A prison sentence is a statement about what the state intends to do with a person for the rest of his life. Eight people in this archive were killed by other prisoners before the state finished doing it.
They are not a set anyone assembled. They come from Wisconsin, Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, California, Ohio, Colombia and Ecuador, and they span from 1975 to 2021. What they have in common is the last line of the entry.
Edwin Kaprat was sentenced to death in Florida on February 28, 1995 for five murders. He was killed in prison on April 19 that year by two other inmates, Mario Lara and Rigoberto Sanchez-Velasco. Fifty days. Whatever the sentence was for, it was never going to be the thing that happened to him.
Donald Leroy Evans was sentenced to death in 1993 and stabbed to death by a fellow death row inmate at the Mississippi State Penitentiary on January 5, 1999. Death row is among the most closely controlled environments an American prison system operates, designed around the certainty that the state and nobody else decides when these men die. It did not hold.
The other six were serving sentences that were never going to end in an execution, and three of them were not facing one because a decision had been taken to spare them.
Charles Schmid was sentenced to death in Arizona in 1966 for three murders and had that sentence commuted in 1971. He was stabbed to death by other inmates on March 30, 1975.
Donald Harvey pleaded guilty in Ohio in 1987 to twenty-four murders and later to further counts in Kentucky, thirty-seven convictions in all, and received multiple life sentences under an agreement that avoided the electric chair. He was beaten by another inmate and died of his injuries on March 30, 2017. He is the most prolific killer in this group by a wide margin, and he had negotiated his way out of the death penalty three decades earlier.
Daniel Camargo Barbosa was convicted in Ecuador in 1989 and sentenced to sixteen years, the maximum the country then allowed, for a series far larger than the two murders this archive records against him. He was stabbed to death in prison by a fellow inmate on November 13, 1994, having already escaped a twenty-five year sentence in Colombia in 1984.
Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life terms and beaten to death by a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution on November 28, 1994, fifteen days after Camargo Barbosa. Two of the eight died within a fortnight of each other, on different continents, in the same way.
Gerard John Schaefer, a former Martin County sheriff's deputy convicted in September 1973 of two murders and given two concurrent life sentences, was found stabbed to death in his cell on December 3, 1995.
Roger Kibbe was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences in November 2009 and strangled by his cellmate at Mule Creek State Prison on February 28, 2021, aged eighty-one. He had served eleven years of them. The prison chose who shared his cell.
The argument is not that these men were owed protection in some sentimental sense. It is narrower and it is about competence. Custody exists so that the state, and not anybody else, determines what happens to a person it has convicted. In each of these eight cases the state made that determination, wrote it down, and was then overruled by somebody it had put in the same building.
The cases where a decision to spare a life was taken make the point most sharply. Schmid's death sentence was commuted, Harvey traded his for a guilty plea, and Camargo Barbosa was tried in a country that had no execution to offer. Three deliberate acts of restraint, all three undone by another prisoner.
Two of the eight died on the same date forty-two years apart, Schmid on March 30, 1975 and Harvey on March 30, 2017, which means nothing at all and is the sort of thing this material throws up.
Enriqueta Marti Ripolles was never tried. She died in the Reina Amalia prison in Barcelona on May 12, 1913, and this archive records that she was reportedly killed by other inmates, while the prison's own records give illness.
She is not counted in the eight, and the reason is worth stating. A prison saying an inmate died of illness is the institution reporting on itself, and it is exactly the account a prison would give either way. That does not make it false. It makes it unverifiable from here, which is a different thing from untrue, and the honest position is that nobody now knows how she died.