Man who spent 17 years on death row for crime he didn’t commit wanted execution to 'prove his innocence'
A death row inmate has explained why he wanted to live under the constant threat of execution for a murder he did not commit.
Juan Roberto Meléndez-Colón was sentenced to death in 1984 for the killing of Florida beauty school owner Delbert Baker.
Baker's jewellery and watch were taken after he was found in his salon with gunshot wounds to the head on 13 September 1983.
Meléndez was a migrant farmworker who didn't know the victim, and spoke very little English at the time of his arrest.
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David Luna Falcon, a convicted felon with a personal grudge against Meléndez, claimed he had confessed to the murder while they were using drugs together and was motivated by a $5,000 reward offered for information.
Despite there being no physical evidence, DNA, fingerprints or murder weapon linking Meléndez to the crime scene, he was sentenced after just a five-day trial.
“I wanted the death penalty to get publicity so I could prove my innocence,” he told LADbible's Minutes With.
“Because if they sentence you to death and give you a life in prison, they gonna forget about you.
“But with the death penalty, you can still in process 'till they kill you. So you got to have a lawyer, they got to have a lawyer.
“So that's what I wanted to, if I wouldn't have had the death penalty, I would probably be in prison right now.”
Meléndez has long argued racism influenced the outcome of the case. The jury consisted of 11 white jurors and one Black juror, with no Hispanic representation, while all of his alibi witnesses were Black.
He believes their testimony was quickly dismissed because of racial prejudice.
"I felt I was in trouble when they show the crime scene pictures, the photos to the jurors. It was about 12 inches in the frame in colour," he added.
"And all you see in that picture is a body with a throat slashed and shot three times, blood all over the place, and they had a picture in colour.
"So when they passed them pictures to the jurors, they was all looking at me and shaking their heads and looking at me with hate in their eyes, I felt it. And I know right then and then this Puerto Rican is in trouble."
His death row conviction was finally overturned in January 2002 after lawyers uncovered a taped confession from the real killer that prosecutors had withheld for 16 years.
And Meléndez became the 99th person in the US to be released from death row due to innocence.
On why he doesn't hold a grudge, Meléndez explained: "Sis, I ain't got no time for that. I look forward now, I ain't got no time. I don't think looking back, it will happen like you say, it will make you angry. And I got enough of that.
"That's gone, gone long time ago. It is one thing that I learned in the inside, I learned how to forgive. And believe me, when you forgive, you're not helping the one you've forgiven, you're helping yourself.
"Living with hate and hang all of us and holding grudges and all this, that's not me."
After nearly two decades of wrongful imprisonment, the state of Florida reportedly provided him with only $100 upon his release.
Anish Vij