Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing

A jury has sentenced Ricardo Sanchez Jr. and Daniel Troya to death for killing the Escobedo family of four along Florida’s Turnpike in St. Lucie County.

The federal death penalty is different from the state of Florida’s death sentence in many ways.

Only 51 inmates are on federal Death Row in Terre Haute, Ind. Florida houses 392. Crimes punishable by the federal death penalty include genocide, killing witnesses, in a trial, terrorism and murder committed as part of a drug enterprise.

Florida has executed 67 men and women since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976. The feds have executed three men since Congress reinstated it in 1988. Some of the more famous of those executed were Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of sabotage for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

Here’s some of those executed since 1927:

James Horace Alderman

1927: James Horace Alderman, known as “King of the Rumrunners,” was intercepted by a Coast Guard vessel 30 miles off Florida’s coast. His boat was laden with alcohol during the era of Prohibition. As Alderman boarded the vessel, he pulled out his pistol. When two Coast Guardsmen and a Secret Service agent rushed him, he shot them all dead. Later, his execution was scheduled for the Broward County Jail, but the county wanted it to occur on federal property. So a makeshift gallows was erected at the Coast Guard hangar.

“When this is read I will have passed over the brink of eternity into the Great Beyond. “I would like to state through the medium of The Miami Herald that I am feeling fine, physically, mentally and spiritually. With the wonderful comfort and strength that I received from Jesus Christ, I am assured that when tomorrow comes I will go with smiles of comfort on my face. … “As I sit here in my cell I can look back and see just what caused me to be where I am today. Drunkenness first starts a young man to gambling — and swearing grows on him — and from that step he becomes hardened in his heart in envy and hatred toward mankind. Then, as he grows up, he becomes what you would call educated to crime. Bootlegging and smuggling is the next step. And there are other angles of downfall that lead to the devil. “The money I made neither did me nor my dear family any good. We thought it did, but no. You can see what it has done — a death sentence by hanging — and a broken-hearted family.”

Read the 1929 Time magazine account of his hanging, here. (more…)

In the beginning … Pastor Donna Healton never intended on reading.

Then, she said, she felt something. A feeling akin to the one she had more than eight years ago, when she said God spoke to her and her husband, Gene, and told them to read the Bible aloud - in public - from start to end.

“It was the unction of the Holy Spirit,” she said.

On Wednesday night, Healton said she pushed her voice up from her soul and let it resonate from the microphone at the Memorial Park band shell as she read the first three verses of Genesis.

“And God said,” she shouted three times, pausing for effect before adding, “Let there be light: and there was light.”

And the evening and the morning marked the first day of Martin County’s eighth annual Bible Reading Marathon.

A few readers took turns overnight through the first few books, teeth chattering through the words as other readers wrapped themselves in sleeping bags, waiting their turns.

By 11:22 Friday morning, a ball-capped man in his 70s was reciting the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy slowly enough so that one crop of attorneys and office workers headed for early lunches heard about blessings in the cities and fields.

The next group came just in time to hear the part about the curses, frowning as they ducked into restaurants along East Ocean Boulevard.

In the afternoon, a tall, slender woman with a deep Caribbean accent was articulating through one of Gideon’s battle scenes in Judges when throngs of pre-teens from Stuart Middle School filled the sidewalks in hoodies and skinny jeans.

A girl and a boy on bicycles rode up to the hand-carved stone tablets etched with the Ten Commandments below the stage.

They listened to the woman’s voice rise when she got to words like “smote,” then rode away to join their friends.

Janet Francis, a pastor’s daughter born on the small island of Dominica, kept reading as they left.

She didn’t stop until she got to the end of the book of Ruth, rattling through the such-and-such begat such-and-such passage without mispronouncing a single word.

Healton said some people don’t like to read from the Old Testament because they’re afraid of those words.

“I don’t think about it,” Francis said with an easy smile, shrugging. “We always had the Word around us growing up, so I’m accustomed to the reading.”

Francis, like most of the readers, is a regular. They sign up for 15-minute slots in twos and threes.

There are couples like Maryann and Lou DiLorenzo, who come every night at 9 and stay all night in case the group needs someone to read.

And people like Michele Mazone, 50, of Jensen Beach, who was so overcome with emotion last year as she read the passage about Jesus at the garden of Gethsemane that someone had to lead her from the stage.

There’s also the retiree named James, who insists on reading the book of James.

“We try to accommodate him,” Healton said. “Sometimes we’re ahead of schedule, sometimes we’re behind, so he might have to be here two to three hours earlier or later depending on how it goes.”

The reading is supposed to last until Sunday, when someone will read the last chapter of Revelation and the group will have Thanksgiving lunch at the park.

Healton, who with her husband pastors Spirit of Prophecy Ministries in Stuart, said the first marathon began months after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

There was a meteor shower that night, she said, and every year since some sign of luminance, spiritual or natural, meets them at the gathering.

On Thursday evening, the brightest light in the pavilion bounced off the fire-engine-red dye in 24-year-old Tammy Marcus’ hair as she signed up for her turn to read one of the world’s oldest books, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with red graffiti-style script.

“I think my generation takes a lot of things like this for granted,” she said. “We have all this new technology, and we forget about what we’ve always had.”