and led his synagogue, according to the Miami Herald. He and Lillian lived in Bay Harbor Islands, a small town on the bay north of Miami Beach; wire reports described the couple as being from Miami Beach. Gans was known for hiring men who had been to prison so they could make a new start, the Associated Press and FlaglerLive reported. That is how Knight, newly paroled, came to work for him in July 1974.
The sources found for this page say less about Lillian Gans than about her husband. She and Sydney had a daughter, Harriet Shapiro, and grandchildren, among them Judd Shapiro. Four decades later, Harriet and Judd were the family's voice in the press as the case approached its end.
The Florida Supreme Court's 1976 opinion, quoted in later rulings, and the Eleventh Circuit's 2013 opinion give the sequence. When Gans parked at his business that morning, Knight approached him with the rifle, got into his Mercedes-Benz and ordered him to drive home to Bay Harbor Islands. There Lillian Gans was taken from the house and put in the car. Knight then had Gans drive to a bank in downtown Miami where the company had an account and withdraw $50,000. While Gans went in, Knight stayed in the car with Lillian, holding a .30-caliber carbine, according to the Herald and FlaglerLive.
Inside the bank, Gans told the bank president that he and his wife were being held hostage. Bank officials called the police, and local officers and the FBI were alerted. Gans went back out to the car with the money. He had done what was asked, and he had also made sure the authorities knew.
Officers in unmarked cars followed the Mercedes as Knight directed it toward the outskirts of Miami, and a helicopter and a small airplane joined them. FBI Agent Terry Nelson testified at the 1996 resentencing that he kept the car under surveillance for about an hour over roughly twenty miles and saw a Black man with a rifle in the rear seat. Nelson said Knight showed no sign of knowing he was being followed. The state's position at resentencing was that Knight did not learn of the surveillance until after the shootings; his defense argued that he had "snapped."
Near the end, the officers lost sight of the car for four or five minutes. In that time, in a wooded area near Southwest 132nd Street and 117th Avenue, Knight shot Sydney and Lillian Gans from the back seat. Both were struck in the neck. When police reached the car, Lillian Gans was behind the steering wheel, and Sydney Gans lay about 25 feet away. Dr. Joseph Davis, the Dade County medical examiner who performed the original examinations, testified in 1996 that Lillian Gans died instantly and that Sydney Gans had been shot at point-blank range and pulled from the car.
Officers saw a man running toward the woods with a rifle. They searched for hours, using tear gas, according to the Herald. About four hours after the shootings, roughly 2,000 feet from the car, a deputy found Knight lying in the mud in a weeded area. In the words of the Florida Supreme Court, "underneath him buried in the dirt was an automatic rifle and a paper bag containing $50,000." There was blood on his pants.
He was charged in Dade County with two counts of first-degree murder.
Knight did not stay in jail long. On September 19, 1974, while he was awaiting trial, he and ten other inmates broke out of the Dade County Jail. The Herald reported that they punched a hole through a wall. The escape set off a nationwide manhunt, and the FBI put Knight on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, according to the Commission on Capital Cases and the AP.
On October 21, 1974, a liquor store in Cordele, in Crisp County, Georgia, was robbed. Two clerks were shot, and one of them died. Authorities linked Knight to the robbery, and an AP report said he committed it with an accomplice. He was never charged. The Commission on Capital Cases record says Georgia did not prosecute him because Florida had already sentenced him to death. His part in the Cordele shooting was never tested in a court and remains an allegation.
He was free for 101 days. On New Year's Eve 1974, FBI agents found him in a shack in New Smyrna Beach, on Florida's east coast. The Herald reported that a chest of drawers fell on him as he reached for a loaded shotgun. The AP said three stolen weapons were found with him.
Knight went on trial in Miami in April 1975. The defense raised insanity, and the jury rejected it: the trial judge wrote that he found, "as did the jury, that the defendant is legally sane, knows right from wrong." The jury convicted Knight of two counts of first-degree murder on April 19, 1975, and recommended death on each. Two days later, on April 21, the judge sentenced him to death twice.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences on September 30, 1976, in Knight v. State, 338 So. 2d 201. A request for clemency was denied in December 1979, and on January 29, 1981, the governor signed a death warrant setting his execution for the Gans murders for March 3, 1981. The Florida Supreme Court refused to stop it on February 24, 1981, and a federal court stayed it two days later. FlaglerLive later reported that when Knight learned of the 1981 warrant, he asked how the state could execute him before it had tried him for killing the guard.
By then there was a second case. Richard James Burke was 48 and worked as a corrections officer at Florida State Prison near Starke, in Bradford County, which held the state's death row. The courts' opinions call him James Burke; his full name appears in the Eleventh Circuit's January 2014 opinion as Richard James Burke, and the news reports used Richard. He had two daughters, Carolyn and Margaret, who would wait more than three decades to see the case closed.
The facts of what happened on October 12, 1980, come mainly from the Florida Supreme Court's 1986 opinion in Muhammad v. State. That afternoon, Muhammad (as Knight was by then known) had been told he could not see a visitor because he refused to shave his beard. The Miami Herald and FlaglerLive reported that the visitor was his mother, making her first visit. Guards heard him say afterward that he would have to start "sticking people."
Burke worked a later shift and had nothing to do with the shaving dispute, the court noted. He was routinely taking death row inmates one at a time to the shower. When it was Muhammad's turn, Muhammad attacked him with a knife made from a sharpened serving spoon and stabbed him more than a dozen times, including a fatal wound to the heart. The other officer on the wing watched from a secure position. Muhammad dropped the knife into a trash box.
Burke died of his wounds. The man who killed him was already under two death sentences.
The prosecution in Bradford County moved slowly and with difficulty. The public defender withdrew after differences arose with Muhammad. He asked to represent himself. Circuit Judge Green advised against it and, although he noted that Muhammad seemed competent to do so, ruled that he lacked the capacity to conduct his own defense. Two judges denied his request to act as his own lawyer and later recused themselves, the Florida Supreme Court said in 2003.
Muhammad's competence was examined before trial. He refused, three times, to cooperate with two court-appointed psychiatrists, Drs. Barnard and Carrera. A third, Dr. Amin, examined him and found him competent. Because of his refusals, the judge barred expert testimony on insanity while allowing the defense itself to be raised.
The first trial opened on May 24, 1982, and ended in a mistrial the next day. On June 7, 1982, Judge Chester B. Chance granted Muhammad's renewed motion to represent himself, with an attorney named Bernstein as standby counsel. In September 1982 Muhammad withdrew his notice that he would rely on insanity. At the second trial, a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder on October 26, 1982. He waived a jury recommendation on the sentence. On January 20, 1983, Judge Chance sentenced him to death, finding three aggravating circumstances (he was under sentence of imprisonment, he had a prior capital felony conviction, and the murder met Florida's statutory aggravator for killings that are especially atrocious or cruel, known as HAC) and nothing in mitigation.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on July 17, 1986, in Muhammad v. State, 494 So. 2d 969. The court rejected his challenges to his competence to stand trial and to his waiver of counsel. A federal appeals court later quoted a line from that body of law that fit his choices: "Society permits a defendant to seek refuge in an insanity defense; it does not require it."
Meanwhile the Gans case was moving through federal court. Muhammad's habeas petition went to U.S. District Judge Hoeveler in Miami, and from there to the Eleventh Circuit. On December 8, 1988, in Knight v. Dugger, 863 F.2d 705, a panel led by Chief Judge Roney rejected six of his claims, among them ineffective assistance of counsel, pretrial publicity and the exclusion of insanity evidence, but agreed with the seventh.
The problem was the 1975 penalty phase. Under Lockett v. Ohio and Hitchcock v. Dugger, a capital jury must be free to consider any mitigating evidence, not only the factors listed in the statute. At Knight's trial, the judge's instructions listed only the statutory factors, the prosecutor told the jury to consider mitigating circumstances "by number," and defense counsel spoke of "two mitigating factors." The court found "a shared perception that statutory mitigating factors were all that the jury was required to consider." It rejected Florida's argument that the error was harmless because there were four aggravating circumstances. The death sentences for the Gans murders were vacated. The convictions stood.
News accounts summarized the ruling as holding that Knight had not been allowed to present character and background witnesses. AP reports date the ruling to 1987; the opinion is dated December 8, 1988, with rehearing denied in August 1989.
Florida did not hold the new sentencing hearing until 1996, a delay FlaglerLive put at eight years. The trial court ordered it on January 18, 1996, and found Muhammad competent on February 1. The hearing was held under heavy security, and Muhammad was kept out of the courtroom for being disruptive, the Herald reported; the AP said he cursed at the judge and the lawyers and shouted "Allahu Akbar!"
Much of the state's evidence was more than twenty years old. Several witnesses had died or could not be found, so a Miami-Dade cold case detective, Greg Smith, summarized the guilt-phase evidence for the jury and related the earlier statements of witnesses who did not appear, among them Milton Marinek, Howard Perry, the lead detective, Julio Ojeda, and the pilots of the helicopter and the airplane. The defense objected. Agent Nelson and Dr. Davis testified in person.
The defense case centered on Muhammad's history and his mind. Family members and a sheriff's deputy, Patrick Duval, described his childhood. Dr. Brad Fisher testified that he suffered from chronic schizophrenia and was under extreme emotional disturbance at the time of the murders; Dr. Joyce Carbonell and Dr. David Rothenberg also diagnosed schizophrenia; Dr. Arthur Wells said Muhammad was "50 percent or more out of control" when he fired. Dr. William Corwin noted "some conscious exaggeration of his symptoms." Three experts called by the state, Drs. Eileen Fennell, Lloyd Miller and Charles Mutter, concluded that he had a personality disorder and was malingering rather than suffering from a major mental illness.
On February 8, 1996, the jury recommended death on both counts by a vote of 9 to 3. The judge imposed two death sentences, finding six aggravating circumstances: prior violent felony, kidnapping, avoiding arrest, financial gain, the HAC factor, and a cold, calculated and premeditated killing. The judge found as mitigation childhood abuse, "some degree of paranoia" and poverty, and rejected the statutory mental health mitigators. The sentencing date is given as February 20, 1996, in the Florida Supreme Court's opinion and March 12, 1996, in the Commission on Capital Cases record.
On November 12, 1998, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed. It held that the trial judge had erred in applying the HAC factor, because the judge's account of what the couple went through rested on "conjecture and speculation," but called the error harmless given the five other aggravators. It rejected Muhammad's argument that his decades on death row were themselves cruel and unusual punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on November 8, 1999; FlaglerLive reported that Justice Stephen Breyer dissented at about that time, citing the suffering of a prolonged wait on death row.
From the late 1980s on, the two cases ran on parallel tracks.
In the Burke case, Muhammad's state postconviction motion was denied in 1989. On June 11, 1992, the Florida Supreme Court sent it back for a hearing on a Brady claim: that the state had withheld material, including a letter and statements, bearing on his mental state. At the hearing in 2000, a guard testified that Muhammad's eyes were wide open shortly after the stabbing, and several inmates described his appearance around the time of the crime, though none had told the state before. Dr. Fisher said the withheld material would have helped in diagnosing mental illness and in making a case for mitigation. On May 21, 2001, the circuit court ordered a new sentencing. The Florida Supreme Court reversed on August 21, 2003, and ordered the death sentence reinstated, finding no prejudice of the kind that would change the outcome. Later state motions failed in 2008 and 2009. In federal court, the Middle District of Florida denied his petition in March 2008, and on January 9, 2009, the Eleventh Circuit refused to let him appeal, holding that he had not rebutted the state court's finding that he was competent to stand trial, that he had waived any insanity objection when he withdrew the defense, and that seven unsigned, undated statements the state had not turned over were cumulative of material he already had. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on January 25, 2010.
In the Gans case, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the denial of postconviction relief and denied a habeas petition on November 3, 2005, in Knight v. State, 923 So. 2d 387. A new federal petition was filed in Miami in March 2006. On November 9, 2012, a federal district judge granted it, finding that Detective Smith's relay of statements from witnesses Muhammad never cross-examined, including the helicopter pilot, violated his right to confront the witnesses against him. The judge ordered Florida to resentence him or commute the sentences to life.
Florida appealed. On September 23, 2013, the Eleventh Circuit reversed, 2 to 1, in Muhammad v. Secretary, Florida Department of Corrections, No. 12-16243. Judge Pryor, joined by Judge Marcus, held that hearsay is admissible at a capital sentencing and that Muhammad had an opportunity to rebut it. Judge Wilson dissented, arguing that the Confrontation Clause applies at capital sentencing and that Muhammad had no meaningful chance to cross-examine. The panel agreed that applying the cold, calculated and premeditated aggravator, which Florida adopted in 1979, to murders committed in 1974 did not violate the ban on ex post facto laws. The Gans death sentences were restored.
After Burke's death, Muhammad was held in solitary confinement on Q-Wing at Florida State Prison until 1989, FlaglerLive reported, citing a forensic psychologist who described the conditions there as "tomb-like."
The Commission on Capital Cases record summarizes the expert dispute that ran through every phase of both cases. Defense experts testified that Muhammad had a longstanding mental illness, possibly schizophrenia. State experts found a personality disorder and concluded that he was malingering. He was found competent in the Dade County case on February 1, 1996, and in the Bradford County case in December 1999. Amnesty International, which opposed the execution, described him in 2014 as having "a long history of serious mental illness, including diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia." The Commission's record of his prison discipline from 1985 to 1987 lists mostly failures to comply and disobeyed orders, plus one spoken threat in 1990.
On October 21, 2013, a month after the Eleventh Circuit restored the Gans sentences, Governor Rick Scott signed a death warrant. It covered only the Burke case. The execution was set for December 3, 2013.
Muhammad's lawyers challenged midazolam hydrochloride, the sedative Florida had made the first of its three execution drugs in September 2013 after the makers of pentobarbital refused to supply it for executions. Florida had used midazolam twice, to execute William Happ on October 15 and Darius Kimbrough on November 12. The lawyers pointed to reports that Happ moved his head after the first drug and stayed conscious unusually long.
On November 18, 2013, the Florida Supreme Court, by a 5 to 2 vote, stayed the execution and ordered a hearing. Bradford County Circuit Judge Phyllis Rosier held two days of hearings on November 21 and 22 and ruled on November 25 that there was "no credible evidence" the drug would cause suffering, and nothing showing that Happ's movement "equated to actual pain or suffering." On December 19, after oral argument the day before, the Florida Supreme Court unanimously affirmed. It said the Department of Corrections' rules required that a prisoner be unconscious before the other drugs were given and that it would presume the department followed them. It rejected the argument that the manufacturer's opposition to the drug's use in executions mattered, and the argument that Muhammad's mental illness barred his execution. Scott reset the date for January 7, 2014.
Last appeals followed. Muhammad filed a federal civil rights suit over midazolam on December 23, which the district court and then, on January 7, the Eleventh Circuit rejected, holding that the Florida Supreme Court's ruling on the same claim barred it. In the state courts he argued that Florida had withheld evidence of his mental condition that could have disputed premeditation in Burke's killing; the Florida Supreme Court rejected that appeal without comment on January 6. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his final appeals. Justice Breyer said he would have granted a stay to consider whether executing a prisoner after so long on death row is constitutional.
His four sisters visited him on Monday, January 6, and a friend on the morning of the execution. A Department of Corrections spokeswoman, Jessica Cary, said he was calm in his final hours. His last meal was mostly sweets: sweet potato pie, coconut cake, banana nut bread, ice cream and Fritos, with a Sprite, the Herald reported. A small group of death penalty opponents stood outside the prison.
Several members of Burke's family were in the witness room, among them his daughters, Carolyn Burke Thompson, 47, and Margaret Dela Vega. Thompson sat in the front row, with her fiancé, Harold Spencer, holding her arm. No one from the Gans family attended. Harriet Shapiro, then 73, was too ill to come, her son Judd said.
Asked at 6:30 p.m. whether he had any last words, Muhammad said, "No." The injection began at 6:31. He was pronounced dead at 6:45 p.m. He was 62. He was executed at Florida State Prison, the prison where he had killed Richard Burke.
"This is where my dad took his last breath," Carolyn Burke Thompson said. "The system finally has worked. I am at peace knowing I don't have to wait any longer. I miss my dad a lot."
Muhammad was the first person executed in the United States in 2014, the 13th executed under Governor Scott, and the 82nd in Florida since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1973, according to FlaglerLive and Amnesty International.
The case is closed. Askari Abdullah Muhammad was executed on January 7, 2014, as reported that day by the Associated Press, Reuters and the Miami Herald and confirmed by the Florida governor's office. The execution was carried out under the Burke death warrant; the two Gans death sentences, restored by the Eleventh Circuit in September 2013, were never carried out. No charge was ever filed in Georgia over the Cordele robbery.
The families spoke mostly about time. "It's been so many times now, she's beginning to lose faith in the system," Judd Shapiro said of his mother on the day of the execution. In the Herald he said the case "shouldn't take 40 years." Earlier, Harriet Shapiro had told the paper she would be very happy to see him dead and that it would be a relief when it was over. Greg Smith, the retired detective who had carried the 1974 case into the 1996 hearing, said Muhammad "absolutely went out like a lamb."
The case raised, more than once, the question of how long a prisoner can be kept under sentence of death. Muhammad argued in 1998 that his decades on death row were cruel and unusual in themselves, and the Florida Supreme Court rejected it. Justice Breyer raised the same question in dissent at the end. At his death, only Douglas Meeks had been on Florida's death row longer, FlaglerLive reported.
His case was also among the first tests of midazolam, and the Florida Supreme Court's December 2013 ruling became part of the record of how the drug came to be used in executions.
Proven: Muhammad was convicted by juries of the first-degree murders of Sydney and Lillian Gans (1975) and of Richard Burke (1982). The convictions were never overturned.
Sentences: the original Gans death sentences were vacated in 1988 because the jury had not been free to weigh non-statutory mitigation. New death sentences were imposed in 1996, set aside by a federal district judge in 2012, and reinstated by the Eleventh Circuit in 2013.
Alleged, never charged: authorities said he took part in the October 21, 1974, robbery of a liquor store in Cordele, Georgia, in which one clerk was killed and another wounded. Georgia did not prosecute.
Disputed: his mental state. Defense experts diagnosed schizophrenia; state experts said he was malingering and had a personality disorder. Courts found him competent each time the question was raised.
Disputed details: the officer's name appears as James Burke in court opinions and as Richard Burke in the press; both are parts of his full name, Richard James Burke. Some reports say the Ganses were shot in the back of the head, while the court opinions say the fatal shots went through their necks. The Herald reported the fatal stab wound as to the chest; the 1986 opinion says to the heart. AP dates the federal ruling that vacated the first Gans sentences to 1987; the opinion is dated December 8, 1988.
February 4, 1951: Thomas Knight born.
1960: Arrested for theft at nine; sent to the Florida School for Boys.
About 1966: Sent to state prison at fifteen for burglary.
About 1970: Committed to Northeast Florida State Hospital at nineteen.
July 1974: Hired by Sydney Gans while on parole.
July 17, 1974: Kidnaps Sydney and Lillian Gans; shoots both after a $50,000 withdrawal; arrested about four hours later.
September 19, 1974: Escapes from the Dade County Jail with ten other inmates.
October 21, 1974: Liquor store robbery in Cordele, Georgia, in which one clerk is killed; Knight is suspected but never charged.
December 31, 1974: Arrested by the FBI in New Smyrna Beach.
April 19 and 21, 1975: Convicted of both murders and sentenced to death.
September 30, 1976: Florida Supreme Court affirms.
December 1979: Clemency denied.
October 12, 1980: Stabs Officer Richard Burke to death at Florida State Prison.
January 29, 1981: First death warrant signed; stayed by a federal court February 26, 1981.
May 25, 1982: First Burke trial ends in mistrial.
October 26, 1982: Convicted of Burke's murder.
January 20, 1983: Sentenced to death for the Burke murder.
July 17, 1986: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Burke conviction and sentence.
December 8, 1988: Eleventh Circuit vacates the Gans death sentences.
February 8, 1996: Resentencing jury recommends death 9 to 3; two death sentences imposed.
November 12, 1998: Florida Supreme Court affirms the new Gans sentences.
May 21, 2001: Circuit court vacates the Burke death sentence; reversed August 21, 2003.
January 9, 2009: Eleventh Circuit denies a certificate of appealability in the Burke case.
November 9, 2012: Federal district judge orders new Gans sentencing on Confrontation Clause grounds.
September 23, 2013: Eleventh Circuit reverses 2 to 1, restoring the Gans sentences.
October 21, 2013: Governor Scott signs the death warrant for the Burke murder, for December 3.
November 18, 2013: Florida Supreme Court stays the execution over midazolam.
December 19, 2013: Florida Supreme Court upholds the drug protocol; execution reset for January 7, 2014.
January 7, 2014: Executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison, pronounced dead at 6:45 p.m.