Biography
Delbert Tibbs was a former divinity student whose 1974 conviction and 1975 death sentence in Florida became a nationally prominent example of racist wrongful conviction. In 1974, near Fort Myers, Florida, Terry Milroy was murdered and Cynthia Nadeau was raped; Nadeau described a Black assailant who had picked her up while she was hitchhiking. Tibbs — himself hitchhiking some 220 miles north of the crime scene — was detained, and Nadeau identified him from police photographs. An all-white jury convicted him of murder and rape in 1974, and he was sentenced to death.
The case rested on Nadeau's disputed identification and a jailhouse informant who later recanted. The Florida Supreme Court reversed the conviction in 1976, citing "considerable doubt that Delbert Tibbs is the man who committed the crimes," and the charges were dismissed in 1982 after the state declined to retry him. Tibbs went on to become a leading anti-death-penalty activist and appeared in the 2002 documentary play "The Exonerated."
Florida’s Commission on Capital Cases records a December 14, 1974 guilty verdict and a March 24, 1975 sentence: life imprisonment for rape and death for murder. Judge Thomas W. Shands presided. The convictions were reversed in 1976, and the state dropped the charges on September 3, 1982.
Truly Innocent? A Review of 23 Case Histories of Inmates Released from Florida’s Death Row Since 1973, PDF page 131; Truly Innocent? A Review of 23 Case Histories of Inmates Released from Florida’s Death Row Since 1973, PDF page 132.
The August 4, 1978 report says Judge Jack Schoonover ruled on July 21 that evidence was insufficient to warrant a second trial; the state attorney announced an appeal. This was an intermediate procedural ruling, distinct from Tibbs’s already documented 1977 release and final 1982 termination of the prosecution.
